ANDREW ADONIS: The speech I believe the Queen should now deliver

One has been given a list of Bills to read out on education, health and life sentences for offences for which my prime minister merits multiple convictions. But as I’m told he said to a young lady who he took on a trade mission, they are all poppycock to win an election.

Mr Johnson has issued a long list of IOUs to make everyone happy without any credible tax plan to support them, a practice of my most profligate predecessor the Prince Regent, who bankrupted the country and even looked like Mr Johnson. I know my people will see through this.

Everyone knows that the real issue before you is how to end the Brexit crisis. And it is surely clear that the only way is to end Brexit itself. I have now had three prime ministers in three years: the last two resigned because they could not make Brexit work and this one will go the same way.

It is like the poll tax, the last project of my longest serving prime minister Lady Thatcher. It does not now matter whether it is a good or a bad idea, it can’t be done. It was obviously bizarre that one should pay the same tax to Windsor council as a dustman, and it’s just as mad to think one can leave the European club but keep all the benefits. I say this to Charles all the time about modern architecture: you’ve got to put up 
with it and improve it, not ban it.

My ministers are thrashing around like headless chickens to circumvent your new law to stop no-deal at the end of October. They hoped the courts wouldn’t notice if they broke it. But that stern Lady Hale and my other Supreme Court judges are not going to let that horse run either.

Being a practical Queen of the world, I can see only one course on Brexit that doesn’t end up in a grisly abdication like that of my uncle Edward VIII. And that is to hold another of those horrid referendums. This time, given the experience of the last three years, one might expect the sensible people to win.

Mr Wilson, my shrewdest prime minister, told me that when undecided about joining the common market he took a look at the people on the other side – the racist Mr Powell and the revolutionary Mr Benn, who kept trying to chop my head off the postage stamps when postmaster general – and said it was no contest. One feels the same when looking at Mr Johnson, Mr Rees-Mogg and Mr Farage, a trio of confidence tricksters.

Sorry my lords, let me return to the vellum scroll. It says: “My government will pursue friendly relations with our European neighbours and strengthen Nato and the WTO in the face of military and trade threats from Russia and China.”

Well one doesn’t keep up with all the latest developments in Nato and the WTO. But I’ve had presidents Putin 
and Xi to stay. They are thugs and I wouldn’t go up against them without support from that nice, decent chancellor Merkel and that too-clever but sensible president Macron. I certainly wouldn’t trust that rude and loud Trump man to help. But Mrs Merkel and Mr Macron won’t even visit me any longer because they say Brexit is too “toxic”, a word one used to apply to fertiliser.

Sir Winston Churchill, my first prime minister, told me that isolation was his fear not his hope. He wanted us to be strong in Europe, in the Commonwealth and with the United States. All three. I know he would have wanted us to stay in the European Union.

My lords and members of the House of Commons, and I say it this year with especial feeling: I pray that the blessing of Almighty God may rest upon your counsels.