If last ditch Remainer attempts to block a no-deal Brexit fail, our head of state, already seen to have aided the no-deal camp by proroguing the existing parliament, will soon be obliged to give Bojo & Co a more vocal endorsement when she addresses the opening of a new one. As with most of The Queen’s public utterances, she will not write a word of this speech herself, so it would be unfair to infer from it her views on its subject matter. And few people will, the enduring popularity of Britain’s longest-serving monarch being due in large part to the fact that her opinions about everything except horses have always been a state secret. Indeed, the last time she made a speech containing anything like a personal take on current affairs was in 1992, when she elicited post-prandial chuckles at a Guildhall dinner by conceding that the preceding twelve months, which saw the collapse of three of her children’s marriages, the immolation of one of her homes and the revelation that her eldest child – presumably despairing of ever being a king – wanted to be a tampon – was ‘not a year I will look back on with undiluted pleasure.’

It was shortly after this that I wrote the treatment for a sitcom whose premise was that following a slew of even more shocking royal scandals, Britain had voted to become a republic, the Civil List had been discontinued, and the royal family had been put on the street. My storyline kicked in a year later when, destitute, unemployable and still incapable of performing the simplest domestic task, they are rescued from the ignominy and squalor of a Scottish caravan site by a white-shoed Gold Coast property developer, who offers them a year’s rent-free accommodation in the show home of his Surfers Paradise McMansion if they agree to appear in his brochures and schmooze wealthy Asian buyers at open houses. Successive episodes of Queen’s Land would chart the royals’ hopeless inability to adapt to this mother-of-all sea changes and the gradual wearing out of their Aussie welcome by, in no particular order, Prince Philip’s inability to refrain from making insensitive references to indigenous Australians, Charles’s disparaging remarks about Australian architecture, the corgis’ insatiable appetite for endangered marsupials and the hostility of a certain flame-haired local matriarch who sees Her Maj as a rival for the affections of her base. But I had barely committed the first of these episodes to my hard drive when my own circumstances took an unexpected turn for the worse and I was obliged to get a real job and put my Logie aspirations on the back burner. I revived them when the Queen came close to falling out of favour by refusing to sob on camera after Princess Di’s death, and again when a teenage Prince Harry appeared on the front pages of several newspapers sporting a swastika. But then the well of royal disgrace went depressingly dry, with Harry’s tour of Afghanistan more than mitigating his youthful indiscretions and William’s wedding unifying the country more than anything since the death of their mother – even reconciling the nation to Camilla’s elevation from wicked stepmother to royal consort. When Harry’s betrothal to an American of mixed ethnicity was greeted with similar euphoria, the House of Windsor looked as secure as Goulburn Supermax.

But if, as a much better scriptwriter once put it, there is a tide in the affairs of men, then there is a veritable tsunami in the affairs of Prince Andrew, a.k.a Randy Andy, a.k.a the Queen’s favourite child. Meanwhile, following their insistence on maintaining the privacy of a Hollywood celeb couple, and in the wake of their spectacular failure to practise what they preach about climate change, the tide of public opinion seems also to be turning on Harry and Meghan. Not a great time, then, for the Queen to be outed as a Leaver. It’s probably too soon to start using phrases like ‘perfect royal storm’, but with four months still to go, and #AbolishtheMonarchy already gone viral, 2019 has the potential to be even more of an annus horribilis than 1992. Maybe it’s time to dust off that treatment.