Here's the latest entry in the diary of Rupert St John-Fontaine, adviser at the Department of Social Affairs...

TO explain how I became an adviser to both the UK Government and the Scottish Government I must tell you something of my lineage.

My name – Rupert St John Fontaine – originated with the great French Stanquentin lineage whose antecedents served as cooks and flag-bearers for William the Conqueror. One of them, known as Antoinette le Fluffeur, had a liaison with a dissolute nobleman, Le Comte Gerard Potdevin who served in the English court of King William as his official wine taster. Gerard succumbed to a toxic combination of over-ripe Burgundy; syphilis and swine fever.

But not before Antoinette had borne five children. Anne was reputed to be a woman of great beauty and possessed of a sharp mind. She used both of these to great effect as she insinuated herself into the Conqueror’s inner circle of court ladies and began to gather some small-holdings from the vitiated aristocratic wastrels who, mesmerised by her looks and flummoxed by her business acumen would often give her little parcels of land as keep-sakes of their intense but short-lived encounters.

In time, she built up a substantial land portfolio in Nottinghamshire. She managed to work around the property laws of the time which forbade women from owning land by creating a male alter-ego called Rupert le Flanneur and took several female lovers whom she swore to secrecy about her sex.

Occasionally, she would be threatened with sexual blackmail but those who attempted this tended to expire very suddenly.

Antoinette was an expert herbalist and she used this to grand effect to remove anyone who threatened to reveal her true indentity.

Eventually, Antoinette found it much more convenient to live as a chap. Her bed-chamber, so it is reputed, was occasionally visited by the Conqueror, a man with a voracious sexual appetite who was reported to play for both teams within the course of the same game, or as the French would have it, un jouer de chaque equipe.

The House of Stanquentin, via several beneficial marriages, became part of the mighty Bolingbroke family and enjoyed great wealth and power until the Jacobite uprising in 1715 when Henry St John, the first Viscount Bolingbroke backed the cause of The Pretender and had to flee to France before being permitted to return to England by virtue of some old-fashioned diplomatic skulduggery and several large bribes.

It’s from this branch of the family that I’m indirectly descended, although by the time I came along most of the money and land we once possessed was squandered on gambling, sexual promiscuity and the drink by debauched males of the line.

Luckily for me, my great grandmama married a resolute and upright German Lutheran minister called Franz Eintracht from Frankfurt who, by virtue of several judicious and cautious investments was able to build a modest scholarship fund for any of his descendants who showed an aptitude for the arts and humanities. It was this that enabled me to attend Eton and complete my studies at Oxford.

I’m named in honour of my glorious ancestor, Antoinette/Rupert. My middle name is from the Viscount Bolingbroke and I became a Fontaine after my grandmama took a third husband, a French casino-owner whom she wed to pay off her second husband’s gambling debts. He was much older than my dear grandmama but he died not long after what she described as “a vigorous honeymoon” and she was left one of his restaurants on the Adriatic coast along with a couple of audacious daubs by a lesser impressionist which realised a sum tidy enough for her to see out her days in a degree of relative comfort.

The rest, I suppose, is history. I fell in with a group of dull but well-connected young Tories and became an adviser in Theresa May’s government.

Eventually, having managed to extricate Boris Johnson from a few of his extra-marital cantrips, I became senior adviser in the Department of Social Affairs before being dispatched to Scotland to undertake undercover work spying on the progress of the Nationalist cause.

But having witnessed the corruption at the heart of the Johnson regime and stumbled upon the secret Satanic temple that exists at the heart of Whitehall I secretly converted to the Nationalist cause and became a devotee of Nicola Sturgeon.

And now, it seems, I must return to Westminster. The First Minister has just sent me an encrypted voice-mail. “Rupert, I want you to return to your old job in Downing Street. But you’ll report back to me all that you see and hear. We have reason to believe that Boris Johnson and the Joint Chiefs are making plans to occupy Scotland if we achieve independence.

“It goes without saying that, should you be caught or killed, I’ll disavow any knowledge of your actions. This message will self-destruct in ten seconds. Good luck, Rupert.”