Queen's clean is enough to make one scream

Haven’t hooted so deeply since the storm-tossed Thames River Pageant for the Diamond Jubilee.

Particularly that bit where an elegantly attired choir serenaded the Queen and Phil from the deck of a wildly bouncing boat in the middle of a storm Shakespeare would have been proud to have for his Tempest.

Clean For The Queen is different level mirth though, not least because the whole thing appears to have been meticulously designed to make some of the worst people in Britain look even worse.

The promotional ads featuring Michael Gove and Boris Johnson not only split my sides, they detached my head from my body. Decked out in UKIP coloured knitwear, waving the same bit of spotless brown paper ‘litter’ at the end of some tongs, Johnson looked like an idiot in search of a village and Gove looked… What is the word…

Remember the old Ealing classic The Dead Of Night, where the ventriloquist’s dummy comes to life? That. But the deep life-altering laughter – that sort where your body just sort of sags and you groan and choke while your shoulders pump helplessly up and down – comes when you consider the unspoken but glaring truth of the whole campaign. Namely this: Obviously, obviously, you, me, your family and friends – commoners, in short – are perfectly content to live like pigs in our own filth, Greggs bags flapping against our faces, clods of waxy doner meat daubed on the war memorial, fried chicken boxes skittering around our communities like greasy autumn leaves.

But guys. Guys. Come on guys.

Let’s tidy up a bit, eh? If not for ourselves, for the Queen. That’s the comedy cake. The icing is that more or less ALL the faces of this campaign are members of a Government which has done more to hobble local cleansing services than any in living memory.

And all, ultimately, achieving just one thing for certain. To alienate around 20 per cent of the populace who might otherwise have been happy to support, endorse, even participate in such a campaign. Republicans hate litter too, yeah? But clean for a billionaire?

One who, by my reckoning, has never done one single real day’s work in her life? I’d sooner fly-tip a fridge.