‘HRH The Prince of Wales made the omelette with the spoils of a mushroom gathering trip to Loch Muick that he had undertaken just that morning,’ said a Buckingham Palace spokesman today. ‘He intended the meal to be a special surprise for his elderly mother. No one is sadder about how things have turned out than Prince Charles himself.’

Detectives now suspect that The Prince of Wales may have mistakenly picked a number of highly poisonous toadstools rather than edible wild mushrooms. ‘It is an easy mistake to make,’ said investigating officer DCI Dowling of the Metropolitan Police. ‘Indeed Prince Charles has made the same mistake twice already this year, and he’s an experienced organic farmer.’

Friends of Sir Digby say that his sudden demise followed years of ill health in his role. ‘During his service he chalked up 19 bouts of salmonella poisoning, 52 episodes of gastroenteritis and suffered from near-constant diarrhoea,’ said one. ‘Luckily Prince Charles always seemed to be on hand to suggest a herbal remedy. In fact we used to joke with Charles that if he’d had a motive the police would have brought him in for questioning long ago. But of course he didn’t – why would he want to bump off the Queen’s official food taster?’

Although Sir Digby will be much mourned, his death is good news for his son Basil Filigree-Gresham who now inherits the position vacated by his father. ‘Finally! I’d been waiting almost 60 years for the old man to pop his clogs,’ he said today. His first assignment is to accompany the Queen to dinner with her eldest son at Highgrove where the menu promises pufferfish on a bed of rhubarb leaves.

Curbie Firetank

Following the recent series of injury scares, Queen Elizabeth II’s trainers have said they expect to make a decision on Friday about whether Her Majesty will be fit for the classic Derby race at Epsom on Saturday.

The majestic royal mare has been suffering with strained withers since landing awkwardly at Haydock Park in May, and has yet to really loosen up in training canters. There would be great disappointment if the monarch is indeed unable to compete in the Derby, as the sight of Her Majesty’s steaming figure thundering around the Epsom turf has become almost synonymous with the ‘Sport of Queens’.

The Queen has an excellent sporting pedigree – few can forget her mother Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother’s spectacular victory by 30 lengths and a nose at the Gordon’s Gin Handicap at Aintree in 1964. But her trainer insisted this morning that the Queen would not race on Saturday unless fully fit. ‘If Her Majesty were to sustain a serious injury on the track it would be a tragedy for the sport,’ he explained. ‘Prince Charles is definitely not ready to take on the great horses of today, even if he did marry one. And when we tried him out in the Grand National he just kept stopping and talking to the hedges.’

Royal Dumps are extremely rare natural phenomena. The last recorded dump was in August 1997 after the awful news had finally sunk in that Tony Blair was indeed her Prime Minister. News of a previous dump in 1964 transpired to be a false alarm and Prince Edward was born instead.

The announcement is further good news for makers of cheap commemorative tat, and many celebratory porcelain items have already hit the shops in addition to Royal Dump toilet paper, laxatives and air freshener.

‘We’ve been speculating for months about the situation between the young lovers,’ said Frank Wilson, Royal Correspondent for the Three Stags pub in the Wirral. ‘Everyone’s been asking, ‘Will they, won’t they?’ Well, it seems he already has. Good lad.’

‘Yep, she’s definitely preggers,’ agreed fellow drinker Jim McMahon. ‘I said as much two nights ago just before closing, and what do you know? Just a few hours later there’s an official announcement from Clarence House that William is to do the honourable thing and take his bride up the aisle before it becomes bloody obvious. I’m delighted for all three of them.’

Patrons gathering at their local today seemed in unanimous agreement that ‘Kate done well for herself’. ‘Admittedly with William there’s only a light covering up top these days,’ said one drinker, ‘but then his brother’s a ginger, so if she was gonna go Royal, I suppose she could have done worse. And anyway, he’ll be wearing a hat for the wedding snaps.’

But the overriding feeling among royal supporters was one of relief that Middleton hadn’t allowed herself to be pressured into ‘getting rid of it’. ‘We’re delighted for the young couple,’ said pub landlord Dave Stanley. ‘Obviously the next job now is to set about choosing a name for the child. I’d say ‘Kyle’ has got to be a front runner if it’s a boy, and ‘Cheryl’ if it turns out to be a young lady. Something classy, anyway. Oh, and I’d strongly advise Will to get a pre-nup. Shopping at Harrods and holidaying in Paris should both definitely be out.’

Despite the optimism, Carl Rowe, a teaching assistant and regular at the Three Stags, is said to still be nervous about the marriage. ‘I’m sure it’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘It’s just that you wouldn’t want the baby coming out black or Chinese. Not with Prince Philip as great granddad.’

Gary Stanton

‘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!’

British secret agent James Bond is reported to be ‘privately a little disappointed’ that official recognition of his services to his country apparently amounts to only to an MBE. The heroic spy’s name was put forward in recognition of ‘services to British intelligence’, and as is customary, the various nominees were contacted well in advance of the Queen’s Birthday to check that he would in fact accept an honour.

But on receipt of the letter Mr Bond was reported to have lost his temper. ‘Frankly after all the shit I’ve been through, you’d think a bloody peerage would be the absolute minimum,’ Bond apparently shouted at Miss Moneypenny who had excitedly showed him the letter. ‘MBE is like the worst one of all of them isn’t it? I mean that Jimmy Savile’s got an OBE and a knighthood, but I’m apparently not as good as a creepy senile radio presenter.’

Miss Moneypenny attempted to mollify 007 with suggestions that if he continued to save the world from crazed criminal geniuses then he might get promoted to a CBE later in his career, but this apparently did little to diminish Mr Bond’s anger. ‘You lay your life on the line, time and time again, you defeat private armies and switch off nuclear detonators with only seconds to spare, and what does that get you? ‘Member of the British Empire…’ Spiffing. My name is Bond; James Bond MBE. On a par with Michael bloody Fish and Alan Titchmarsh.’

The tone of Britain’s most famous spy apparently changed when it occurred to him that the little bronze medal might actually be a cover for be a secret tracking device that could fire poison pellets and emit an odourless sleeping gas. Mr Bond excitedly rang Buckingham Palace to enquire whether the MBE actually concealed a number of secret spy gadgets. A spokesman for the Palace curtly replied that it didn’t.

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