‘Apparently she doesn’t even wear this ‘crown’ thing very often,’ claimed the editor of the Daily Telegraph Will Lewis, ‘but keeps it locked up at public expense in the Tower of London, just so that she can look at it from time to time.’

A Buckingham Palace press officer said that the jewel encrusted crown was worn for major state occasions such as the State Opening of Parliament, but struggled to provide an answer for why the Queen needed the most expensive hat in the world to wear once a year for a visit to the Palace of Westminster. ‘Because she’s the Queen’, repeated the Palace spokesman.

Further investigations have revealed that Her Majesty has also been claiming for the fixtures and furnishings at her second home in Windsor, and her third, fourth and fifth homes in Balmoral, Holyrood House, Sandringham not to mention several other extensive London properties in Kensington and St James’s.

she's got houses, like, everywhere

‘The expenses forms also include claims for a ‘Household Cavalry’ scoffed Lewis. ‘How many of us can honestly claim to need our own household cavalry? And why should the taxpayer pay these receipts for fourteen million pounds to have her so-called ‘throne’ recovered in gold leaf, when you can get a perfectly good chair from IKEA for ten quid?’

‘The whole shoddy episode has shown how our royal family is out to milk whatever the can out of the system’ said the Telegraph editor. ‘It’s as if they’re less interested in honest hard work than they are in submitting their expenses, I mean imagine if all our journalists were like that!’