THE PRINCE OF WALES and his new bride have taken America by storm this week. Across the nation, a frenzy of monarcho-mania has once again swept this great republic.

Office workers clasping DVDs of the royal wedding in April have been hanging out of high-rise windows trying to catch a glimpse of the Prince’s motorcade as it sweeps triumphantly through city streets. Special souvenir copies of The Wall Street Journal with cut-out-and-keep guides to the couple’s couture have been flying off newsstands. Hairdressers are reporting a sudden surge in demand from middle-aged women for a new style — Camilla bangs. In rowdy classrooms from New York to San Francisco happy schoolchildren have been singing songs of affection for the old country and its future king and queen.

All right, I made all that up. There was no special Wall Street Journal. The royal couple didn’t even make the cover of People magazine. Camilla’s hair remains, as far as I am able to tell, frowsily unemulated. Office workers, schoolchildren and teachers went about their daily life undisturbed by the royal tourists.

The truth is that this has been one of the most anonymous royal trips that I can recall. It’s the first official visit by the heir to the throne in two decades, but a poll in USA Today found 81 per cent of Americans expressed no interest whatsoever in the event.

The good news, then, for the royals is that their worst fears, that an America still in thrall to the Diana cult, would rise up in the spirit of 1776 and throw the monarchical chump out of the country, have not been realised. The bad news is that this is probably because nobody has noticed he’s here.

Not since the third Adam and the Ants comeback tour has so much energy been expended by so many to so little attention. The Prince and the Duchess have proceeded ceremoniously from one event to the next like harlequins at a convention for the colour-blind.

The papers and the nightly news have reported the visit, but it has generally ranked below items about the baby giant panda’s first steps at the National Zoo and yet another shake-up at CNN. Even David Blunkett got more attention in the news pages of The Washington Post yesterday than did Charles and Camilla’s arrival in the capital.

There was one brief moment of excitement during the “social dinner” (not a state dinner, be sure to note) at the White House on Wednesday. Inside, in the East Room, some of Washington’s finest C-list guests — including luminaries, the White House press release told us, such as James C. Langdon Jr, attorney with Akin Gump Strauss Hauer and Feld LLP — dozed through a dinner of celery broth and medallions of buffalo.

Outside, a large crowd with placards had gathered in Lafayette Park across the street. Who were they? Members of the Northern Virginia chapter of the “Diana is our only Queen” sect, ready to throw tampons at the Prince’s car? Angry producers of genetically modified crops fed up with being lectured by Charles about the virtues of organic farming?The original members of the neoconservative cabal, perhaps, upset that the Prince might be inside trying to persuade President Bush of the virtues of multiculturalism and being nice to Muslims?

It turned out that they were a group of Ethiopian immigrants and refugees urging Mr Bush to intervene in their country after some dodgy elections there at the weekend. They didn’t know there was a big dinner going on, still less that there was a royal couple in the house. It sums up the trip really; you can see the T-shirt already: I went to Washington and all I got was this lousy demonstration about Africa.

The Prince’s media handlers are apparently troubled by the inconspicuousness of their master’s presence on America’s national stage. The whole idea of the trip after all was to resell Prince Charles to Americans, to de-demonise Camilla, adulteress and tiara-stealer in the eyes of a deeply moralistic nation, to banish forever the memory of Diana being twirled around the dance floor by John Travolta.

But almost every comment I have heard or read about the trip has included something along the lines of: “Dear me, it’s not as exciting as when Diana was being twirled around the dance floor by John Travolta, is it?” Worse still for the Prince, he’s come at a time when it’s suddenly become hip to be dull, and yet he still can’t cut it.

Prince Charles hasn’t been competing for news coverage with glamorous princesses. He’s been sidelined by a sudden flurry of grey-suited fiftysomething men of anti-cult status: Scooter Libby, a hitherto anonymous assistant to Vice-President Dick Cheney, now in trouble for apparently lying to a grand jury about a crime that never was; Ben Bernanke, a hitherto anonymous economist just appointed to run the Federal Reserve; and Samuel Alito, a hitherto anonymous judge from Philadelphia whom Mr Bush has just nominated to the Supreme Court.

And yet the Prince and his courtiers should not be downhearted. That he is being ignored is an encouraging sign. It means that Americans, like the Prince himself, have finally grown up. All those years of Diana mania, all that breathless media coverage of the royal marital chaos seem so 1990s. In an America still hung over from all that excess, it’s reassuring to be able to pay no attention to a Prince who is just a harmless old bore with slightly batty ideas and a dowdy wife.

Indeed Americans should be grateful to Prince Charles for doing his little bit to erode the cult of celebrity in this celebrity-obsessed nation. And we should enjoy the sheer finger-gnawing tedium of it all while it lasts. There are rumours that Prince William may be coming to America next year. The slump in the souvenir-mug making business will soon be at an end.

gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk

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