Royal babies are baked to order, like lucky pies, to provide gurgling distractions in times of crisis. Last week, the world’s scientists agreed we have 12 years to limit the worst climate change damage or face mass extinction. Within days, as floods washed away the villages of the Aude valley and their delicious French wines, we began fracking in Lancashire in the face of heroic protest and a dismissive Donald Trump accused scientists of having a “political agenda”. Nothing changed. But look! A baby!! A baby!!! A bouncing royal baby!!!!

Like many former Class War subscribers now approaching late middle age, I belatedly find myself quite a fan of the Queen, largely due to Dame Helen Mirren’s amazing acting in the film The Queen, in which she invested the eponymous heroine with imaginary depths and assumed feelings.

Michael Parkinson is such a fan of Dame Helen Mirren’s talents that he keeps a stuffed toy of Nyra, the magic owl Mirren played in The Owls of Ga’Hoole, under his pillow. Sometimes, in the restless night, Michael Parkinson sneers at the felt owl for its voluptuousness and accuses the woodland creature of trying to bewitch him. But the Yorkshireman is from a different time and must not be judged by the owl-respecting standards of today.

Monarchists’ last line of defence of the royal family boils down to the fact that they, and specifically their newborns, are good for tourism. But if this is the case, then surely we as a nation are guilty of failing to fully monetise the royal babies’ tourist appeal. Can we afford to be so profligate with our assets in the forthcoming era of Brexit-driven financial uncertainty?

For the last four-and-a-half years, I have worked on my laptop most days in the cafe of London Zoo, where I am unknown to the tourists. The zoo’s marketing people persuaded me, over an enchilada one lunchtime, to provide the recorded voice of an ennui-stricken black widow spider in the Bug House, but other than that I am virtually invisible in my cafe corner. And so I am able to eavesdrop on the staff.

Zoo keepers will hurl luxury dinners towards the royal baby, encouraging it to leap and caper for the public’s delight

Plans are afoot, so it would appear from the brown-coated huddle I overheard last week, to repurpose Berthold Lubetkin’s iconic 1934 penguin pool. While recognised as a 20th-century design classic, in 2004 the enclosure was emptied of penguins, who didn’t like swimming in it as, like Boris Johnson, it was too shallow to be of any use to anyone.

Having frustrated generations of sea birds for more than 80 years, Lubetkin’s white elephant now languishes drained and dry, too famous to demolish and too impractical to function, the Millennium Dome of marine aviaries. Now it is to be inhabited again but only, it would appear, during usual zoo opening hours. Would the normal keepers be doing the feeding or would the zoo’s latest addition have its own handlers, the hushed staff asked one another. Would they be allowed to look it in the eye? Would there be special protocols? And above all, how was the zoo going to cope with the tourist numbers when the next royal baby was put on permanent public display in Lubetkin’s empty penguin pool.

Everything had been thought through in meticulous detail, the possibility of public objections overruled in deference to our desperate need for tourist dollars. Tickets will be auctioned to the highest bidder and income projections were already off the scale, knocking pregnant pandas into a cocked hat.

Royal chefs will prepare the child’s food on site, but the normal zoo keepers will be required to hurl the luxury dinners from buckets towards the royal baby, encouraging it to leap and caper for the paying public’s delight.

When the royal baby reaches school age, a tutor will sit in the enclosure with it all day, to make sure it is properly educated, though he or she will bring their own packed lunch, which must not contain nuts. The royal child will be permitted to do its main toilet on tabloid newspapers in the private penguin nesting area, but everything else will happen in public view, thus preparing it, perhaps more successfully than with any previous royal, for a lifetime of spotlit scrutiny.

And should the royal baby, heaven forbid, suddenly choose to dress as a Nazi stormtrooper and parade around the penguin pool saluting, or to show its bottom to partygoers, the child will learn the hard way what it means to live a life in full public view, as the camera-phones of those surrounding the enclosure flash into social media integrated life.

And at the end of each working day, the royal child will be airlifted by helicopter to Kensington Palace, where it will then live a completely normal existence as a member of the royal family, waited on hand and foot, opening hospices and being stalked by photographers.

But once I saw a gang of young men leaning over the Asian short-clawed otter enclosure wall to feed Starbursts™ to the animals. I told them that the sweets would surely be very bad for the otters and to their credit the boys went off, horrified, to find a keeper to confess to. And everyone knows the implausible, but not necessarily untrue, urban myth of the amorous Florida zoo employee who died due to his over-familiarity with an alligator.

Can we expose a member of the royal family to these kind of risks in the name of national solvency? We need to take a long hard look at ourselves, as a society, if we are prepared to prioritise the generation of money over the mental and physical wellbeing of a child, even if that child is a member of the royal family. Call me unpatriotic, or a snowflake, call me what you like, but I for one, will not be queuing up to see the newborn royal baby leaping around for food flung from buckets into a disused penguin enclosure. I think it is wrong.