Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II’s long delayed emergence from lock down last month inevitably sparked questions as to where she had been and what she had been doing while the UK came to a standstill thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. That said, the subject of her first Royal visit since the start of the first lock down – Porton Down – has also raised questions. Just why was she visiting the UK’s centre for chemical and biological warfare? “That’s right, she visited a top secret government chemical and biological lab in Wiltshire. Of all the places she could have gone to for such an historic visit, why choose somewhere that the public can’t see her and media access is highly restricted?” anti-lock down protestor Hubert Hirken demands to know. “Well, I’ll tell you why! I have no doubt to be given the latest secret Covid treatment which is handed out only to the super-rich and Tory donors (usually the same thing), to ensure that they don’t perish during the pandemic!” Despite being dismissed as a crank, Hirken – who was recently arrested in Trafalgar Square during an anti-mask protest – is adamant that secret Covid treatments really exist and are being withheld from the public. “I know, because every conspiracy theorist and Trump supporter I encounter online tells me that it is true.,” he says. “The fact is that the lock down was a sham, designed to keep us proles locked away while the wealthy and privileged were able to do as they pleased while we couldn’t see them – pissing in public parks, vandalising monuments, writing obscene graffiti on walls, having sex in public places! Trust me, that’s what the Queen and her people were doing during lock down – whatever the Hell they liked, with utter impunity!”

Others, however, disagree vehemently with Hirken, calling his allegations ‘utter shite’ and insisting the Queen spent the lock down in her Covid-proof bunker under Windsor Castle. “The question, of course, remains as to exactly what she, Prince Philip and the rest of their entourage actually did down in that bunker for so many months,” says Martin Jock, Royal Correspondent of top tabloid The Shite. “One can’t help but have visions of some kind of geriatric version of the last days of Sodom, with Her Majesty sat on her throne in full regalia, presiding over wild bacchanalian orgies, with the nobility of England shagging each other on the banqueting tables without inhibition, in between the silver platters of roast swan.” Jock also claims to have heard rumours of fights-to-the-death being staged between various of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting, with big money bets being taken on the outcome. “But then again, maybe it all ended up like the last days of Hitler, with an increasingly deluded monarch barking orders into phones to armies and navies that no longer exist thanks to Tory defence spending cuts, when she wasn’t ranting at her assembled entourage,” he speculates. “The main difference, of course, between Windsor Castle 2020 and Berlin 1945 was that it didn’t all culminate with Her Majesty poisoning her corgis and Prince Philip before shooting herself and her body being burned outside by her guards.”

Such claims of rampant Royal lock down orgies ha e been met with disgust by other Royal commentators. “These allegations are most unseemly and, to be frank, utterly repugnant, not to mention disrespectful,” opines top Royal watcher Hugh Ropley-Tossington, author of the best-selling Muck House: Inside the Pleasure Palace. “The truth is undoubtedly far more mundane – she and Philip probably spent lock down catching up with the TV soaps.” While Her Majesty might well have wanted to spend this time watching her favourite soaps, with production suspended on them during the lock down, this might have required drastic action. “Bearing in mind that she’s the Queen, they probably shipped in the casts of the soaps to perform new episodes live for her,” says Jock. “That’s obviously what the likes of Danny Dyer were doing during the lock down TV production hiatus – Royal Command Performances at gunpoint.” Both the BBC and ITV have denied that any of the casts of their top soaps were sequestered in a bunker under Windsor Castle during lock down.

“Look, the logistical difficulties alone would have been insurmountable,” a BBC spokesperson has told The Sleaze. “You would have had to be putting up the sets for Emmerdale at seven thirty, then striking them in order to erect those for Eastenders before striking those sets in order to put up the ones for Coronation Street at eight! And those are just the interiors – God knows how anyone could have handled the exteriors!” Nevertheless, some commentators have speculated that if Her Majesty had demanded that the medical soaps such as Casualty and Holby City had been performed live, then all of the medical equipment they use as props might have proven extremely useful. “Her Majesty and Prince Philip aren’t getting any younger and this could have provided a back door way of the authorities setting up a secret hospital for them, without risking complaints of resources being diverted away from the NHS,” muses Jock. “After all, if either of them had been taken ill, then there is no way that they would have wanted to be taken to a regular hospital full of commoners coughing their last with Covid.”

The journalist has further speculated that when she finally did emerge from her lock down bunker, Her Majesty was doubtless surprised to find that her realm wasn’t now a grim wasteland populated only by bands of roaming zombies. “Allegedly, Prince Philip came out with a shotgun and let rip both barrels at some passing tramp he thought was one of the living dead,” he claims. “Apparently, they only briefed her on the situation and the death rates just before they left the bunker. Obviously, they’d kept her isolated down there – the fear being that if they didn’t insulate her from the horrors going on outside, then she might have a heart attack, or something.” Ropley-Tossington rejects the idea that the Queen emerged from lock down uninformed as to the truth about the pandemic. “While being locked up in that bunker did at least mean that the Queen was spared the ordeal of having to have personal audiences with the Prime Minister, she did hold them remotely on Zoom instead,” he explains. “Although, to be fair, she did probably put Boris Johnson on mute for the duration. Which must have been a blessed relief for her – nobody understands what the fat buffoon is gibbering about, anyway. Still, as we head through a second lock down, I say long live the Queen (and she doubtless will, thanks to the super secret anti-Covid serum she received at Porton Down).”