How comforting it is that amongst the seething political uncertainty of the first weeks of 2019, the wisest words so far of the entire Great British Brexit should come from a 92-year-old woman at a Women’s Institute meeting in north-west Norfolk.

The Queen’s address to their centenary meeting on 24 January means that the Sandringham WI will henceforth have its place in any future biography of Elizabeth II or any forthcoming account of the European Question that has so wracked her kingdom over all the decades of her reign.

As the Brexit discord played out noisily across the land, the Queen painted a calm portrait of her country as perhaps she had imagined it in the past, and still wished it to be: “As we look for new answers in the modern age, I for one prefer the tried and tested recipes, like speaking well of each other and respecting different points of view; coming together to seek out the common ground; and never losing sight of the bigger picture. To me these approaches are timeless and I commend them to everybody.”
The Sandringham address was very carefully crafted and constitutionally impeccable.