For years, one despised it, sniffed at its excesses, considered it utterly common. No longer. The whirlwind romance between the British royal family and the media reached a spectacular point last week with the news that Prince Edward, long-time bachelor and man of the theatre, has decided to marry his own spin-doctor.
Media and monarchy will meet in a literal embrace. One really couldn't be more chuffed.
Dour Downing Street mandarins must be awfully pleased at this helpful distraction from their government's travails. Even the briefest glance at Sophie as she flashed her ring to camera on the news reports should reassure the public royal marriage will finally reclaim its special fragrance.
And with the Millennium Dome so dismally failing to engage the public imagination with a sense of occasion, what better storyline than the standard soap opera fall-back of a sun-drenched, "high-society" summer wedding - just as focus group reports apparently confirmed the public was getting tired of such a long-running courtship.
Marrying your spin-doctor is not so daft as it sounds. As wife to Queen Elizabeth's youngest child, public relations consultant Sophie RhysJones will prevent one putting one's foot in it through unhelpful Fergie-style adventures like It's a Royal Knock Out. Gender apart, it is almost as if Tony Blair woke up in the marital bed of Peter Mandelson, or David Trimble in the embrace of Eoghan Harris.
While Irish people hold their breaths to catch the latest twists in the should-they-or-shouldn't they speculations about Bertie and Celia, the Edward-and-Sophie saga hardly counts as primetime news. The royal romance is essentially a story of survival, an example of how a failing institution can dramatically bring itself up to speed.
The Bertie and Celia speculation, by contrast, owes more to the image of a 78 RPM record now past its sell-by date, with the same old arguments scratching out the voices of the past.
To marry or not to marry is hardly the question, or at least not on those terms. At stake are the feeble last gasps of that tiresome contest for the soul of old Ireland.
The age of tribunals may be grinding to a close, but up for grabs remains the place and role of traditional viewpoints in a time when pluralism is embraced, if not yet fully valued, by the rest of us.
The remarkable parallel drawn on this page by Dr Noreen O'Carroll, a lecturer in the Jesuit college at Milltown, Dublin, between the private life of Mr Ahern and that of former president of the Law Reform Commission and former judge Mr Rory O'Hanlon is a case in point. An unlikely parallel, by any standards - Ahern the northsider-turned-Taoiseach; O'Hanlon, the legal aristocrat with a distinguished record of public service.
Mr O'Hanlon, she argued, was sacked as president of the commission for being a Christian, and specifically for being a member of Opus Dei. It was a fetching spin. According to Dr O'Carroll, both men could be seen to have "politically incorrect" private lives. So why penalise one and not the other?
Persuasive to be sure, apart from the facts.
Reports at the time in 1992 indicated that Mr O'Hanlon was in fact removed from his position for making comments in favour of further constitutional exclusion of abortion while president of the commission, and for expressing his concern while still president that the then-forthcoming Maastricht Treaty might admit abortion to Ireland by another means.
There is no secret society of separated or divorced people who cohabit (as the old phrase quaintly has it) with other people, and use questionable means to persuade the rest of us to do likewise.
But there is a secretive organisation called Opus Dei whose structure and methodology is a legitimate object of concern to many people, in Ireland and abroad, within and outside of the Roman Catholic Church.
Mick Peelo's recent report on Opus Dei for RTE's Would You Believe confirmed that concern by picturing a society where transparency was alien.
Tales of self-flagellation and ritual punishment were supported by first-hand accounts of induction techniques which sounded, to me at least, suspiciously like brain-washing. The kindest conclusion you could draw was that pluralism did not belong to its code of conduct.
At any rate, political correctness is fast becoming another old voice - it is increasingly correct to be somewhat incorrect, once you remain respectfully so.
The problem is one of image rather than substance. The political process now gives an undue priority to focus groups of selected voters who set the agenda for the spin-doctors. And therein lies the rub for Bertie and Celia.
The consensus so far is that Mr Ahern and Ms Larkin's status is their own business. But spins have a life of their own. British focus groups reportedly found the public were getting tired of so long a courtship between Edward and Sophie.
Five years walking out together is considered to be a long time.
When image is all, or nearly so, what public figure can afford to become boring? That logic, rather than the charges of former moral guardians, could end up forcing the couple's hand.
Rather than let the story eventually turn Mr Ahern's poll-topping popularity into a charisma deficit as worrying as that of an opposition leader, or expose him to charges of being a dawdler, Mr Ahern and Ms Larkin may simply have to get married.
There are difficulties with this position, not least the unchallenged assumption that, if asked, Ms Larkin would say "yes". But faced with the electoral advantages of a millennium wedding destined to catch the public imagination, how could she really say "no"?