We love the royals most when they appear like bemused visitors from another planet, baffled by our ways

There are six words no public figure on earth wants to hear. Those words are: “Tom Bower is writing your biography.” I once heard the great man described affectionately by his own editor as “not so much a writer as a siege weapon”, and if he gets on your case, your case tends to stay got on. And the case this time is that of Prince Charles.

Most riveting of all his discoveries, though — and it may pain this scrupulous heavyweight investigative journalist to know it — is a story about the Prince and Camilla returning to Clarence House after an evening at the theatre. The staff had been instructed to leave some cold cuts out for the couple. Charles walked into the dining room, according to Bower, and “shrieked, ‘What’s this?!’”

His more worldly wife was able to supply the answer: cling film. Here is an indelible image of the heir to the throne as a man who had reached late middle age without ever once laying eyes on cling film. Can it be true? It scarcely matters. Just like the story about Peter Mandelson — said to have pointed to the mushy peas at a chippie in his Northern constituency and asked for “some of that guacamole” — it sticks because it fits too well with what we would like to believe.

Two categories of detail about the royal family reliably fascinate the punters. One is when they seem “just like us”. The other is when they appear to be the equivalent of bemused visitors from another planet, baffled by the ways of humans. A story of the first kind came in the Nineties when a Mirror reporter posed as a Buckingham Palace footman and sensationally revealed that Her Majesty’s breakfast cereal comes to the table in Tupperware and the Duke of Edinburgh turns first to the Racing Post.

This countermanded the well-worn speculation that Her Majesty must believe that the world smells of fresh paint, and it plays into the image of her as a thrifty, surprisingly grounded figure. With Charles, though, the cling film thing adds to a heap of memorable claims in the other direction: that he has a servant squeeze out his toothpaste; that he’s cooked seven boiled eggs so that he can select the one done perfectly; that he ships his entire bedroom ahead of him when he goes to stay with friends; that Indian military veterans hand-pick slugs off his plants by torchlight. Tall tales, not doubt — but, like cling film, they’ll tend to stick. That’s a serious PR problem.

Let it be said, though, that if you’ve never seen cling film before in your life, shrieking in horror is exactly what you’d do. We’re used to it, those of us who live in a world which contains it, but you must admit that it’s bloody weird: all stretchy and creepy and sticky yet not sticky. Well might you imagine the cling film ingenue thinking: “Yurgh! Who put a condom on my lunch?”

Heaven help the Prince of Wales when he finds out where those breakfast eggs originally come from…

Only the crumbliest, flakiest parallel

Is there nothing we can now do without feeling guilty? According to scientists at Manchester University, the UK chocolate industry generates about the same number of greenhouse gases as Malta.

You’d like to think that this odd and striking comparator would spur us to action, or at least to cement the already latent suspicion that we could all get along fine without Malta.

But the more you think about this fact, the harder it is to interpret it. Is Malta a particularly egregious emitter of greenhouse gases? Who knows? Perhaps it’s an eco-paradise, and this small, proud and entirely sustainable nation is a living token of the environmental friendliness of our chocolate.

You’d have to suspect otherwise. But then, what is the correct number of Maltas that one looks for in an exemplary chocolate industry?

If Paris is worth a mass — as Henry IV of France is said to have once declared — is a Malteser worth half a Malta?

These are deep waters, and the authors of the study give us no help in navigating them. A “sharing bag” of Crunchie Rocks — not to be shared — was until recently one of the few innocent pleasures I felt I could rely on.

With populism and nationalism on the rise across Europe, in countries such as Italy, and Crunchie Rocks being as delicious as they are, all this sort of comparison does is foment anti-Maltese feeling.

That’s quite irresponsible, if you ask me.

Angelina Jolie enjoys ageing

Angelina Jolie says she embraces the signs of ageing. “I look in the mirror and I see that I look like my mother, and that warms me,” she says. “I also see myself ageing, and I love it because it means I’m alive — I’m living and getting older.”

Would she be as relaxed were she older than 42? Or were she not, at 42, looking like many 32-year-old women can only dream of looking? Ours is not to speculate. Perhaps we should check when she is in her late fifties and ask her again.