YOU'VE got to hand it to Windsor and Co. After a few sticky years when the Chairwoman appeared to be losing control to younger board members, The Firm has finally found the measure of the market. Like any other business they've discovered it requires a little give and take to survive in these cut-throat times.

Give the public something glittery, but of little consequence, and take the jackpot. That's how empires are built, remember?

The shenanigans surrounding the "leaked" reports of "secret" meetings has all the hallmarks of an extremely effective PR sting. There was really nothing new in what was put forward, proposals either aired in Jonathan Dimbleby's biography of Prince Charles or, more recently, in Vernon Bogdanor's The Monarchy and the Constitution. But leaked to the tabloid press it took on a different complexion.

How poignant, not to say endearing, to discover the poor beleaguered queen trying to bring the monarchy up to date, just when she's had to dig so deep into her pockets to bail out that dork of a son with the millions he needed to pay off the Ex. And sorting things out on her holidays, no less, with just a few members of her family and the odd courtier or two. What a trooper!

A bit of sex equality would go down well, Ma'am. Right? No more primogeniture. Does that mean that Anne, universally considered the most respected, not to mention most normal, of the royal offspring has a chance of succeeding to the throne?

Well no. Not unless Charles and his two (childless) sons come a terrible cropper in a bizarre series of accidents that would have actuaries running for cover.

What about royals marrying Roman Catholics? A small sop to common sense and the five million British Catholics, perhaps. But no big deal. In the 17th century two queens (i.e. consorts of kings) were Catholic, and nothing untoward happened in the way of gunpowder plots, which was the only point of the Act of Settlement of 1701.

No great sacrifice there. What about the 400-year-old twinning of state and church embodied in the monarch as Defender of the Faith?

Apart from denying 56 bishops hard-earned expenses for days spent in the House of Lords, it's hard to see what difference it would make. George I and George II, for example, weren't even Church of England Protestants, but Lutherans.

As for paring down the number of royal highnesses, does anyone seriously imagine that the current lot are going to be stripped of their coronets? That we will no longer witness the queens of Wimbledon curtseying, undies to camera, to the Duchess of Kent? No. Nothing will change until this generation dies.

And the way things are going the monarchy will be lucky to stagger beyond the turn of the century, let alone another 50 years.

So is all this flim-flam just a desperate throwing of iced buns to the populace before they storm the gates? When no general shoving of hands into pockets was evident following the fire at Windsor Castle - the coup de grace of the queen's annus horribilis - her Britannic majesty decided to raise the money by sacrificing Buckingham Palace to the push and shove of a generation addicted to celebrity keyholes courtesy of Loyd Grossman and Hello!

Similarly two years ago, when the queen offered to pay income tax, the impetus was political expediency rather than moral imperative.

No. The genius of this gift-wrapped pack of reforms is the white-flagged willingness to "give up the highly emotive Civil List, the £7.9 million granted by parliament to the queen every year which keeps her, Prince Philip and the queen mother and the 400-strong royal household in the state to which they are all accustomed. (Its 10-yearly reassessment is due in 2000.)

Add to this the cost of the queen's flight, the royal yacht, the royal train and other benefits funded through individual government departments, and you end up with a grand total of around £50 million.

To fund this annual expenditure, the de-facto privatised monarchy would need a spot of capital. And what better than to reverse the action of her ancestor George Ill (was he in his right mind, one wonders?) when he handed over the crown estates in return for a parliamentary allowance known as the Civil List.

Perhaps in 1760 it was a good deal. (He had to pay for the judiciary and ambassadors.)

But last year the crown estates consisting of some of the most valuable real estate in London (Oxford Street to Piccadilly) and other cities, plus 250,000 acres of agricultural land involving some 600 tenants, yielded £94.6 million profit to the British treasury.

SOME commentators have suggested that with a tax liability of say, 40 per cent, the loss to state coffers in such a changeover would be negligible. But is that really the point? At the moment the British monarchy is ultimately answerable to parliament. If its funding were not in parliament's control, then the whole rationale behind a constitutional monarch is negated.

Does Charles (who is generally agreed to be behind this push) really fear parliament's wrath?

Maybe not. But last year Australia missed dumping the monarchy by a whisker. Had the socialists got back it's a pound to a penny Australia would have been a republic by 2000. In spite of the Conservatives' latest demonising campaign, New Labour's God-fearing Tony Blair is an unlikely candidate for leader of the revolution.

But, were the republican tide to turn, how much more comforting for Windsor and Co to know that the family silver was in their own, rather than government, vaults.

In the meantime, consultation along the lines depicted by Michael Dobbs in the last of his prescient political trilogy, To Play The King, gallops apace.

Advisers from both sides of the political divide were at a lunch at the palace in July. Prominent among the guests was Vernon Bogdanor, professor of government at Oxford University, who continues to exercise a pivotal influence on Prince Charles's view of the kind of monarchy he would like to lead.

Also there was Lord Blake, the constitutional historian. By one of those coincidences PRs just adore, both these august academics were available to write suitably tailored explanatory articles for the Mail (Tory) and the Mirror (Labour) the day the story broke.