As imagined by Brian Beacom

HONESTLY, this car chase stuff through the streets of Manhattan the other night? It was really scary.

Not quite as scary as than my stepmother when she hears I’ve been a bit off with Pa, but one doesn’t exaggerate when one is describing life or death moments.

Yes, the New York Post have been having fun at my expense.

They point out that it’s hard to drive more than 10mph in Manhattan at the best of times, and that our big SUVs were in fact travelling slower than Jenny Gilruth’s local trains over the Christmas period.

And, OK, perhaps you have a point when you say ‘Why did you then jump into a New York taxi, you ginger-headed chump? Have you never seen Taxi Driver?’ But before you say it, this wasn’t a PR stunt.

Megs received a Woman of Vision award the other night and even she couldn’t have seen this coming, an ordeal which could have ended in death. Yes. Death.

If we’d carried around the streets of Manhattan for much longer, not being able to shake of the paps, terminal boredom could have set in.

At the very least we could have become physically ill; if you’ve been eating lobster thermidor all night and then take to riding around in a shoddily sprung taxi, it’s going to repeat on you, isn’t it?

Yes, I know the cynics will all say that this plays right into our narrative, that we’re all about the Triple A policy; Attention, Anger and Arrogance, that we should opt for the quiet life.

One British cynic, it may have been William, had the nerve to mutter; ‘Harry, if you can’t afford the grief that arrives alongside a high-profile life, then take the Ann Widdecombe advice; don’t buy a cheese sandwich.’ But here is my reply; what’s the world coming to when you can’t turn up at a multi-million-dollar gala night in the centre of the entertainment world, with Megs wearing a nice £10k frock, without some low-rent snapper trying to steal a picture?’ For as well as being a tale of near catastrophe, this is also a story of danger.

I’m currently going to court in the UK to demand police protection – even if this scenario would never have happened in Britain because of the Ipso’s Editor’s Code of Practice – because if we don’t get that what’s going to happen if my driver slows down and the paps then take pics that we can’t possibly copyright? Isn’t that extremely dangerous?

This is about our right to cling on to the absolute privacy we’ve fought so hard to achieve, which we’ve demanded constantly on international television such as Opra, our Netflix series, and in my best-selling book, for which I received a nice $20m advance.

So, we’re not, as the Post described us, ‘The Duke and Duchess of Hazard.’ I’m just a simple Montecito chicken raiser with a wife who used to be a daytime TV actress trying desperately to be treated like a Royal.