The royal family is an embarrassing soap opera – so here's my idea for an alternative head of state

The crisis over Prince Andrew should be more serious than it is, but he cannot be sacked and he won’t face a judicial process. We wouldn’t have these problems if we were ruled instead by a tablet loaded with the finer details of the unwritten British constitution

Here we go again then. Like a reality television series that you don’t really want to watch, but you end up binging on anyway, the British royal saga is getting harder to ignore – and easier to be depressed by.

Maybe it would be best if we could vote one of them off each week, evicted from their own Big Brother Palace? Given the scale of the extended family it would take quite a while.

The trivial rows about Harry ’n’ Megs’ jet trips to see Sir Elton John; the fallings out, real or imagined, with Wills and Kate; the easyJet stunt; nappygate (OK, I made that one up – but there is a green-tinged issue about disposables there). It’s all pure entertainment, a bread and circuses show laid on by a parasitic media, taking our minds off the imminent arrival of a decade-long economic slump. Has Prince George met Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor yet? Do Beatrice and Eugenie get on with Meghan Markle? What toothpaste does Princess Anne use? And does she get a bulk discount?

Even level-headed conservative commentators such as Charles Moore seem unable to separate fact from fiction. He’s put forward the notion that the actor playing the Queen in the next series of The Crown, Her Serene Highness Olivia Colman, has got a “left-wing face”. Not sure it matters that much, all this, except that we’re going a bit mad.

Rather more serious, Uncle Andy doesn’t seem to see what all the fuss is about in his on-off friendship with the late billionaire paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. That is not a storyline in a soap opera, though it is often treated as such; it is about sexual exploitation and its consequences. Yet because it slots so well into the soapy treatment, it is treated as behaviour supposedly only as obscene as getting in a Cessna without properly remembering the carbon footprint.

The more you learn about the Duke of York’s behaviour and his odd relationship with Ghislaine Maxwell (who denies any wrongdoing in the affair), the more he has questions to answer, as they say. His latest brief statement doesn’t really do it. He certainly doesn’t seem to want to appear on the Andrew Marr Show to clear things up. Indeed, reports say he’s a bit nervous about even visiting America these days.

Boris Johnson, perhaps trying to be helpful, says HRH does good work for British business, which is supposed to make us mentally add the unspoken corollary “so that’s all right then”. It doesn’t, and quite why the prime minister intervened is unknown.

It is all getting rather toxic. More than two decades after the death of Diana, on another August bank holiday, the royal family is again getting itself into a political mess, whatever the viewing figures.

The crisis over Prince Andrew should be more serious than it is, in fact. But what can anyone do? You cannot sack him from being a prince or un-duke him because he has acted unwisely, or worse. You can’t take his admiral’s uniform off him. He’s not going to be put through any judicial process. He’s going to carry on, regardless, hoping it will blow over. And maybe it will.

The one useful function the British hereditary monarchy has is its limited constitutional one. This has usually been performed impeccably by the Queen, but even here the great Brexit morass is placing that in jeopardy. And the respect and prestige of the institution, built up in the decades since after the crises of 1997, with a series of adaptations and new characters – “the young princes” – is being undermined. It will get worse, for obvious reasons: the great Queen Camilla debate will be soon upon a knackered kingdom like something out of Game of Thrones (which, I suppose, it is).

Of course no one wants more flawed politicians to replace our flawed monarchy, so here is a different idea: the world’s first AI head of state, “when the time comes” as Nick Witchell always delicately puts it.

This could be a tablet loaded with an app of the British constitution. It could tell us what to do, in the sense of sending for a new prime minister or dissolving parliament. The British constitution is largely unwritten, but it still exists and can be codified. The software could have no political bias, and never have a “left-wing face”. It would have machine learning to learn from mistakes.

And while we’re at it, the tablet could have its own velvet-lined, bejewelled casing decorated with Puginesque motifs, “live” in a palace, and go around in a horse drawn carriage originally built for George III. Fine. But it would be bang up to date and very British – even if manufactured by Huawei.

Just think: it could solve the Irish backstop conundrum and sort out Brexit. Majestically rising above politics, just so long as someone’s got a charger for it. The United Appdom would be a world leader in high tech. Global Britain made symbolically real. Beat that, Singapore!

Then we could retire the royal family to become aristocratic celebs, doing excellent work for charities and British business, no doubt, making a perfectly good living in their own right and living out the soap opera at their own expense.

Of course we’d still need someone to host Donald Trump when he wants to head over for a photo opportunity and a free banquet for the family. So we could have a group of humans to do that and also convey the constitutional decisions of the mighty app. I’d favour Professor John Curtice, Jill Rutter of the Institute for Government and Professor Vernon Bogdanor to be the Council of State – a role they pretty much play already.

So there you go: a vision of the future, positive thinking about a post-Brexit, modern, outward-facing Britain, fit to make its way in a globalised world, calm and rational. God save the app!