I’ve probably enjoyed as many long lunches as any old adman, and in the 1980s and ’90s may well have been guilty of what would today be called misconduct. But the office I held was never public, and the misconduct which occurred in it was always legal and consensual, so my 66th birthday last year didn’t start with me being arrested. Everyone on the planet has now seen the photograph of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor looking more like a rabbit caught in the headlights of a Range Rover than a middle-aged man sitting in the back of one. And I’m sure that before he’d even fastened his seat belt, Peter Morgan, the man who wrote The Crown, was firing up his laptop. Who wouldn’t want to binge a bonus season dedicated to this least likeable Windsor? Andrew’s life, unlike that of his sainted, alabaster mother, doesn’t need an award-winning screenwriter to make it watchable. Consider the narrative arcs: prince to pariah, war hero to zero, naughty boy to (alleged) nonce. Then there’s his long-time female accomplice. By giving her a bit more rat-cunning, Morgan could make Fergie the Becky Sharp to Andrew’s Rawdon Crawley. And if Netflix does decide to dramatise their disgrace a lot of screen time will doubtless be given to how she augmented her Civil List allowance and taxpayer-funded alimony before opening an account with the bank of Epstein. Post-divorce especially, Fergie made it clear there wasn’t much she wouldn’t do for money, and that’s why, not long after she became Weight Watchers’ least obviously qualified brand ambassador, I wrote her into a TV ad for the Australian launch of a new kind of tea bag. ‘She’ll never do it,’ said my Melbourne client after reading my script. How wrong he was. Her agent told us she was fine with the script, and that if we could just add one more nought to the fee she’d be at the pointy end of the next Qantas flight out of Heathrow. Unfortunately, she turned out still to be subject to the approval of her ex-mother-in-law, whose great-great-grandmother had allowed this particular tea company to put the Royal Warrant on its packaging. So the ad was never made. Which is a shame, because it would have been quite funny: Open on Fergie in an ordinary kitchen looking sadly into camera. ‘I used to live in a palace and have my tea poured by servants from the finest silver teapots,’ she says, filling a mug from a kettle. ‘But now,’ she beams, lowering our product into the mug, ‘I’m a bag lady!’

An intriguing detail of Andrew’s arrest is that police were also waiting behind the house when they knocked on its front door. Even if he’d been able to bolt across the fens like a startled fox and get on a North Sea ferry, where did they think he might go? The UAE, home for the past decade to his equally scandalised third cousin, King Juan Carlos of Spain, wasn’t being attacked by Iran at the time, but it’s too hot for golf. And Monaco, an equally sunny (but less Sunni) place for shady people, would hardly be a safe house with its UK and US extradition treaties. Then again, having already been branded a sex offender and traitor in the court of public opinion, he might welcome the chance to clear his name in a real one. So far we’ve seen nothing that suggests he’s guilty of anything worse than dishonesty and sleaze. But mud is particularly hard to remove from royal reputations, and even if UK Plod decides not to press charges, he and Fergie will still have to relocate a long way from Commonwealth Head Office. Mr Albanese, being the first Anglosphere leader to request Andrew’s removal from the line of succession – just as he wanted to be the first leader to recognise Palestine – has already taken Australia off the menu. New Zealand and Canada will surely follow suit. So perhaps Andrew will join Harry in the US, which has been a martyr to buyer’s remorse since 1783, and a haven for not-fit-for-purpose royalty since the abdication of Edward VIII. In the meantime, like many erstwhile monarchist ex-pat Poms, I feel personally let down by the events of the last few months. And I cannot be alone in thinking that however quietly Andrewgate closes, a line has been crossed. That Charles’s relegation of his brother, and William’s snubbing of his uncle, smack of Titanic deckchair re-arrangement, and that it may be time to consign the whole dysfunctional tribe – and the increasingly redundant, crumbling institution they embody – to history.