The rules

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/26/rules-etiquette-guide-royal-christenings

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How to report a royal christening

A royal christening is not as big an event as a royal birth. That is because everyone was born but not everyone was christened. The market of people who care that a thing has happened is limited to the number of people who really understand what the thing is.

This is one explanation for why the BBC chose to report Prince George's baptism at the end of its nightly news bulletin instead of the start.

The other explanation is that the BBC is packed with misanthropic, leftwing, vegan republicans who hate Britain and want to hurt the Queen's feelings.

Those are the same people who read the Independent, which reported the christening in four lines at the bottom of page 27. The Daily Mail devoted 15 pages to the event. This is the maximum amount of words that can be written about a royal event before a separate souvenir edition is automatically triggered.

(Separate rules apply for the Mail Online, where the volume of coverage is proportionate to opportunities for publishing pictures of Pippa Middleton.)

The royal christening did provide newspapers with official pictures of the royal baby. Images of the heir to the throne are rationed and, as Prince George grows up, newspapers will be bound by a code of conduct that forbids intrusions into his privacy.

One rule of royal intrusion is that nothing can be published until it has first appeared in a foreign magazine. The other rule is that anything can be published as long as it is in the public interest.

(The public interest in this case is defined in relation to the Leveson inquiry as anything editors feel like publishing because to impose limitations on the press is the death of freedom and the beginning of tyranny.)

Why be baptised?

The main reason why babies are christened is as an insurance policy against going to hell.

People who are not baptised are not supposed to go to heaven, although the Church of England generally makes allowances for that sort of thing.

That kind of flexibility is why the Church of England exists in the first place.

Another reason to be baptised, from a baby's point of view, is to get presents – although the accumulation of material advantage is less urgent when you are on course to inherit Buckingham palace and the crown jewels.

For a christening it is also important to choose godparents. If you are religious, these are people whose job is to keep you away from Satan. If you are not religious, they are people tasked with remembering your birthday.

Prince George has seven godparents, which is more than the usual number. That might be because monarchs are allowed to have more than the usual number of birthdays.

Christening is also when a baby is given his or her Christian name. This is what heathens call their first name.

Prince George's Christian names are George Alexander Louis. These are all carefully chosen to fit in with royal tradition and to avoid anything that sounds too foreign or Catholic.

Louis definitely has a whiff of France about it but it's buried as his third name and can be taken as a sign of how relaxed modern monarchy has become.

Useful royal christening terms

Baptismal font 136 point bold, the type size used by tabloid newspapers when announcing royal news.

ABC Insiders' abbreviation for the archbishop of Canterbury, the supreme authority who conducts religious royal ceremonies. Also Audit Bureau of Circulation, the supreme secular authority that measures whether royal pictures have successfully boosted newspaper sales.

Royal expert Person with no social or family connections to royalty, deployed by news channels to speculate about how it might feel to be royal.

Minor royal Member of the royal family, whose mention online does nothing to boost web traffic.

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