Out of here like Scomo

So Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have Scomo’d themselves out of the royal family? In case you’re wondering what Scomo’d means, the word Scomo (an abbreviation of Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s name) made the front page of the Urban

Dictionary in late December and means: A person in charge who leaves things to others when a difficult or emergency situation arises.

To give the word context, the Urban Dictionary offers the sentence: ‘‘Shit was going really tits up at work this week, so I Scomo’d out to a tropical island for some R&R and let someone else sort it out.’’

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex announced their quitting from The Firm on Instagram, saying they would still support the Queen, but were branching off to focus on a new charitable entity (while being deeply uncharitable to HRH and leaving her in the lurch).

Prince Andrew has just been put out to pasture for gross conduct unbecoming, and it is all hands to the pump for the royal family as questions are being asked about their relevancy.

It was only yesterday that Meg & Harry and Kate & Wills were being called the Fab Four, and now not only have Meg & Harry consciously uncoupled from that union, they have also broken with the mothership.

Like the closing photo frame of America’s Next Top Model, where a model leaves the show and fades from the lineup, the Queen, with clairvoyant accuracy, predicted her own family’s disappearance when she went on TV at Christmas time seated next to a table of family photographs, which didn’t feature Andrew, Harry or Meghan.

The duke and duchess have announced they mean to make their own money in the world, their pockets already lined – he with the millions inherited from his mother, and she with acting funds. It will be hard for the world to feel much sympathy for these rich young entitled people deserting their post leaving an elderly matriarch, who has already had a difficult year. Could they not wait till she abdicated, or died?

But Elizabeth has come back from worse. She is the original comeback kid, surviving frothing-at-the-mouth Princess Diana fans when they nearly wrenched the royal family from the palace after the death of the Queen of Hearts.

In the film The Queen, it was the then prime minister, Tony Blair, who went to the palace and gently advised HRH how to behave in front of the madding crowds. It would be hard to imagine Prime Minister Boris Johnson being allowed to step across the threshold to patronise the Queen and say: ‘‘To lose one senior royal may be regarded as a misfortune, but to lose two looks like carelessness.’’

And this family splintering doesn’t even follow hard on the heels of a difficult family Christmas lunch. Everybody else has to put up and suck up the machinations of family feuding at Yuletide, but H&M failed to even front that.

So there will be more jobs to do for the surviving crew. Perhaps the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s children will be ripped from school and sent out to press the flesh of the Commonwealth? The royal family are intellectual lightweights, and the Queen never had a formal education, so do the heirs need to bother? Princess Charlotte has bucket loads of charisma and would make a charming Infanta to send out to the colonies.

Harry and Meg might have new projects to spin, but who will want to give the latter-day Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson the time of day?