Princess Diana’s old Escort RS Turbo sold for £722,500

If you are a human being on this planet (and we’re betting that at least some of you are), you’ll have noticed how pricey things seem to be getting.

And it seems that not even royal memorabilia is immune – as of course it wouldn’t be, when even brimming your tank costs a king’s ransom. But we digress.

The fact is that an old Ford Escort (pretty much the people’s car of Britain) that was owned and driven by Lady Diana (very much the people’s princess) has sold for a sum that’s broadly unthinkable to most people. That’s £722,500, in case you’re the sort to click headlines without reading them.

Which means we must now find some way to contextualise a mid-Eighties front-drive Ford selling for three quarters of a million pounds. So. About that.

Any straightforward yardstick, such as comparing it to a hot hatchback from the past decade, is largely redundant, in much the same way that it’d be pointless to compare a new guitar to Kurt Cobain’s ‘Teen Spirit’ Mustang, which recently sold for $4.5 million.

Both the Escort and the Mustang were the actual item used by a wonderful, genuinely dearly departed human being who transformed their generation and became the unwitting (and often unwanted) icon of the times they defined. How you even attach a price tag to that, let alone justify it, is beyond our ken. So we’ll try to rationalise it at something closer to our level.

Here goes, then. When you consider that a slice of William and Kate’s wedding cake sold for nearly £6,000, perhaps that takes the sting of a quarter-mil Escort down a peg or two. At least that’s what we heard...