After one particularly frustrating overseas trip last year - Prince Charles and Camilla's visit to Turkey - I got so fed up at the lack of anything approaching a real story that I tried to find out just exactly how much it had all cost and what had been the benefit to Britain.

I discovered that the Foreign Office, which asks the Royal Family to go on these visits to help smooth relations with key nations, does not routinely keep an account of the cost of these trips and provides no account to Parliament about what they achieve or fail to achieve.

Five months after being passed around the houses by various officials at Clarence House, Buckingham Palace, and in Whitehall, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has now released papers to me under the Freedom of Information Act.

Among the papers are reports sent back to the FCO by British ambassadors or high commissioners who helped to host the last few visits undertaken by Charles and Camilla.

In addition to revealing an interesting tale about a diplomatic row over Charles's visit to a seedy red light district in the Ugandan capital Kampala (to see various

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A poll commissioned by English Heritage named George IV, a notorious womaniser who spent his money lavishly while his subjects struggled through an economic crisis, as the worst monarch in British history.

Some 40 per cent of the public chose George from a shortlist compiled by a panel of historians  who also named Mary Queen of Scots and Edward II as contenders for the unwanted crown.

That got me thinking about who is our greatest monarch. When this comes up the usual names mentioned are Alfred the Great, William the Conqueror, Henry V, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, and Victoria.

Foremost among those perhaps are the two Queens, Elizabeth and Victoria, who both presided over golden ages of rising British prosperity and influence.

Yet in her own quiet way, our current Queen, Elizabeth II,  surely merits comparison with her celebrated ancestors for the way she has maintained the integrity of the monarchy while adapting to a rapidly changing world.

She has been on the throne for 56 years and is already Britain's oldest ever mona

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The five arrested off Barbados by US Coast Guard officials working with William's warship HMS Iron Duke have been handed over to the authorities in Venezuela after being caught red-handed on a speedboat with 45 bales of cocaine worth £40 million.

In theory, they face at least 10 years in jail each under Venezuela's tough anti-drugs laws but Venezuelan officials are proving strangely reluctant to explain their fate.

The drugs raid was, of course, a public relations coup for the Royal Navy, which is under ever-increasing pressure to justify its existence in these cash-strapped days.

A large consignment of drugs destined for Europe was seized along with the suspected smugglers. But in the last few days I've been talking to experts on the deadly tail of cocaine smuggling across the Atlantic and, privately, they fear the men may never be brought to justice because so many senior military officers and government officials in Venezuela are involved in the illicit trade.

In the past, British anti-drugs officials have found it difficult to trace what has happened to smugglers and seized narcotics when they ha

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Prince Charles has just honoured a longstanding debt to its members but he's failed to take account of inflation, leaving them thousands of pounds out of pocket.

When Charles went to Worcester on Tuesday, he handed over £453.15 in recompense for a debt incurred by his ancestor King Charles II in 1651.

Before the Battle of Worcester in that year, the King commissioned the city's clothiers to make uniforms for his troops, cannily promising to pay after winning the battle. He didn't win. Cromwell's parliamentary forces routed the royalists and Charles II fled to Europe, leaving a debt of £453 and three shillings, which he failed to settle after he was restored to the throne in 1660.

As various prominent individuals who had supported Cromwell were being rounded up and then hanged, drawn and quartered at the time, I don't suppose the Clothiers Company of Worcester felt like picking a fight with the new monarch.

Finally, however, his descendant has agreed to honour the debt and handed over the money in a gaming purse made by the Royal Shakespeare Company. "It seems that members of the Clothiers Company have

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Inevitably, the focus this year is on Prince William, who has become the 1,000th Knight of the Garter, joining Britain's highest order of chivalry.

Tourists and photographers love the colourful uniforms but, much as I respect and admire the work that Prince William and his family do for the country, I wonder whether he has really done enough in his life so far to warrant such a major honour.

Privately, I know that William was embarrassed that, even before he graduated from Army officer training at Sandhurst, he was required to wear on formal parades the Golden Jubilee medal that his grandmother the Queen gave to every male member of her family.

Mere mortals in the Armed Forces only qualified for the same medal if they had completed five full calendar years in the serves before February 6, 2002.

Last week on a visit to Gosport in Hampshire, William, who is Commodore-in-Chief of the Royal Navy's submarine service, was advised against wearing uniform at a ceremony to open an area of remembrance for 5,300 submariners who had died in service since 1904.

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