Britain’s poet laureate Andrew Motion last weeke wrote some rap for Prince William’s birthday. What a mistake. “The poet laureate going hip-hop is like Mel C going punk – except without quite so many flying bottles. Even so, within hours of the rap being published, an online petition was launched demanding, with a rather sinister turn of phrase, that Motion ‘be removed’. The factor which will prevent MC Motion being sprayed in 20ft letters across the Buck House gates is not that he attempted the rap, but that it is so toe-curlingly off-the-mark, that instead of putting William – and the royal family – in some sort of modern context, it’s more like a trap door beneath William on the gallows of cool, with Motion being forced to yank the lever.”