Last week the Queen of England very kindly agreed to break off from her waving duties and lend a hand with a television programme I’m making about the Victoria Cross.

And so on Wednesday I slipped into a whistle and went to Buckingham Palace to see some prototype medals she’d found in a cupboard. Sadly, I never met my new researcher but I did have a snout around the state rooms, which provided a rare insight into the life of the royals.

First of all, I’ve never really understood why the richest and most powerful of the world’s royal families has to live behind a Coronation Street, working-class veil of net curtains. There are no nets at Versailles, for instance. But it turns out they are weighted at the bottom and designed to catch flying glass should someone set off a bomb.

That’s something you and I don’t have to worry about, and nor do we have to share our house with 500 staff, most of whom, it seems, will one day take the tabloid shilling and spill the beans on your toiletry habits.

Then there’s the bothersome business of guests. Last week the new president of Albania was scheduled to make a 20-minute visit. Imagine what that must be like. Going to meet him off the Eurostar and trying not to look surprised when he emerges, not from the carriage, but from a hidey-hole underneath the bogies.

Then she’s got the weekly visits from His Tonyness. They probably weren’t so bad when he was a new boy but now it must be awfully wearing to have to call him sir and kiss his shoes all the time.

Mind you, he’s nothing compared with the ordinary people. Pretty well every day a bunch of hand-wringing do-gooders goes to the palace for an official function of some kind, and every single one of them, no matter how worthy they are, will feel an almost uncontrollable urge to nick something.

I did. Over the years I have been to hundreds of houses and have never once felt the need to pocket a teaspoon or an inkwell. But over a cup of tea in the palace’s music room, I was overcome with a Herculean bout of kleptomania. I had my eye on the harpsichord but anything would have done. A cup. A saucer. A milk jug, even.

Staff, I’m told, keep a watchful eye on visitors but what do you say when you see a leading Rotarian shove a royal teapot in his pocket? How on earth do you ask for it back, diplomatically? I mean, he’s going to know that you know that it didn’t get in his trousers by accident.

And what’s more, when Denise Van Outen boasted that she’d nicked an ashtray while on a trip to the palace Mrs Queen couldn’t very well prosecute. It would seem mean, somehow. The same goes for the old biddies who pick flowers while at the garden parties. Even Prince Philip has never been heard to yell: “Oy, Ethel! Leave that orchid alone.”

Gravel, apparently, is what most people steal. Handfuls of it. Although my biggest problem with the loose shale that covers the courtyard was resisting the urge to do a handbrake turn on it.

The worst thing, though, about living in the palace is the decor. The Queen is the only person alive who watched that Michael Jackson shopping trip to Las Vegas and thought: “I’ve got one of those vases.”

The whole thing is a symphony of gloomy portraits of unsmiling ancestors with splashes of pure ostentation and gilt. In the main corridor pink and gold Eltonesque sofas clash violently with the bright red carpets.

It’s a Neverland kind of Derry Irvine hell and, unlike anyone else, the Queen can’t watch an episode of Homefront and think: “Right. I’ll knock through here, fit a natural wood floor, some Moroccan-style scatter cushions and top it all off with a bit of rag-rolling on the ceiling.” She’s stuck with it.

She’s stuck with her job, too, endlessly waving and asking people to hand over the teapot. Of course, theoretically, she still has the power to start a war, though His Tonyness is capable of doing that on his own these days, and she can still dissolve parliament.

This brings me on to my biggest point. Imagine having the power to send that braying bunch of n’er-do-wells from the Palace of Westminster home, and not doing it.

Not even for a bit of fun, during a party. Whatever you may think of the Queen she has willpower, that’s for sure.

You may argue that the pain of being a queen is eased by her vast fortune. This may be true. But what can the poor dear spend it on? A speedboat? A Lamborghini? She’s not Victoria Beckham, you know.

Some say she should be replaced with a president. But who, at a cost to the nation of just 82p per person per year, is going to live in what amounts to Liberace’s wardrobe, and spend their days making small talk with stuttering and sweaty two-bit Third World politicians whose entourage is hell-bent on nicking the carpet? You’d need to be mad to volunteer for all this. But then presidents usually are.