Such are the ways of the Palace press office: there's silence if a biographer slurs a dead member of the family. But claim the Prince of Wales has his chef prepare no less than seven eggs for his breakfast than, lo and behold, the denial comes like a shot!
Clarence House appears to be upset by the claim in the hugely respected journalist Jeremy Paxman's new book ('hugely respected' meaning that this is not a man who would make up nonsensical tittle tattle).
The story is that Prince Charles is so cossetted that his staff have to prepare no less than seven boiled eggs for the heir to the throne to examine on returning from a morning hunt.
Yes, one egg isn't good enough for our Prince, a man whom even the Queen has complained is far too extravagant.
The source for the claim is "one of the Prince's friends"
but clearly this isn't good enough for the royal hierarchy, who have
gone so far as to publicly deny what Paxman refers to as an "unutterably trivial" story but nevertheless a claim which is "one of the most extraordinary stories I came upon while researching this book."
The presenter of the BBC's Newsnight programme writes of Charles in his new tome, Jeremy Paxman On Royalty: "Because
his staff were never quite sure whether the egg would be precisely to
the satisfactory hardness, a series of eggs was cooked, and laid out in
an ascending row of numbers. If the Prince felt that number five was
too runny, he could knock the top off number six or seven."
Paxman tells today's Guardian newspaper, which is serialising the book in the coming week: "So many jaw-dropping stories have emerged of the way in which his household is run that it can sound credible."
