Is spare part surgery keeping the Queen and Prince Philip alive? This is the astounding claim being made by top Royal-watcher Roger Todgingly. “How else do you think they keep going,” the journalist, who has reported on the Royal family for a number of newspapers including the Daily Excess and The Shite, told US tabloid the Weekly World Shopper. “I mean, just look at Prince Philip – he’s clearly decrepit, you expect something to fall off every time he moves, yet he just keeps on dodging that coffin!” According to the fifty nine year old, the Queen and her consort’s longevity is down to a series of organ transplants, carried out in complete secrecy by a crack team of surgeons based in a secret operating theatre located deep underneath Buckingham Palace. “Whenever one of them vanishes from public view for a few days – supposedly because of ‘illness’ – they are actually having ‘running repairs’ done,” he told the US tabloid – available at supermarkets throughout Kansas and North Carolina – in article entitled ‘Long Live the Queen’. “Something has failed or worn out and they are being fitted with replacements. Obviously, they don’t want the world to know what’s going on, so they just tell the press that the Queen has a ‘cold’ or that Prince Philip has a ‘bladder infection’ – a whole new urinary system, more like!”

In order to facilitate this, apparently increasingly frequent, surgery, the surgical team has a huge refrigerated vault, stocked with spare parts, Todgingly claims. “Clearly, they can’t use just any spare body parts for the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh,” he says in the tabloid article. “They have to be carefully matched – quite apart from the risk of rejection, there’s the question of breeding and social class. You can’t have the Royal flesh and blood ‘diluted’ by the organs and other bits of the lower orders – it would completely the notion of the Monarchy being a hereditary position!” He revealed that, in the early days of the programme, there had been fears that the use of ‘inferior stock’ could also result in behavioural problems for the Royals, particularly after the duke of Edinburgh took to wearing a string vest, drinking pints of lager and farting at the dinner table after receiving a kidney suspected to have come from a retired bus driver. “It had been used in an emergency, when they has to use whatever was to hand,” Todgingly explained. “After that, it was decided that the provenance of all the items used had to be clearly established and, preferably, should show that, no matter how distantly, they should be of the Royal bloodline.” Consequently, the writer claims, they surgical team focused on, quite literally, stripping other members of the Royal family for spares.

“They started with Princess Margaret,” alleges Todgingly. “When she turned up her toes in 2002 they harvested everything – any organs she hadn’t pickled with her drinking, bones, corneas, hair, skin, the lot! Believe me – there wasn’t enough of her left to go in her coffin! They filled it with her empty gin bottles to give it some weight before it went to the crematorium!” The ‘spares’ salvaged from her sister kept the Queen going for several years, the reporter has claimed, but as stocks have run low, alternatives have had to be sourced. “They’d also salvaged quite a bit from the Queen Mother, who died a few weeks after Princess Margaret,” he told the tabloid. “Incredible as it might seem, even a 102 year old woman could yield a surprising amount of viable material – and not just her artificial hips.” Todgingly claims that the Queen Mother herself had been kept going with spare parts – mainly harvested from Princess Diana, following her death in a road accident. “She was effectively used as a prototype for this kind of surgery,” he explained. “Forget all those wild conspiracy theories about the Queen Mother having transfusions of crocodile blood, being injected with monkey gland extracts or drinking bull’s semen in order to extend her life. The reality was that she had the Princess of Wales’ heart, lungs and kidneys.”

Obtaining spares for Prince Philip has been less straightforward, with the surgical team forced to rely upon obscure members of the Greek Royal family as they died. “Obviously, they are now planning for the future,” says the journalist. “Why else do you think that the younger Royals are breeding like rabbits? An endless supply of spare parts genetically matched to the Queen and Prince Philip.” But just why are the monarch and her consort so determined to extend their lifespans? According to Todgingly it all comes down to the matter of the succession to the throne. “The fact is that they are both very disappointed with Prince Charles, the heir apparent,” he told the Weekly World Shopper. “They think he’s a complete crank, totally unsuited to be King. They’ve decided that the only way to prevent his ascension to the throne is to outlive him. And his sons, if necessary, as they have doubts about them as well.”

For his part, Prince Charles is apparently well aware of his parents’ longevity plot and has determined to counter it with his own plan to extend his life. “Clearly, he can’t use the surgical method – his parents have cornered the market in Royal spare parts, for one thing,” Todgingly revealed to the tabloid. “Moreover, with his predilection for alternative medicine, it might be seen as hypocritical for him to rely on conventional surgery.” Instead, the Prince – a keen gardener – is thought to be looking to the vegetable kingdom for inspiration. “Many plants have extraordinarily long lifespans – just look at those giant redwoods in the US, they’re hundreds of years old,” opines Todgingly. “So he’s been experimenting with injections of a serum derived from tree sap in an attempt to win this longevity contest with his parents.” Unfortunately, the tree sap experiments appear to have had some serious side effects. “It’s no so much the tree-like stiffness it induces which is worrying his aides – that can pass for normal in his case,” claimed Todgingly. “But rather it is the fact that he keeps burying himself up to his ankles in soil and standing stock still for hours on end. They fear that he’s going to take root.”