It was my 65th birthday yesterday, a day of national rejoicing. You may have missed it. My name was in the paper to mark the occasion, but it wasn’t at the top of the list, which is odd. It was at the bottom, after Daisy Waugh and Ray Winstone.
“Who the hell are they?” I yell at my private secretary, whose name I never knew because it doesn’t matter, “and what the bloody hell is going on?”
My private secretary is usually very busy somewhere I’m not, which is odd now I think about it, but today he walked past the open door of the state dining room just as I’d finished brekkers. I was dressed in the admiral’s uniform I commissioned for my 60th birthday but have never been allowed to wear in public because everyone is so bloody spiteful and keeps going on and on and bloody on about Jeffrey bloody Epstein. I barely knew the man! Did he speak Mandarin? No. Well, there you are. Why would I need to?
“Actually,” Charles once said mildly, ignoring the Jeffrey word, “you’re not allowed to wear an admiral’s uniform because you’re not an admiral,” but I take no notice of him. Insufferable man. So puffed up with his own importance. Who does he think he is? Anyway, yesterday my private secretary, wotsisname, walks past the state ballroom when I am doing my boomerang practice, and can you believe it, it hooks him round the neck and yanks him in? Bloody hilarious.
“Bonzo!” I yell triumphantly as he stumbles into the room, gasping and clutching his neck. “Bingo! Gotcha! Bloody hilarious, no?” I say, beaming, and he agrees that yes, it’s very funny indeed. “Bull’s-eye!” I add, looking around the room for people laughing at my excellent jokes, but there aren’t any. “Anyway,” I say, jabbing the newspaper, “enough of the small talk. Who is this Hilary Cass person and why is she above me on the birthday list? And Professor Jennifer Doudna? They’re women. Not an HRH between them. And what have they ever done for this country?”
My private secretary mutters something about eminent scientists and the alphabet and will that be all?
“No,” I say, waving my boomerang in a bloody amusing manner, if I say so myself. “It is not all. The Court Circular carries no record of national rejoicing. Union Jacks on government buildings, peals of bells, that sort of thing.”
He mutters something noncommittal and starts reversing slowly towards the door.
“Can I perhaps advise Your Royal Highness,” he says, “to rejoice instead that your name was not followed by either Pizza Express or Ghislaine Maxwell?”
“Or sweat!” shouts Fergie, who’s sitting in the corner with a corgi on her head, because she says it helps her to understand what Queen Elizabeth would have wanted. “There’s no mention of sweat either. That’s good, right?” and she gives the double thumbs-up to my private secretary, who looks out of the window. “And,” she adds, “nobody found out about the magnificent black tie ball we threw for 350 of your closest friends here at Royal Lodge.”
My private secretary blinks.
“You did?” he asks.
“We did?” I ask.
“No,” she says wistfully, patting the corgi and rubbing her stomach, because she’s so clever like that. “But it would have been fun, wouldn’t it? Make a change from just the two of us sitting at each end of a table for 24, you in your admiral’s uniform, me in your favourite sailor suit. A ball would have been something jolly for your dearest and closest friends to pay for. I’ve been learning Mandarin especially.”
My private secretary closes his eyes and leans against the door for support. I snort with derision.
“Man up,” I tell him. “It was only a bloody boomerang round your neck. Honestly, the youth of today. No backbone.”
“Actually, sir, I’m 45,” he says, “and I used to be in the Royal Marines.”
“So what?” I say, flooring him with my intellect. “What’s your point? Are you an HRH? No. Can you speak Mandarin? No.”
“In that case, why do we employ him?” Fergie asks, and I think about that, and frown and stick my lower lip out in that frowning-thinking-clever sort of way that I have.
“Search me,” I say, looking at him. “But you can keep your little persons’ job, whatever it is and whoever you are, if you make sure that in future everyone refers to me as HRH the Duke of York, especially that hotbed of bloody commies, the BBC. Because otherwise how is anybody to know who I am? How can they be sure that it’s me, not some other Duke of York?”
The man with no name looks at me and I squint at his lapel where a name badge should be, but there isn’t one.
“Sir,” he says, “are you absolutely sure you want them to know who you are? You wouldn’t rather draw the curtains and sit quietly in the dark, on your own, indefinitely?”
I look at him, perplexed. “Charles keeps saying the same bloody thing,” I tell him. “Have you two been talking behind my back? Swapping notes? Because I won’t have it, you know. It’s disloyal and it’s not on, unless it’s in Mandarin, in which case, hellooooo there! Come on in and welcome to Royal Lodge. And for heaven’s sake man, where’s your bloody name badge?” and he bows and leaves.
“How do you think that went?” I say to Sarah, as he closes the door. “I think that went well, don’t you?”