It’s not often you can say, ‘I know exactly how he feels’ about your Prime Minister. But in following the press coverage of Mr Albanese’s UK tour there was a moment when the déjà vu was so strong I had to open a window. ‘It was very good of the King to invite me to Balmoral Castle,’ Albo told the reporters who had followed him to Scotland, ‘I regard it as a great personal honour and also an honour for Australia.’ A statement whose immediate effect on me was to sweep away the last fifteen years and restore me to the role of advertising writer for Australian Wool.

One of the less challenging aspects of this gig was attending couture events, and since that usually involved business class travel to a European capital and a few days in a five-star hotel, I was happy to do my bit, which mostly entailed standing around in big rooms feigning interest in the opinions of fops and fools while guzzling champagne and ogling supermodels. But occasionally at these shindigs I had conversations of consequence, and in that respect the 2010 London launch of the environmentalist lobby group Campaign for Wool was especially memorable.

The high point of the evening – a formal reception in a consulate off Piccadilly Circus – was a speech delivered by the organisation’s founding patron, a man who, in addition to being famously green, happened also to be the future King of England. Assigned no specific role in the proceedings, I had spent that afternoon drinking beer with old friends in Soho pubs. But I must have still looked quite presentable when I arrived at the reception, because I only had time to drain a couple of palate-cleansing flutes before an official informed me that being the person who’d told the world that wool is ‘The moral fibre’, and that there is ‘No finer feeling’ than Australian merino, I had been chosen as one of the people HRH would stop and talk to en route to the podium. Having established I was up for this cameo, the lackey told me that I should resist a natural inclination to bow when presented, and that it was acceptable to address His Royal Highness as Sir.

As he hurried off to brief the next person on his list it occurred to me that if his job was to ensure these encounters went smoothly, he might have done better to simply ask me if I was a loyal subject, whereupon, emboldened by my ‘eating’s cheating’ regimen, I might have told him that notwithstanding my Pommy accent I had voted in favour of an Australian Republic in the 1999 referendum.

Speccie readers may be relieved to hear that I have since changed my position on monarchy in general and become a big fan of the British variety in particular. But in 2010 I was still of the opinion that allegiance to the House of Windsor is superfluous to Australian requirements. So I spent the time it took Charles’s entourage to get to where I stood composing a statement to that effect, and resolving to waste none of my allotted seconds enquiring after the health of the Duchy of Cornwall’s merino flock or expressing fears about the environmental threat posed by oil-based synthetics. And then somebody took the glass from my hand, and somebody else pronounced my name and provenance, and a surprisingly short man in a very good suit shook my hand and acknowledged, in the unmistakable Spitting Image voice, what a long way I had come and what a marvellous job I was doing. I muttered my thanks and was about to launch into my own little speech when it was gazumped by someone with an equally familiar voice enquiring about the health of His Royal Highness’s merinos, and asking how concerned His Royal Highness was about the threat posed by synthetics! To both of which questions he gave short, intelligent answers before being ushered away through the crowd. I spun around, furious, to identify the person who had stolen my insurrectionist thunder, but there was nothing behind me but antique oak panelling. And then the penny dropped. I couldn’t see the owner of that intrusive voice because the owner of that intrusive voice had been me, suppressing a passionate desire to express a long-held conviction in order to keep a very good job. Some might call that spinelessness, some might call it pragmatism. Albo, I’m sure, would understand.