This Princess of Monaco is not such a grim Grimaldi, even though she dared to enter the very lair of the feral beasts, working on a London Sunday paper. Time was when the Independent was an insouciant but principled newspaper which refused to cover the shenanigans of royalty. That all changed during Queen Elizabeth's Annus horribilis, when the monarchy actually made news. But as recently as 2005, when Prince Charles wed Camilla Parker-Bowles, the newspaper (which styles itself a views-paper now) cocked a snook at the royals with a full front page splash about the fairytale nuptials of Thomas Crapper, and demoted the heir to the throne's Windsor wedding to a meager two sentences on the inside.
How things change. Tristan Davies, the editor of the Independent on Sunday, famously fawns over celebrities. He was beside himself when Bono signed on as a guest editor for a Red edition of the Indy which was not so widely read. George Clooney is tapped to be the next editor-for-the-day (a conceit from Vogue magazine, more suitable to the langours of a monthly.) But Tristan has outdone himself. He has hired a genuine pouting princess on as a work-experience intern. She is Charlotte Casiraghi,age 20, the daughter of Princess Caroline of Monaco and granddaughter of Princess Grace. Hello. She may possess Hermes Kelly bags of talent, but her main journalistic experience so far is being on the opposite side of the lens as paparazzi snap away. Nothing fazes her much.
The MediaGuardian opines: It can only be a matter of time, given editor Tristan Davies's love of posh celebrities, that he blows all the savings made through the paper's redundancy programme and gives Casiraghi her own column.
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