Since the Queen’s Speech on Wednesday could be her last, she should break from tradition and tell the truth

‘My government will engage in a game of competitive buck-passing over the Grenfell Tower tragedy. It will seek to avoid a Tory party civil war over Brexit (good luck with that one!). And it will do all it can, up to and beyond risking the peace in Northern Ireland by inserting itself in the colon of the DUP, to avoid the general election the country needs if this present paralysis is to pass’

Queen Elizabeth II meets members of the community affected by the fire at Grenfell Tower in west London (PA)

When Her Britannic Majesty addresses Parliament on Wednesday, she will read out the emptiest Queen’s Speech ever heard. In the absence of anything that can be called a “government” in more than the narrowest technical sense, it could not be anything else.

But it might make history in a second way. This could be the last Queen’s Speech delivered by a queen that anybody alive today will ever hear. If the alleged Prime Minister’s cancellation of next year’s speech isn’t reversed by a new Tory leader or a new Labour government (and much like “if Brexit happens”, that is a gargantuan if), Her Maj would be 93 by the next one.

We all hope she emulates her mother by living long enough to send herself a telegram, but you needn’t be a leading actuary to appreciate the uncertainty that she will be alive in two years, or be up to it if she is.

So in 2019, it could be either a Queen’s Speech read for her by the Prince of Wales, or his first King’s Speech. With William and George next in a line of succession stretching the best part of a century ahead, we must try to savour Wednesday’s speech in case we never hear a female voice read one again.

The obvious way for Her Maj to make her potential swansong unforgettable is by binning whatever gibberish she is given to recite, and speak off the cuff on the following lines.

“My Lords and Members of the House of Commons, one has been doing this for a very long time – and, frankly, as my Windsor cousin Dame Barbara might put it, I’ve bleedin’ ’ad it and no mistake.

“So on the understanding that this may be one’s last Queen’s Speech, I will keep it short and sweet.

“A few hours ago, I was handed a document containing my government’s exciting plans and important pledges. That piece of paper was worth as much as the one Mr Chamberlain waved about on returning from Munich in 1938, when I was a slip of a gal yet to properly hit puberty.

“So, having used it for the only purpose to which one felt it ideally suited – cleaning up after one of the corgis – one has little choice but to riff.

“My government will engage in a game of competitive buck-passing over the Grenfell Tower tragedy. It will seek to avoid a Tory party civil war over Brexit (good luck with that one!). And it will do all it can, up to and beyond risking the peace in Northern Ireland by inserting itself in the colon of the DUP, to avoid the general election the country needs if this present paralysis is to pass.

“And, er, if one might conclude by borrowing from the Private Eye obituarist EJ Thribb, that’s it. I’m DJ Sovereign, I’m out, and may God have mercy on y’all.”

If that alternative text overstates how far she has gone to adapt to modernity, she proved she has come a long way with her visit to the blackened husk of a tower block in north Kensington.

Twenty years ago, when a resident of a different part of that royal borough died in shocking circumstances, her archaic refusal to react emotionally threatened the monarchy. A few days later, her survivalist instincts kicked in, and she raced to London from Balmoral to give the live broadcast about Diana that killed the surge in republican sentiment. She learned the lesson, and changed. Two decades on, she radiated empathy last week.

Theresa May’s inability to learn that lesson – that a central function of the modern figurehead is to empathise in times of tragedy – seems to leave her weeks, days or hours from resigning, voluntarily or otherwise.

It hardly needs stating that any soothsaying from the likes of me is as reliable a guide to future events as Chamberlain’s peacenik piece of paper. But I tentatively predict this. Any Tory MPs yet to grasp that keeping her does them greater long-term damage than ditching her possibly could, however chaotic the immediate fall-out, will grasp it very soon.

The Tories may deserve the Stupid Party nickname, but the punters are not dupes. They know it when a political party insults their intelligence and damages the country by keeping a PM on life support to play for time. They do not forget and will not forgive.

There comes a tipping point when a leader morphs from severely wounded to human punchbag, and becomes ritually blamed for almost literally everything. It happened to John Major after the ERM disaster of 1992, and to Gordon Brown when a sequence of fiascos followed the election that never was in 2007.

Both limped on because those best placed to remove them (Michael Portillo and David Miliband) were too fearful of the axiom about the assassin never wearing the crown. The Tories were punished in 1997, and Labour in 2010.

Theresa May reached that tipping point last week.

She will now be blamed for everything, from the nihilistic pointlessness of tomorrow’s Brexit talks (she might as well send a David Davis cardboard cut-out, or a shoe) to Ant of Ant-and-Dec’s struggle with painkiller addiction.

If Andy Murray loses at Wimbledon to the world number 714 from Kyrgyzstan, it will be her fault. A tornado battering Kansas will be as much down to her as an outbreak of cholera in Munchkinland.

Boris, Davis and anyone else hungrily eyeing her job may think it suits them to keep her as a lightning rod. But even if the paralysis endures for only a fortnight, their collusion in lumbering Britain with a vegetative state PM when the Brexit talks began will be remembered.

As for the Queen, gawd bless her for pitching up on Wednesday to commit a kind of parliamentary perjury with the phrase “my government”. It isn’t her government. It isn’t yours or mine, and it certainly isn’t Theresa May’s. Since it cannot begin to govern, it isn’t a government at all.