But beware: designs should ‘reflect modern Britain’.

Pictures depicting smiling (British) Britain haters or lesbian mothers with their NHS-supplied fatherless babies would be appropriate. Or maybe couples in minor stately homes, earning impressive salaries and collecting their New Labour welfare bribes.

Or maybe a piece of street art depicting drunken, vacant-eyed teenagers stepping over a couple copulating in a pool of vomit outside an all night bar.

How about heavy duty machinery ripping up English countryside to make way for affordable housing?

I recommend at least two spelling mistakes.

And a disproportionate number of non-whites (not sure how they’ll depict all the different cultures in a single-colour coin though. We’ll need a crowd scene if we’re to not leave out any particular cultural victim-in-waiting grouping).

Absolutely there’ll be no military scenes. Despite Iraq we’re not proud of our military past and should continue the project to reject it. And no writers or scientists unless they’re not white. (But not Salman Rushdie or anybody who has upset the Muslims.) Composers are a no-no unless they’re ‘relevent’ (hip-hop, boy band or The People’s Pop Star, Dame Elton John).

Maybe we should just cut to the chase and decorate our coinage with pictures of Emperor Blair. On both sides.

Rule Britannia, eh?