In most respects, this was the least important thing to have happened yesterday…

…but it was also an extraordinary collision of realities, and the resulting images - all over the papers this morning - are profoundly jarring (if less immediately so than than being coshed into a stroke) and glaringly anomalous.

The Charles-Diana-Camilla thing has been settled business for a while. It was largely put to bed during the Queen’s Golden Jubilee celebrations in 2002, and the subsequent marriage of Charles and Camilla in 2005 seems to have looked to most people like a suitable point to finally and completely lose interest in the Royal soap opera. True, there has recently been an attempted relaunch as HRH: TNG, but as often happens with these things the new cast (Wills and Kate) just look wet - you can’t really imagine this generation’s charmed princeling getting anywhere very much with whoever this generation’s Mrs Parker-Bowles may happen to be. In any case, the sudden manifestation of these two dinosaurs, in the middle of the most widespread and savagely antagonistic public disorder we’ve had since the Poll Tax riots, just seems like an occult signal from some entirely other layer of reality. What can it possibly mean?

The question’s at least semi-serious, because this kind of moment-defining image is always overcoded and retroactively motivated, to the point where even if it came about through a complete accident (and the most compelling and effective raw material for such image-work is the most plausibly spontaneous and unpredictable), it’s then played out as if it was planned all along. One obviously ought to ask whose “moment” is being defined here, by whom and for whom. I would imagine that from the point of view of just about everyone who participated in yesterday’s protests, the events of real moment were happening elsewhere: so to start with there’s the distraction effect, of obvious value to those whose job it is to manage the public’s attention.

Then there’s the shock value of placing in the middle of a contumacious crowd a person whose physical aloofness and closely-guarded safety are axioms of their public existence: nothing is safe, nothing is sacred, and so on. That’s volatile material to be deploying, since one of the most impressive things about the student protesters this time around is their refusal to be cowed by the sanctity of targets like Top Shop (commercial premises, with security who expect you to bugger off when they ask you to and are tellingly baffled and wrong-footed if you don’t) and, of all places, the Radcliffe Camera. It’s not difficult to horrify Middle England; there’s no need to take the risk of giving people a sense of their own agency and power while you’re doing it.

What I think’s uncanny in the above image, and therefore most difficult to “spin” coherently, is that it breaches the boundary between two distinct times: a past that is defunct, over-with, de-libidinalised, and a present that is massively energised and “happening”. Look at their faces again: pure car-crash orgasm, like corpses being jolted back to life. No amount of regal “calmness” and “dignity” can erase the memory of that look, its spooked intensity. It’s as if they’re saying: what the fuck is this? History? Dear God - make it go away!