THE Prince of Wales tripped up some ancient stairs yesterday as he toured a 14th-century palace. “You were told not to do that,” the Duchess of Cornwall said, wagging her finger in playful remonstration and grinning broadly. She seems to be getting the hang of royal tours.

On her second official overseas trip, to Egypt, the Duchess appears relaxed and comfortable in her role. It’s early in the tour, but one might even venture to say that the Spouse of the Year is enjoying herself.

The Duchess was honoured at the Oldie of the Year lunch yesterday for her “strength and conviction under the gaze of the public eye”. She sent Jilly Cooper to pick up the award while she was demonstrating that strength and conviction by supporting her husband as he attempted to scale staircases and fresh rhetorical highs.

The Duchess is not the box office draw of her husband’s first wife, but she is developing her own elegant, understated style. When the couple arrived at the al-Azhar mosque and university, reputedly the oldest in the world, where the Prince gave his much-trailed speech on Islam, she was wearing a light-blue chiffon tunic and cream trousers by Robinson Valentine and a matching headscarf. After slipping off her LK Bennett shoes to pad across the marble courtyard of the 10th-century mosque, she revealed feet shod in flesh-coloured pop socks and toenails painted pink.

The couple poked their heads into dimly lit classrooms where Islamic studies students met them with a thicket of arms held aloft to take mobile- phone photographs.

The Duchess has been happy to take the initiative in posing for press photographers. Nothing too flash. But she stops and smiles warmly, even while her husband is wandering on.

Of course there are some pictures that won’t be appearing. The couple will not be heading to the pyramids. The Prince told a local television interviewer that he didn’t have time to show “my darling wife . . . all the things I would like to see”. He didn’t mention that the late Diana, Princess of Wales, with whom he visited Egypt on his honeymoon cruise, was once photographed alone in front of the pyramids while he was on a separate trip to Turkey.

Those pictures came soon after she had famously posed solo in front of the Taj Mahal, sending an unmistakable message that her marriage was crumbling. The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall will also be giving this, the world’s greatest monument to love, a wide berth when they visit India next week. Clarence House is emphasising that this is a “working trip”.

During the Prince’s much-touted speech on “Unity in Islam” the Duchess sat in the front row, wearing reading glasses to follow a written translation of the lavish praise heaped on her husband by Sheikh Mohamed Sayyed Tantawi, the Grand Imam of al-Azhar.

The Prince appeared to criticise the decision of a Danish newspaper to publish cartoons that depicted the Prophet Muhammad. “The recent ghastly strife and anger over the Danish cartoons shows the anger that comes of our failure to listen and to respect what is precious and sacred to others. In my view, the true mark of a society is the respect it pays to minorities and to strangers.”

He said that Britain had “made great efforts to welcome people of other faiths”, adding that more than 1.5 million Muslims “enrich British society in countless ways”.

His speech was received with polite applause by the ranks of imams in the auditorium. There was a louder burst of applause when he was awarded his honorary doctorate, an apparent signal that they disapproved of the claim of one of their faculty members that Charles had not done enough to deserve the award from such a distinguished institution.

The couple moved on to the Taz Palace and an exhibiton of work by students of the Prince’s School for Traditional Arts. At one stand the Duchess did a passable impression of someone who was genuinely interested in geometry in nature.

Perhaps the Spouse of the Year was looking for a conversation opener with President Mubarak at last night’s dinner.

Click here for Ruth Gledhill’s weblog: defender of faith?

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• UK regional accents thrive against the odds
• ‘Scarecrow’ wind farms put rare birds to flight
• What an anti-climax: G-spot is a myth