My friends Charlie and Hannah are trying to accrue a full tea service in royal commemorative china. A teacup of George V's wedding here, a side plate celebrating the birth of Prince Andrew there.

When we were young, Charlie and I used to collect awful things because we thought they were funny. We'd scour charity shops for lurid T-shirts and terrifying china poodles. I remember proudly hanging on the wall a 3D pelican made from brown velour and broken glass.

But we were students. What kind of a joke is it, now, to have a royal commemorative tea set? Is it a joke at all? There's no doubt I felt a wave of envy when Charlie and Hannah mentioned their new home décor idea, and wished I'd thought of it first – but is that the same old 1990s irony, or something else?

I mean, presumably those blue-rinsed ladies who used to refill their 1953 Coronation biscuit tins with new biscuits thought that was a bit funny. But they also liked the tins. They were pleased to see Her Majesty's robed and smiling figure every teatime.

It is possible that I have simply reached an age where royal commemorative crockery, like comfy chairs and estate agents' windows, has become genuinely appealing.

I was thinking about this last Thursday, when I saw a popular newspaper's front page pose the question: "Will baby George get a nanny after all?"

This is a shocking question. I was horrified. Baby George doesn't have a nanny?

It has got to stop, this fashion for toffs to pose as ordinary. David Cameron going to a morning-suit wedding in a lounge suit; George Osborne dropping his t's to address Morrisons workers; William and Kate having the official baby photos taken by Gramps in the garden rather than Snowdon in a silk-draped studio.

We're not stupid. The disguise is not convincing. These people look about as middle-class as Mr Toad looked like a washerwoman.

I'm sure that advisers are at fault: mediocre people with PR degrees, eagerly advising on how to avoid the resentment of the masses.

But fear of resentment is disproportionate, brought on by a handful of noisy voices on the internet. Most people are quite nice. The millions who watch Downton Abbey do so neither relating to the Granthams nor hating them. It's an amused enjoyment of spectacle.

Anger at the wealth gap is no longer about dukes in horse-drawn carriages; it's about vast, tax-dodging corporations. This will not be assuaged by seeing the royal family claiming to live like we do. If anything, that will make us angrier.

Let me give you an example.

On 30 August last year, Seamus Heaney died. The Nobel prizewinner, greatest poet of our age – and certainly, until that day, the most famous living poet – passed away in hospital, with the final words "Noli timere" in a text message to his wife.

Yet the photograph on the front cover of the next day's Times (the Times of London! The "newspaper of record"!) was not of a black-and-white Heaney, but the Duchess of Cambridge making a public appearance on Anglesey. The dead poet was somewhere in the middle of the paper.

Now, I don't mind royals riding high in the news values. They are not necessarily worse than poets. Both lift us out of our everyday monotony – poets by finding the eternal within the quotidian; royals by gliding about in crowns and ballgowns – and I am not a femme serieuse.

But there were no crowns or ballgowns. Kate was in jeans, looking a little unkempt and sleep-deprived, telling bystanders that the month-old Prince George "is with Granny at the moment" and "sleeping for now, fingers crossed!"

It's not Kate's fault. Perhaps this is the person she truly wants to be – an ordinary mum, bit knackered, only able to get out of the house because her own mum's doing the babysitting – and was just unlucky to fall in love with Prince William rather than the local butcher. But I felt a genuine rage to see this "ordinary person" knock Seamus Heaney off the front page. What an insult to his memory, not even to provide the quirks and sparkle that justify royal front pages at all.

During the royal sex scandals and divorces of the 1990s, many people asked whether the monarchy could survive. It's in far greater danger now. Those juicy plot twists were never a threat; if the new generation actually succeeds in becoming "just like the rest of us" then republicans will not be placated and royalists might just stop caring.

The average taxpayer shells out about 40p a year for the royal family, I think, which makes them an excellent deal on entertainment – better value even than the BBC licence fee. But there must be entertainment. We must have tureens and castles. And nannies. Lots of Crawfies and Bobos, wheeling Silver Cross prams across private parks.

31 August, the day that Seamus Heaney was ousted from the front pages by Kate Middleton, was the anniversary of Princess Diana's death. Foolish people (including, perhaps, PR advisers at the Palace?) like to say that the drive for "ordinariness" began with her.

What they fail to see is that Diana was such a natural star – so innately strange, complex and beautiful – that trips to Alton Towers and Wimpy made her more interesting, not less. It was impossible for her to become dull. The same is not true of anyone else in the current family.

If you are actually ordinary, the only way to give royal status meaning is to live an extraordinary life. It can't be jeans and burgers and granny doing the babysitting. Nobody wants a commemorative teacup of Kate on a stepladder doing the bathroom.

Actually that's not true. It would be an amazing teacup. But you get the point.

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