It was 10.30 pm and the furniture was still in the van. The driver was asleep with his head on the steering wheel.

“Philip?”

The Queen was tired she had never been so tired. She couldn’t make any decisions. She wanted to retire to her room in Buckingham Palace, where her nightgown would be laid out. She wanted to slide between the linen sheets and drop her head onto the soft pillows and sleep forever, or until somebody brought the tea tray in the morning. Philip sat on the stairs, his head between his hands. He was exhausted after helping to carry the carpets in from the van. He had thought he was fit. Now he knew he wasn’t.

“I don’t bloody know. Do as you like,” he said.

“Send for Mr Spiggy,” said the Queen.

Spiggy turned up three-quarters of an hour later with his Stanley knife and his metal tape measure and his four tins of Carlsberg. The Queen was unable to watch while Spiggy sliced and chopped at her precious rugs. She took the dog for a walk, but when she got to the end of the Close she was turned back by polite policemen manning a hastily constructed barrier. An Inspector Denton Holyland emerged from a little hut and explained that the rest of the Flowers Estate was out of bounds to her and her family, ‘until further notice’.

“I’ve already explained to your son,” he said. “He wanted to find a fish and chip shop but I had to turn him back. Mr Barker’s orders.”

The Queen walked around the Close four times. Nobody was about apart from the odd mongrel dog. She thought, I am living in a ghetto. I must consider myself a prisoner of war. I must be brave, I must maintain my own high standards. She knocked on her son’s front door. “May I come in?”

Diana was in the hall. The Queen could see she had been crying. It wouldn’t do to sympathise, not now, thought the Queen.

“Our carpets won’t fit,” gulped Diana, “and the furniture is still in the van.”

Prince Charles and the driver of their removal van came into sight, struggling with an unwieldy Chinese carpet.

“Not a hope, darling,” panted Prince Charles.

“Do be careful of your back, Charles,” said the Queen. “There’s a little man up the road who will cut carpets to size…”

“Mummy, I really think that you er shouldn’t…isn’t it frightfully patronising…I mean, in our present circumstances…to call anyone ‘a little man’?”

“But he is a little man,” said the Queen. “Mr Spiggy is even smaller than I am and he’s a carpet fitter. Shall I ask him to call?”

“But these carpets are priceless. It would be an act of er…well, sheer vandalism…”

William and Harry appeared at the top of the stairs. They were dressed in pyjamas with Bart Simpson slippers on their feet.

“We’re sleeping on a mattress,” piped Harry.

“In sleeping bags,” bragged William. “Pa says we’re having an adventure.”

Diana showed the Queen around the house. It didn’t take long. The decor had been chosen by someone who had never heard of Terence Conran. Diana shuddered at the purple and turquoise wallpaper on the walls of the marital bedroom, the polystyrene ceiling tiles, the orange paintwork splodged over the sash window.

She thought, I’ll ring Interiors tomorrow, ask the editor to come round with paint charts and wallpaper samples.

The Queen said, “We’re lucky, we’ve been decorated throughout.”

Both women were rather dreading the night to come. Neither was used to sharing either a bedroom or a bed with her husband.

The two little boys lay on their backs and gazed rapturously at their Superman wallpaper.

“And look,” said William, pointing to a round patch of mould above the window. “That’s the planet Krypton.”

But Harry had gone to sleep with one hand flopping off the mattress and onto the dirty bare boards of the bedroom floor.

Spiggy drank the last of his cans and surveyed his handiwork. The carpets glowed under the bare bulbs. The Queen gathered the offcuts together and put them in the box room preparing for the day when they would be woven back and relaid in Buckingham Palace. Because this nonsense wouldn’t last long. It was a hiccup of history. Mr Barker would make a dreadful hash of things and the populace would cry out for the restoration of the Conservative government and the monarchy wouldn’t they? Yes, of course they would. The English were known for their tolerance, their sense of fair play. Extremism of any kind was simply not in their nature. The Queen was careful, even in thought to distinguish the English from the Scots, Irish and Welsh, who, owing to their Celtic blood, were inclined to be rather hot-headed at times.

“That’ll be fifty quid, Your Majesty,” said Spiggy. “Being as it’s after midnight, so to speak.”

The Queen found her handbag and paid him. She was unaccustomed to handling money and counted it out slowly.

“Right, ta,” said Spiggy. “I’ll nip round to Prince Charles’s now. He’ll still be up, will he?”