Where would you hide the Queen for her protection?

This question hasn’t been as relevant or urgent since she was a pubescent princess during the war, when plans were hatched to seclude the family in Canada.

Or possibly since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, a decade after she first parked her regal bum on the throne, when an extinction level event seemed imminent.

Now, in the midst of our proxy cold war with Europe, it rears its hideous head again.

If crashing out of the EU causes social unrest, so it is widely reported today, the monarch and her closest kin will be removed to a “secret destination”.

Britain Before Brexit: Northeast England Show all 12 1 /12 Britain Before Brexit: Northeast England Britain Before Brexit: Northeast England Middlesbrough After midnight, New Year’s Eve. A girl looks at her phone and smokes, framed against a line-up of antiquated postcard features of Britain. She’s the most authentic part of the scene, however, a glimpse of modern Britain, while the red phone box belongs to the past Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain Before Brexit: Northeast England Middlesbrough I walk through a field by the industrial estate where several horses live chained to the ground. They feed on thinning grass. The Transporter Bridge lies in the background: an emblem of movement and motion and crossing divides, like a cruel joke played on the animals, stuck and fixed and static Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain Before Brexit: Northeast England Middlesbrough The first second of 2019, welcomed with with a kiss, a hug, with stares and smiles, with a shot thrown down a throat, with phones and photos and forgetting Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain Before Brexit: Northeast England Middlesbrough Shoes hang from lines of communication, sagging between houses, pulling down on the words and silences that somehow run through these black wires. It reminded me of the view from my bedroom window in Poland Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain Before Brexit: Northeast England Middlesbrough A queue to keep going, into the night, further into 2019 before sleeping. Vape rises distinctly, a new sight on the street in the last few years, bringing atmospheric emissions to the image. There’s sweat and purpose and promise Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain Before Brexit: Northeast England Middlesbrough I’m struck by this naming and shaming, by the identification of supposed disloyalty, clearly marking the public space of the city for all to see, whether they care or not, whether they know or not Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain Before Brexit: Northeast England Hartlepool A view from inside the Market Hall, looking out, onto another person sitting on the street and another person faced with the experience of walking by. Both lower their heads, as if in acknowledgement of the difficulty of the situation Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain Before Brexit: Northeast England Hartlepool I walk to the end of a long jetty by the marina. Fisherman stand at the furthest tip, waiting for a bite, looking to the horizon where faint puffs of smoke appear and vanish from factories further down the east coast Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain Before Brexit: Northeast England Seaham Dwelling spaces of the dead and the living, closer than usual, occupying the same public space, both observable in one view, the burial ground of the local church acting as a garden for the housing estate behind Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain Before Brexit: Northeast England Sunderland A walk by the River Wear is comically framed from the Wearmouth Bridge, a view unavailable to the couple, who probably have no idea they’re walking into shot. Some things just cannot be appreciated at ground level and can only be seen from above Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain Before Brexit: Northeast England Sunderland Somebody once wrote this on a wall. That’s all. But now it’s part of the scene, part of the view, part of the experience of walking up High Street West into town. It’s tiny and anonymous, but noticeable and affecting Richard Morgan/The Independent Britain Before Brexit: Northeast England Sunderland Three elements of the city: a flapping pigeon; an austere grey tower block; purchasable sex Richard Morgan/The Independent

Some will dismiss this as a palpable fiction; another transparent kite flown by Downing Street in the hope of nudging a few more invertebrates to back whatever same old-same old version of her decomposed cadaver of a deal Theresa May will ask MPs to mistake for a bouncing new born.

The timing will have others wondering if it’s intended to distract from the news that a car manufacturer is preparing to mothball plans to make a new model in the northeast.

If the royal family ignored the attentions of the German air force to look the East End in the face, these sneerers will posit, why would a little disorder on the streets send them into hiding?

Is an “evacuation plan originally intended to be put into action in the event of a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union”, to quote the The Sunday Times, applicable here?

Would Her Maj be equally endangered by some post-no deal rioting as the Luftwaffe’s aerial bombardment, or being vaporised by a nuke?

Easy to be cynical as it is, the answer to the above is plainly, yes. If the Queen lived in a moderately gated house protected by state of the art security equipment, battalions of armed police and a phalanx of military sentries in hilarious hats, then yes, it might verge on the alarmist to fret about her safety.

But since not a thing was obviously learned from the night Michael Fagan popped into her bedroom for a natter, it is folly to underestimate the risks. Any gang of marauding Remainers who gathered outside parliament to protest against the lack of tulips from Amsterdam in the floral section of Waitrose could so easily go that extra half mile to Buckingham Palace, and tear the old girl limb from limb. Nothing would stand in their way.

The clearer and more present danger is that the Queen would go to them. It’s a little known fact – I’m breaking a D-notice here, but with the 30-year-old cabinet papers due for release next year what’s the harm? – that in March of 1990, Her Majesty attended a poll tax riot in an unofficial capacity.

She had never got on with Margaret Thatcher, and her fierce commitment to social justice finally overwhelmed her. Artfully disguised in her Ken Dodd fancy dress costume, she ignored the advice of her equerries, and marched to Trafalgar Square wielding the cast iron tickling stick with which she proceeded to hospitalise at least seven coppers.

Although she was released uncharged that night on the grounds that she, like Judge Dredd, is the law, and therefore immune from prosecution, a stern warning about her future conduct has kept her on the straight and narrow ever since.

But who could believe that she’d stay on it in the anarchic aftermath of no deal? Suppose, for example, that gridlock at Calais robbed her of any Dubonnet to put in her gin. What spirited 92-year-old sovereign wouldn’t be incited by such a privation to mix it with the feds? And imagine the carnage, by the way, if she had to inveigle her husband to drive her to the mash-up.

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So don’t for a second smugly file away these headlines – however much they put you in mind of a classic inspired satirical rant from Jeremy Hardy, under the bulging header of laughably crude Downing Street scare tactics. This is deadly serious.

But where on Earth, to return to the original question, would you hide the most recognisable person on Earth? If the palace isn’t regarded as adequately secure, then Balmoral, Windsor Castle, Sandringham and all other royal abodes must be even less so.

Since no amount of conventional security will suffice, what’s needed is the last place in post-Brexit Britain where anyone would expect to find human life.

No one in the know, needless to say, is sharing. “If there were problems in London, clearly you would remove the family,” confides a certain Dai Davies, a former head of royal protection at the Yard. “Where and how they will evacuate them is top secret, and I can’t discuss it.”

Nor can I. You don’t build a bond of trust with The Firm, as I have painstakingly done over many years, to blow it in a moment of indiscretion that would put their very survival in doubt.