A young bald Monarch - just what we need

No sooner has he acquired a cool wife than Prince William risks falling back into the tragically uncool bad habits of the Windsor family. One of which - as observers of Prince Charles will be painfully aware - involves "spontaneous dancing" with young women, usually of a different ethnicity.

One likes to think that Prince William, at the peak of his sex appeal as an Eton sixth-former, watched in horror as his father swayed uncomfortably in some tribal township, patches of sweat clearly visible under the arms of his Anderson & Sheppard suiting.

But the photograph of William dancing with Vanessa Boateng, 18, at a charitable shelter makes me worry that the Windsor impulse to make an awkward fool of oneself in public is overtaking him.

While jolly Vanessa seems to be swaying naturally to the rhythm of her "swag dance", William is adopting the effeminate pose associated with young men who wore green carnations in the 1890s. It's not a good look. (Either that, or he had given his detectives the slip and joined Ms Boateng in a guided tour round her herb garden.)

Let's be brutal about this. If William had kept his hair, he could have kept up the cool clubbing routine well into his fourth decade. But nature has left him with no choice: he has turned into a Hanoverian of the most conventional variety. King George V, of blessed memory, didn't "swag dance" and neither should he.

Actually, my reference to George V isn't entirely frivolous. For several years now, the British media have been keeping a secret about the Duke of Cambridge, and it has nothing to do with the discreet deliveries of Rogaine to his private apartments. (And now to Prince Harry's, too - there's a good reason why Harry is no longer the vivid redhead of yesteryear, and that's his so-far unnoticed but really quite striking thinning pate.)

No, the one thing most people don't know about William is that he's as solemn, prickly and generally self-possessed as his grandfather, the Duke of Edinburgh. For those very reasons, he may well prove to be an effective Monarch - especially if, as we must all devoutly hope, he succeeds his grandmother when his energy is still at its peak.

There is, admittedly, still the frightening prospect of Prince Charles becoming King. But who knows? When the time comes, the current Prince of Wales may well be engaged with his most intimate conversations with flowers to date - that is, pushing up daisies at Highgrove.

What the British Monarchy needs, it seems to me, is the nearest possible male equivalent to our beloved Queen. King William may not turn out to be an entertaining head of state, but he will do the job properly, without dragging his subjects into the apocalyptic vegan cult envisaged by his father.

He will be a sober King, undoubtedly a very bald one, and if - like many middle-aged men - he decides to abandon his contact lenses, a bespectacled one. That is a prospect that our current Monarch would find entirely satisfactory. As a lady of formidable equestrian skills, she wants above all to be succeeded by a King who does not frighten the horses.

And if that means skipping a generation - well, these things happen.