It’s a boy! Thank God...

Call me a dyed-in-the-wool, fuddy-duddy traditionalist, but I could not help feeling very relieved that the Duchess of Cambridge gave birth to baby George Alexander Louis last Monday afternoon.

With the British Parliament having decided to change the laws of royal succession so that, irrespective of sex, the first-born would eventually inherit the throne, I really felt that such a law would spell the end of monarchy as we know it had a girl been born.

Now we can rest assured that the law will remain inapplicable for another three generations.

I have nothing against queens. In fact, there have been three excellent queens on the British throne, including the present one, all of whom have left an indelible mark in history: the two Elizabethan ages and the Victorian age, periods of great development and wealth.

There have been an equal number of bad or mediocre ones but we will overlook them.

One may well ask whether it was the queens themselves who instigated this prosperity or their ministers or, perhaps, circumstances.

Possibly, a bit of all three. The three queens in question were symbolic of the times they lived in.

Elizabeth I consolidated England as a strong modern State and formidable European power, Victoria presided over the creation of the British Empire while Elizabeth II is the keeper of the flame, a queen whose life has been a continual example to us all and, even in adversity, has, through her sheer determination and dedication, earned the admiration even of the most ardent of republicans. Can anyone fault her?

By the time George inherits the throne, very few of us will still be here to see him crowned unless both Charles and William have very short reigns. Who knows if the monarchy will survive for another three generations?

Unless both Charles and William occupy the role of Head of State with the equanimity, wisdom and imperturbability of their mother and grandmother, the whole edifice will crash and the United Kingdom will become the Disunited Republic overnight.

By the time George inherits the throne, very few of us will still be here to see him crowned

The present queen will probably be the last to have married within the tradition that hitherto bound royalty to marry within royal circles.

Diana Spencer, although a thoroughbred aristocrat, as was the Queen Mother, was still considered to be a commoner in royal circles and as for Kate...

I would imagine that forgetting bloodlines and concentrating on good looks alone, this baby should by rights have film-star status.

Maybe this is something that The Firm has taken into consideration. Had William looked like Billy Bunter and Kate liked like Beryl the Peril I don’t think we would have been all that interested in their offspring, would we?

There was a time when to marry a prince was the stuff one read about in fairytales.

All little girls of my generation hoped to marry a prince and, indeed, found out later on in life that when they fell in love with their future husband he had, in their eyes, all the attributes of one. And so it should be.

Brought up as my generation was, in the swan song of colonial Malta, most of us had very set ideas about royalty.

When I was young, the queen was the epitome of beauty; a fairy queen in frothy, white ball dresses and sparkling with a plethora of diamonds; a being from another planet accompanied by a consort who too looked like a prince out of a fairytale.

Royalty was then at its zenith.

Today, the mystique of royalty has been blown to the four winds, possibly because The Firm has decided that the only way for monarchy to survive was to become, as much as possible, one of us. I find that debatable.

Does one wait in wind, sun and rain to catch a glimpse of ‘one of us’?

Do the trappings of royalty so exclusive to the United Kingdom and that are a huge source of revenue sit so well on the shoulders of ‘one of us’?

Will tourists flock to London to see a queen if she is ‘one of us’?

I somehow don’t think so.