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It's a good rule of thumb that, no matter how big an idiot someone is, he can never compete with the political class's response to his idiocy. Thus, whatever feelings of unease I might have had about Prince Hitler were swept away the moment the rent-a-quote humbugs started lining up to denounce him.
I say to Harry: you go, girlfriend, you Reichstone Cowboy you. It's uniforms night at my pad every Thursday and you're more than welcome, Your Royal Heilness.
First off was Doug Henderson, former armed forces minister, who suggested that the Nazi dress sense should disqualify the young lad from Sandhurst: "I think it would be very inappropriate," huffed Doug, "that someone who had done such a stupid thing as Prince Harry has should join the Army."
The French sports minister suggested the "scandal" would undermine Britain's bid to host the Olympics. Londoners should be so lucky.
But, if I understand the concern of the sporting world correctly, being a totalitarian state that's killed millions is no obstacle to hosting the Olympics, but going to a costume party wearing the uniform of a defunct totalitarian state that's no longer around to kill millions is completely unacceptable.
German politicians, meanwhile, launched their own rhetorical blitzkrieg, arguing that his choice of fancy dress demonstrated the need for a continent-wide ban on Nazi insignia.
"In a Europe grounded in peace and freedom there should be no place for Nazi symbols," declared Markus Soeder, general secretary of the Christian Socialist Union party. "They should be banned throughout Europe, as they are with good reason in Germany."
Personally, I found the sight of the Prince of Wales climbing into the full Highgrove hejab for dinner with that bin Laden brother a week after the 9/11 slaughter far more disquieting: it seemed a rather more conscious act of identification than his son's party get-up. But a good indication of societal decadence is when it prefers to obsess over fictional offences rather than real ones.
I suppose it's possible that, should fate bring Harry to the throne, he'd turn into a Victor Emmanuel or King Carol of Romania and lend a constitutional figleaf to some Fascist regime. But worrying about a minor Royal schoolboy's alleged Nazi bent seems something of an indulgence at a time when the neo-Nazis get as many votes in Saxony's elections as Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democratic Party; when from Marseilles to Paris, Jews are being attacked and their homes, schools, kosher butchers, synagogues and cemeteries burnt and desecrated in a low-level intifada that's been going on so long the political establishment now accepts it as a normal feature of French life; and when the Berlin police advise Jews not to go out in public wearing any identifying marks of their faith. It's not just Nazi insignia you don't see in Germany these days; Nazi wise, the uniforms are the least of it.
But if Adolf Hitler were to return from wherever he is right now, what would he be most steamed about? That in some countries there are laws banning Nazi symbols and making Holocaust denial a crime? No, that wouldn't bother him: that would testify to the force and endurance of his ideas - that 60 years on they're still so potent the state has to suppress them.
What would bug him the most is that on Broadway and in the West End Mel Brooks is peddling Nazi shtick in The Producers and audiences are howling with laughter. I don't know what kick Prince Harry gets out of his Nazi gear, but once long ago I was obliged for an historical scene to wear an SS uniform and I've never felt so screamingly camp as when mincing around doing that little flip-of-the-wrist mini-Heil thing.
One reason why the English-speaking democracies were just about the only advanced nations not to fall for Nazism or Fascism is that they simply found it too ridiculous. Bertie Wooster's famous riposte to the Mosleyesque Sir Roderick Spode could speak for the entire anglosphere: "The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting, 'Heil, Spode!' and you imagine it is the Voice of the People.
"That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: 'Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?'" That's why British party stores stock Nazi outfits - because they're a joke, and we made them one. So when prissy Krauts want to ban Prince Harry's party gear they should go suck an old bratwurst.
Alas, tyranny doesn't always come with a self-evidently hilarious dress code. And the soft, supple, creeping totalitarian inclinations of our present-day rulers are sometimes harder to resist. If I had to pick the single most revolting remark from this bogus Reichsfuror, it would be this: "I think it might be appropriate for him to tell us himself just how contrite he now is."
That's Michael Howard, the leader of the supposed Conservative Party. What's conservative about demanding people submit to public self-abasement? Wasn't it the Commies who used to insist you recant on TV and then disappear into re-education camp? A conservative party ought to be a refuge from the sanctimonious nannytollahs of the age. But, from his shabby Kerryesque opportunism on the war down, Mr Howard has no discernible coherent political philosophy - except for his all-pervasive authoritarianism, into which his repellent call for a display of princely contrition fits all too neatly.
Since Britain seems to hold three-minute silences for something or other every month now, maybe for the next one we could all get together and Prince Harry, in uniform, and his father, in mufti, can lay a wreath to mark the tragic loss of our sense of proportion.
