A royal action hero shoots for the stars

"If all the year were playing holidays," says Prince Hal in Henry IV Part 1, "To sport would be as tedious as to work." Well, quite. It's all very well sinking a treasure chest or 10 at Mahiki (that's a 100-quid-a-pop cocktail for those of you contributing to the downturn in the celebrity mag market) or boogieing the night away at Boujis. But, you know, seen one Barbie doll in a mini-skirt, seen them all, particularly when your own seems a bit chippy about your wide-ranging interest in chicks.

In the end, what you want, like, is a break. You don't want the hassle of all that hammered heir in gutter, plastered prince in waitress romp, nasty Nazi, blah, blah, bollocks. What you want is freedom and adventure. You want to be able to rough it. You want to be able to gaze at the stars. The ones in the sky, that is - not the ones like you.

What you want most of all is to be one of the lads. You want to share a shower - but only one in four days - that's a punctured bag in a wooden cubicle. You want to sleep on a camp bed. You want to use a "thunderbox". And you want big, shiny kit - kit that swoops and hovers and bombs and kills as if by royal command. But it isn't royal command, you see; it's just Widow Six Seven (almost 007!) and no one knows it's you.

When Grandma told you that you were, at long last, being sent into action in Afghanistan, you were well chuffed. "She was asked," you told whoever it was that produced the almost identical mass coverage that appeared in pretty much all the papers (except this one, of course) "are you cool with this, and she was like 'It's a splendid idea, go with it'." So here you are, dicing with death and tussling with the Taliban and "doing hearts and minds" (a prince of hearts, in fact!) and you're having the best bloody time of your whole bloody life. Or you were. Until some berk on a blog blew it.

It's just not fair. Christ, if a black guy (the kind of guy who'd be a houseboy at your girlfriend's parents' home) has a serious chance of becoming leader of the Western world, then why can't you serve Grandma and country in the way for which you've been trained? I mean, at least in Afghanistan you had the Gurkhas. "Terry Taliban and his mates" didn't know you from Adam, or Mohamed, or whoever. And now, apparently, you're "target number one" for Islamist terrorists in Britain. Bye-bye Boujis, hello hanging around at home.

Poor old Harry. Who could blame him, in the age of Wife Swap - of life swap, in fact - for believing that he too could dip in and out of the smorgasbord of life options on offer? When telly tells us that we can give our homes, gardens, bodies and children an instant makeover, when shiny paperbacks promise us that we can Change Our Life in Seven Days, when "ladettes" ditch drugs for deportment and prime ministers' daughters pee on TV in jungles? Yes, I'm a celebrity, please, please get me out of this celebrity jungle.

For this is the age of the grass being greener, the age of having your cake and eating it. It's the age when well-educated, RP- speaking Brits affect the accents, and mannerisms of a mythical working class, when posh white kids from Hampstead pepper their speech with patois, when middle-aged men and women dress like teenagers and listen to music produced by anaemic 19-year-olds, and when children, not knowing quite what they want but taking their cue from their peers, dress like drug addicts or prostitutes, but end up living with their parents until well into adulthood.

It's the age, too, of social mobility, the age when more people than ever own their own homes (a trend that might just be about to suffer a little hiccup), the age when more people than ever go to university, the age when more people than ever own a handbag the price of a sofa.

So why shouldn't Harry have a slice of the pie? If share prices (and high street banks) can go down as well as up, surely princes can too? Lots of little boys want to be pilots. Some of them want to be air traffic controllers. Why shouldn't this one?

Because, dear reader, Henry Charles Albert David Windsor, professionally known as Cornet Wales, had the misfortune to be born into a thousand-year-old monarchy, hidebound with thousand-year-old traditions, at a time when a 1,500-year-old religion was offering a pretext for nihilists and nutters to launch a war on - well, pretty much everything. And at a time when our lust for celebrity cellulite, celebrity parties, celebrity everything, in fact, is such that a rare pact of privacy by the British media is a bomb just waiting to explode. The Palace meets A Place in the Sun? Who could resist it?

Actually, according to a recent report by the Sutton Trust, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, social mobility in Britain hasn't shifted in 30 years. Perhaps it's appropriate, then, that a 23-year-old heir to the British throne should have a taste of what it feels like to be stuck. What it feels like, in fact, to be one of his grandmother's subjects.