When did Harry the hellraiser turn into such a right-on bore?

AT 9am on Wednesday, the familiar pips signalled the end of  BBC  Radio 4’s Today programme. And also, I’m sorry to say, the end of Prince Harry’s reputation as the most quirky and intriguing member of the Royal Family.

The naughty charm, the mickey-taking, that redhead streak of subversion — all the qualities we associated with Harry flew out of the window during his guest editorship of the flagship news show.

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Prince Charles’s younger son emerged as a nice-but-dim Windsor bore — banging on about the wonders of nature and the wickedness of waste.

That’s a shame but hardly a surprise.

The royals (with the exception of the Queen) have always been blind to the hypocrisy of wagging their green fingers at us before hopping on to a private jet.

But there was something especially troubling about Harry’s Today “editorship” — I put it in inverted commas because it had more than a whiff of French queen Marie Antoinette playing shepherdess.

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In addition to waving farewell to the mischievous Harry, we also had to abandon any notion that he’s above politics. This was a prince with an agenda.

And that’s disturbing — even though the agenda was little more than brain-dead millennial waffle.

The prince could have interviewed anyone he liked. His choices could hardly have been less imaginative — Barack Obama and the Prince of Wales, both of whom were drenched in sycophancy.

Older readers may remember when Tory Prime Ministers were invited by broadcasters to tell the nation what a simply splendid job they were doing.

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That was Harry’s approach with Obama. The ex-president would indulge in his trademark languid boasting, and then HRH would tell him not to be so modest.

Barry couldn’t believe his luck.

What other interviewer would allow him to portray chaotic Obamacare  as the feeding of the 5,000, then  reply: “You’ve made a difference, a huge difference”?

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Harry didn’t add: “And you’re not that ghastly Donald Trump.” He didn’t need to. When he asked the 44th President of the United States to “give us a reason  to be optimistic about next year” his voice   was   laced with contempt for No 45.

Fair enough, you may say, but millions of Americans think Obama’s laidback narcissism helped create the  new world disorder. It wasn’t Trump who abandoned Syria to the Russians or allowed North Korea to flourish.

As a military man, you’d expect Harry to be curious about looming nuclear war. Instead, he and Obama told us how “passionate” they were about young  people “changing the world”.

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I haven’t heard such a boring exchange since I covered the planning committee of Reading Borough Council as a cub reporter.

The prince’s interview with his father began more promisingly — Prince Charles talked about his new cause,  the persecution of Christians. But that doesn’t tick any millennial boxes, so Harry wasn’t interested. He wanted to discuss climate change, and Charles was happy to oblige.

Naturally, neither prince acknowledged that there is more than one view on the subject — though “Pa” threw in some mumbo-jumbo about moving to a “circular” rather than a “linear” economy.

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The Prince of Wales sounded happy. For once, he didn’t have to force the broadcasters to sign a 14-page contract guarding against tricky questions — something Channel 4 revealed recently.

Charles referred to himself as “dotty”, and that’s how he came across — rather endearingly so.

The problem was that Harry didn’t sound in the least eccentric or independent-minded. He spoke in the same right-on jargon as a B-list celeb — coincidentally, the very language employed by his fiancée Meghan Markle, who’s delightful in most respects but can’t resist a politically correct cliché.

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I turned off the radio, thinking: “Give us our old Harry back, the first champion of the Invictus Games, rather than the millionth high-profile whinger about climate change.” But I’m not optimistic.

Obama did make one good point. He said that thanks to the internet, the younger generation are “cocooned in information that reinforces their own biases”. Does that remind you of anyone?

Harry fits the bill, though it’s not just the internet feeding his bias.

It’s also the fawning luvvies and charity apparatchiks who have sunk their claws into his father — and also, I very much fear, into his future bride.

Damian Thompson is an associate editor of The Spectator magazine.