Two weeks after our Prime Minister told us he will be attending the coronation of Charles III we still don’t know for sure if Prince Harry will show up. But I can reveal that until very recently the attendance of both senior Sussexes was a racing certainty. The tell-all memoir of her husband having failed to tell anyone anything they didn’t already know, Meghan saw that it was unlikely to generate much more revenue, and that to secure the entitlements of their progeny (the naming of one of whom for Harry’s grandmother seeming only – and inexplicably – to have angered Daily Mail readers) the initiation of some kind of royal rapprochement was a priority. Indeed, was a matter of such urgency that not even the indignity of finding themselves seated in row 17 next to the Prime Minister of Tuvalu under a plaque commemorating donkeys of the Somme should keep them away from Westminster Abbey. Nor, they had selflessly decided, should they be deterred by the fact that casting themselves in what may be the highest-rating costume drama in television history could compromise the privacy they have gone to such extraordinary geographical and contractual lengths to safeguard. But then, just as the Duchess started checking out Expedia flights and Berkshire Airbnb’s, word reached her Twitter feed that another international A-lister who’d previously accepted an invitation had now thought better of it. A woman, moreover, who, unlike Meghan, is both a favourite of the new King and also a bona fide Commonwealth subject, not to mention royalty herself. Australian royalty, to be precise. And no, I’m not talking about Princess Mary of Denmark; I’m talking about Queen Kylie of Melbourne. The diminutive disco diva has decided not to headline at the coronation concert, we are told, ‘after taking into account growing republican sentiment in her native Australia’. Until now, Kylie’s republican sympathies have been just shy of visible; the lyrics of her 2007 trip-hop flirtation ‘King or Queen’ being inaudible to anyone not on ecstasy, and the anodyne 2014 toe-tapper ‘Mr President’ assumed by pundits to have been merely her bid for a Best Marilyn Monroe Homage Grammy, the introduction of which category, coincidentally, was prompted by Elton John’s repurposing of ‘Candle in the Wind’ at the interment of Harry’s mum. But while that performance did even more to secure Elton’s knighthood than his services to the cut flower industry, Kylie’s coronation snub will ensure that she never gets ennobled. That is, she will never be a member of that most exclusive sorority of Australian chanteuses – Nellie Melba, Joan Sutherland and the much later but equally lamented Olivia Newton-John – who have been made Dames. But while the teenage Kylie might have thought she should be so lucky lucky lucky, the older one won’t lose any sleep over it. The bestowal and acceptance of any kind of honorific beyond ‘National Treasure’ has been problematic for all Australians since 2015, when Tony Abbott revived our own version of the knighthood and made the coffin-nail decision to give one to the Duke of Edinburgh, a man whose reputation for commenting on the physical characteristics of non-Caucasians was so well established before he even met Meghan that it would have been considered odd if, when told she was expecting her first child, the old man had not wondered audibly what kind of complexion it might have.

If any Australian deserves British establishment recognition for his or her contribution to Anglosphere happiness, it is Barry Humphries. I do not know if Mr Humphries has been invited to the coronation, but I do know that he already has a CBE, and, given his age, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if men with regimental ties are currently auditing his achievements with a view to an upgrade. It is entirely possible that the decision of the 2019 Melbourne Comedy Festival committee to remove his name from their top award after he described transgenderism as ‘a fashion’ will deny Barry Humphries the knighthood he so richly deserves. But it would be no more than poetic justice if, in King Charles’ determination to show what an inclusive monarch he intends to be, his first Birthday Honours List gives official recognition to the self-proclaimed damehood which has long been enjoyed by the most famous of Mr Humphries’ creations.