Any major royal baby announcement serves primarily to remind us that the Windsor fairytale really is a special kind of Grimm. No sooner had the news broken this week that Prince Harry and his wife Meghan were expecting a baby, than out of the woodwork crawled an army of psychics, rogue former servants, multiple birth experts and international body-language sages.

For the mid-market female newspaper columnist, of course, this sort of announcement is a hugely important game. (If you’re trying to place Lost in Showbiz, incidentally, please be advised that this column is resolutely downmarket and always will be. It doesn’t want “close protection” from Bodyguard star Richard Madden, couldn’t give a shit what happens on Question Time, declines to use its kids as a weekly “makes ya think” item and has never written a “relatable” injectables feature so it could get free Botox from whichever monstrous Swiss has set himself up as this year’s “address book secret”.)

Now, where was I? Ah yes: big games. Harry and Meghan’s pregnancy announcement is a massive game – a proper six-pointer – and consequently there is a sense among the Glenda Slaggs that they need to get out there and make it count. This is what you’re here for. You’re not going to disappear in this fixture; you’re going to step up and you’re going to have it. You’re the Sergio Ramos of saying “mixed-race baby” and “biological clock”. Get inside their heads, leave a bit in on the tackles; maybe even nick one in injury time. That’s why you’re on the team. Go big or go home. Player rating: eleventy.

As expected, the most thirteenth of all the fairies at such events is the Daily Mail’s Sarah Vine. In the media village, Sarah’s the elder they have to show the bloody sheet to after the wedding night. “In some ways it’s a relief,” began the second paragraph of a Vine article on the baby news, which you immediately knew was on an unstoppable train hurtling towards some preposterous Henry VIII analogy. “At 37, there was always a faint worry about Meghan’s chances of conceiving naturally.” It’s so faint, I can just barely even make it out at the top of your column. “Mother nature is mother nature,” clucked the Demeter of putting “diversity” in inverted commas, “and fertility falls off a cliff at 35, duchess or not”.

TICK FRICKING TOCK, LUV. Or, as an exhaustive drill-down into such matters published in the Atlantic a few years ago put it: “The widely cited statistic that one in three women aged 35 to 39 will not be pregnant after a year of trying, for instance, is based on an article published in 2004 in the journal Human Reproduction. Rarely mentioned is the source of the data: French birth records from 1670 to 1830.”

Well. I don’t know what to say to such an inconvenient science bit, other than something brilliantly arch, such as “duchess or not”. So let’s move on. “This pregnancy is special and symbolic on a number of different levels,” Sarah continued, “and in a way that few royal babies have been since Jane Seymour succeeded in producing a son for Henry VIII, at the cost of her own life when she died a few days later.” Yup, there it is.

The idea that Harry and Meghan’s baby will have its work cut out for it in the way that Edward VI did is certainly intriguing. However, it is thought marginally more likely that the child will be schooled in London and the home counties, become an accomplished telemark skier by the age of 15 following multiple taxpayer-funded Alpine holidays, and eventually boast a friendship circle including the ambassadors of various South Kensington nightclubs. Of course, if Norfolk mounts a rebellion on the basis of agrarian grievances, all bets are off.

“This baby is not just any baby,” concluded Sarah, and not altogether conclusively. “It is a symbol of the wider modernising agenda that Harry and Meghan – as well as Prince William and his wife Kate, descended from geordie coalminers – have for the future. It is the embodiment of the revolutionary royal family they are striving to create.” Mmm. I wonder if ardent revolutionaries William and Kate still have that painting called The Negro Page on their drawing room wall – the one whose nameplate the servants had to hastily cover up when Barack and Michelle Obama came over? Not that I’m using it to cast aspersions. There are only 7,000 pictures to choose from in the Royal Collection, and they only studied history of art at university.

Still, what are Meghan and Harry having? “Meghan likely to be pregnant with twins, says expert,” ran one headline. Scanning down the copy, it emerged that “experts and psychics are predicting the couple could be welcoming twins”. Aha. According to psychic Sally Morgan, “Harry will have more daughters than sons and in fact, this is a biggie, there may be twins there.”

I see Sally styles herself as “Diana’s favourite psychic”, which feels like the reddest of rags to this column’s old friend Simone Simmonds, who claims something similar. Apparently, all “spiritual advisers” have a presentational style. In metaphorical terms, Simone’s look is “being restrained by royal protection officers while screaming: ‘I KNEW YOUR MOTHER’.”

Can it really be only a year since Simone announced that Princess Di had been in touch with her to reveal she would have voted leave in the EU referendum? “I know a lot of people aren’t going to like it,” Simone hazarded back then, “but she said we’ve got to vote for Brexit. Britain was great, economically and production-wise and before we joined the EU. She was interested in the referendum, and suggested I vote to leave because Britain was really great before the EU. That’s the only political thing she’s ever said – because she loved the country.”

Yes. For whatever reason, Diana declined to discuss the backstop with Simone this week, instead preferring to focus on her grandchildren. “Diana often tells me how much she adores George and Charlotte,” claimed Simone, who gets very cross if you call her a charlatan. “She talks to Charlotte a lot about her favourite colours and toys.” But what of Meghan and Harry’s baby? “This baby will have great communication with Diana,” claims madam. “That’s going to be interesting. I’d love to be a fly on the wall.” But you’ll settle for being a fly on shit.

In a similar vein came a series of interventions by Paul Burrell, a man mostly famous for stashing a load of Princess Di’s dresses in his attic “for safekeeping”, sparking a misunderstanding that would ultimately lead to a collapsed trial, and the actual Queen supposedly recalling a three-hour conversation with Burrell in which she’d said urgently: “Be careful, Paul – there are powers at work in this country of which we have no knowledge.”

Totally normal country. For whatever reason, Paul’s attempts to reach out to Princes William and Harry are now limited to tell-all books, or Busktucker Trial performances and so on. This week, he was to be found tweeting Prince Harry and Meghan. “If your baby is a girl,” he instructed, “be brave and call her Diana, which would make your mother so proud.”

All in all, it was hard not to marvel at the sheer WTF-ery of the headlines and commentary. “Meghan pregnant with Prince Harry’s child”, announced a Telegraph alert confirming the duchess’s receptacle status. “Meghan Markle and Prince Harry are having a royal baby,” opined NBC. “But only one of them will endure being pregnant in public.” “The pregnancy news was announced right before she and Prince Harry launched a tour of Australia,” explained Readers Digest, “and it can only be assumed that she’ll come back to England to give birth.” Yeah, but can it? I’m hearing bookmakers have seen a flurry of bets on her taking a part in Neighbours and never returning.

“Should Harry and Meghan have waited?” wondered Tracey Cox, who acknowledges herself as an “international sex, body language and relationships expert”. “Like everyone else, I’m thrilled Meghan got pregnant (what appears to be) effortlessly,” began Tracey, in an article whose pending “but” can be seen from space. “But, at the same time, I also think it’s kind of a shame that it happened so fast.”

Poor Tracey. While she comes to terms with the choices of others, let’s play out with Lady Colin Campbell’s response to being asked on GMB to assess the potential impact of a mixed-race baby. “I’m very sorry,” the fourth-tier socialite and royal biographer shot back. “The baby’s not going to be black, the baby’s also going to have white blood. You can’t be seven-eighths white and be called black. I think that’s racism of the highest order. That’s rather like Hitler’s definition of a Jew: I’m sorry, but if you’re an eighth Jewish you’re completely Jewish and therefore going into the ovens. If you’re partly black you’re partly black. You’re not fully black.”

Okaaaaaay. Any view on what colour they might do the nursery?