When Hello! invited me to join it last week at the wedding of the Queen’s grandson Peter Phillips and his Canadian fiancée Autumn Kelly, like millions of others I accepted with keen pleasure.

I bought my bumper copy of Hello!, and after leafing through no fewer than 90 pages of photos, interspersed with shampoo ads, I felt as if I knew the royals quite a lot better than I did most members of my own family. In fact I felt a bit faint, like I do when I’ve been ambushed into viewing a mate’s endless safari or skiing photos in an album. Even now, whenever I close my eyes, images of tumbling floral displays, glittering crystal place settings and busty women in strapless mint gowns and butterfly fascinators revolve in my head.

My feelings of slight overkill are, however, as nothing compared with the disgust evinced by some of the younger members of the royal family, who - as soon as the news that the wedding had been underwritten by Hello! was out - lost no time in jumping on their high horses.

Easy to see why: the deal puts the royal family on a par with Wags and the other celebrities paid to appear in the magazine’s glossy pages - such as Holby City actresses and Spice Girls - and raises all sorts of dubious questions about flashlights and magic and the royal family.

There was a time, you see, when for the British people there were four categories of morality, in ascending order: immoral, amoral, moral and Balmoral.

Heaven knows what crumbling courtiers and the fading aristocracy are saying about the Hello! monarchy coverage now. In fact I know what they’re saying because I’ve got a little mole in the palace, who has told me. Basically the line there is that it’s vulgar to flog your wedding snaps, especially when they are taken in the holy precincts of St George’s Chapel, the Windsors’ spiritual home. How unfortunate, too, that the pictures expose our royals for what they are: wealthy, horsey (little shudder) middle-class (bigger shudder) Germans.

So no wonder some of the “guests” invited to this “private” event kicked up a fuss when Hello! hit the newsstands. Inverted commas are necessary of course because it became brutally clear to the principals when they got to the reception and it was crawling with photographers, that the wedding was anything but private and they’d been invited not so much as guests but as profit centres.

The bridegroom had done a lucrative deal with Hello!, rumoured to be in the ballpark of half a million quid, in return for exclusive rights to the event.

Now, as the palace spin doctors have it, Phillips put them all - especially his grandmother - in an impossible position. He wanted a big, fat royal wedding but, boohoo, even though he was the model of a working royal, he didn’t have the money to do it on his own, and his bride didn’t either, coming from humble stock.

So he signed a big deal and then took it to his grandmother as a fait accompli. With the ink dry on the contract, Her Majesty could either go along with what poor Peter, who draws no money from the civil list, had arranged off his own bat . . . or make a fuss and ruin the happy couple’s big day.

So those who knew about the deal gritted their teeth and got on with it; and those who didn’t felt used after the event. As a mere glutted consumer of the end product, though, I don’t think that the happy couple are to blame.

After all, no wedding is complete without a blazing row that engulfs both families at some point in bitter recriminations, so Peter and Autumn have done us all a service. They’ve made us feel just like them. Yes, weddings are stressful, and no, we couldn’t have paid for a sit-down wedding for 300 catered by Peregrine Armstrong-Jones either.

In fact the worst that can be said of Peter Phillips is that he pimped his royal relations behind their backs to the paps from Hello!. Big deal. Everyone who pitches up at a wedding knows there will be photographs. Endless photographs. And it’s not as if any of the people invited to this one were unused to being photographed and appearing in magazines.

No, I know whom I regretfully finger for this. After six decades of reigning with the utmost propriety and reserve, Her Majesty has, I’m afraid, finally put a foot wrong. This whole PR fiasco could have been avoided with one simple stroke of the royal quill on the royal chequebook. If the Queen of Mean didn’t want a gala family occasion plastered over Hello!, she could have offered to pay for the bride’s Sassi Holford dress, the Vera Wang bridesmaids’ gowns and all the other namechecked brands. Unlike all the Phillipses, père, mère et fils, she could afford to. But it seems she didn’t.

So let us only hope that the curse of Hello! - having made an unusually early appearance during the honeymoon - will now leave the handsome newlyweds, and our noble and gracious monarch, in perfect and lasting peace.

- The other morning I filled up my Volvo (a low-emissions diesel estate bought secondhand and now, according to the experts, an unsellable “white elephant”) and almost pegged out on the forecourt. It cost £83. Yes, £83. Once I’ve chucked in crisps and Cokes for the children, a skinny, extra-shot latte for me and Country Life and Revels for him, filling the car with diesel - which is now £1.25 or more a litre - costs going on three figures. The reason? Oil prices have crested on speculation and demand past the $135-a-barrel mark.

Later that day, as I was reading the AA’s Drive Smart bleedingly obvious tips on getting the most out of my fuel (turn off the air-con; take heavy things out of the boot), one of those old round-robin e-mails whizzed in. It was catchlined “Petrol prices”. I opened it. The e-mail instructed me not to buy fuel from Esso and BP - which, faced with this boycott, would lower prices to attract custom, forcing other retailers to compete in a sort of reverse cartel. The e-mail acknowledged this would take quite some doing and urged me to send it on (so consider yourselves all e-mailed).

Of course, as even the AA agrees, we should all be using our cars less. The sight of a vast 4x4 with a 4 litre engine being steered around town by a blonde mummy between private school and Pilates is the most irritating on the planet.

Outside London, public transport is either expensive (trains) or inadequate (rural bus services). In fact driving a car will soon be a luxury only the rich can easily afford while the rest of us could conceivably be driving around in cars that are worth less than the petrol in the tank.

rachel.johnson@sunday-times.co.uk

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