Will David Cameron, should he form a Conservative government after the next election, give the Queen a pay rise? The Civil List, which covers around a third of royal expenditure, is up for renegotiation at the end of next year — at which point it will, once again, be fixed for the following decade. For the past 20 years, this sum has been set at £7.9 million a year. But the Palace has been dipping into its cash reserves: it siphoned off £6 million to meet a shortfall last year. That’s the sort of gulf between income and expenditure that would make Mr Micawber grow faint.

Yet if the Queen is to balance her books from 2011, it is estimated that the Civil List will have to swell to nearly £20 million a year until 2021. Of all the minefields Mr Cameron expected to have to negotiate if he took office, this one probably caused him the fewest worries. But it is one that has the potential to detonate the most spectacularly. At a time when the national political and economic debate is between cuts and investment, an incoming Cameron administration will face a dilemma: one of prudence versus privilege.

When those who voted for him are facing a life of pay cuts and punier pensions, would a Conservative government have the stomach to sign a much fatter cheque to the Queen and risk accusations that you need only to scratch the modernising veneer to reveal the traditional Tory party beneath? Or will it ask the Queen to tighten her belt like everyone else? Or perhaps something in between, whereby the new government looks kindly on some increase, and the monarch agrees to economise a little — a Queen who, rather than running about shrieking: “Off with their heads”, pursues a goal of “Off with our overheads”?