I am a Guardian reader with republican principles. Does this mean I can’t take an interest in the current royal shenanigans? Daria, by email

Hell, no! Just as being empowered currently means whatever a woman wants it to (“I love Instagramming photos of my boobs because it totally empowers me!!!!”), then the inclusive, equality-minded Guardian must be inclusive of those who love a royal soap opera. So buckle up, principled readers, I’m about to get all Hello! on your principled arses.

To the royal baby! Now that the Diana storyline has finally, after a full 20 years, came to a conclusive end with Prince Harry’s happy wedding, a new plot was clearly needed to fill the void. (Twenty years! Even the mysterious death of JR only ran for eight months on Dallas. Whoever writes these royal storylines really should give masterclasses.) The Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s baby was always going to be the source of self-parodically overheated commentary, with the Mail this week engaging in some full-throated Meghan bingo. “Mixed race”, “multicultural Britain” – yup, reckon we got a full house in this article. It’s always fun to watch the Mail having to tiptoe carefully through this field of cliches. Two years ago the Mail on Sunday did another kind of Meghan bingo and described his then girlfriend as “exotic” and “racy”, and debated whether it was worse if she was “a bolter” or (bonus points!) “black sheep”. A few days after that piece was published came a public reprimand from Harry to the press.

Try not to go full colonial before lunchtime at least, Mail.

“This baby is not just any baby,” the paper solemnly intoned this week. Is it an M&S baby? Oh, sorry, I think I just confused my British institutions. But they are right, this is not just a baby, it is a baby at the centre of various warring factions, just like any good royal baby should be. On the right, there is the York family, whose special day – Princess Eugenie’s wedding – was decidedly overshadowed when Harry and Meghan announced the pregnancy to their family members. Now, this column is no fan of the popular idea that brides have the emotions of toddlers and therefore expect to be the centre of attention all day. But we are talking about the York family here, who insisted on throwing a £2m wedding for Eugenie, paid for by the public even though most of the public wouldn’t recognise Eugenie if she whacked them on the head with a tiara because she doesn’t, actually, do anything. So we’re not dealing with actual grownups with normal emotions here. Exactly how the Yorks felt about Harry and Meghan gazumping their day was made especially plain by Sarah Ferguson (twitter handle: @SarahTheDuchess) frantically tweeting images from the wedding, retweeted by her husband, at exactly the moment the palace announced Meghan’s pregnancy on Monday morning. Some might have thought that Fergie could have given Harry and Meghan a break, given that they invited her to their wedding, unlike William and Kate. But that is to underestimate Fergie’s pettiness, and, let me tell you, I am here for it.

Speaking of pettiness, enter stage left, the Markle family! I genuinely cannot get enough of the Markles, with Samantha and her rants-for-pay about how outrageous it is her spoilt cow of a half-sister won’t be nice to her, and her father Thomas, bemoaning to tmz about how cross Meghan is because he is always talking to, um, tmz. Honestly, the scriptwriter who came up with these characters, give them a raise! Samantha this week, we were told, “broke her silence” about the pregnancy (her silence? She was slagging off Meghan all over Ireland last weekend. The Markles’ silences are like Ivanka Trump’s feminism, existing purely in the eye of the beholder). She added that the pregnancy “makes everything that happened over the past year disappear”. Mmmm, would that “everything” be you and your father blabbing about Meghan to every hack with a Florida phone book who calls you up? Reckon Meg might feel differently, Sam.

So there we are, we’ve only known about the royal foetus for half a week and already we have two major plotlines brewing and, sure, maybe they are just distractions from actual important stuff, but when the actual important stuff is so depressing, surely it’s better to be distracted than depressed? Bring it on, ideally straight to the day of the birth, when Samantha tries to storm hospital security and Fergie celebrates the big day by tweeting baby photos of her daughters. Because if we can’t be a world power any more, post-Brexit, at least we can be a world jester.

• This article was amended on 22 October 2018 to clarify that Harry’s public reprimand was to the press in general, not the Mail on Sunday in particular.