In the dim, hushed Egyptian Halls, an automated woman – already immortal – plucks a mechanical harp in a silver barge like Cleopatra’s, and a sarcophagus lid installed beneath the escalator seals in the periwigged ceramic poodles and miniature Eiffel Towers with which Al Fayed presumably intends to enjoy himself in the after-life.”It must not be allowed to die,” Al Fayed orotundly said of Punch, and by his decree it will live for ever in his nether kingdom. Definitely no conferees with plastic badges!” I wondered silently whether this was the wrong address for a satirical magazine.Punch has become a product, a touristic trophy of Al Fayed’s imaginary Little England, like Staffordshire dogs or Devonshire clotted cream. It has also been subsumed into his personal quest for immortality. He likes to refer to Harrods as “my pyramids”, and (since he would hardly have bought Punch if he had a sense of humour) he is not joking The shop is his megalomaniac tomb, a retailer’s necropolis. We can do things with it, product-wise.” The editorial offices look out on a warehouse in Trevor Square, due for reincarnation as the Harrods House Hotel “Very exclusive,” Coles predicted “A home from home for the super-rich Strictly limousine trade. “It’s the intellectual property value of the name which attracted us,” his publicist, Michael Coles, told me “Punch is a brand name, like the Ritz or Harrods.

The Punch offices, complete with the lunch table and its royal graffiti (the Duke of Edinburgh learnedly carved a Greek phi, and Prince Charles adorned his C with a crest of moulting feathers), have been uprooted from Fleet Street and deposited in Knightsbridge, next door to Harrods Estates with its window display of bijou rezzes For Al Fayed, Punch is real estate by other means. Mohamed Al Fayed gained control of Harrods in 1985; he also owns the royal shirtmakers, Turnbull & Asser; holds the lease of the Parisian villa where the Duke and Duchess of Windsor lived; and sponsors a horse show frequented by the Queen. Punch is the latest side-show in his glossy, spruced-up national theme park. It resumes publication next month, edited by Peter Mackay, perhaps the most notorious of all Fleet Street hacks, the saloon-bar tribune, gossip-scavenger and fact- refiner rebaptised McLie and McHackey by Private Eye, which solemnly subtitles him “the world’s worst columnist”.This is where the collision occurs – of personalities, values and agendas.

Here too there were belated attempts to modernise, though the fabric remained tatty, the staff fractious. But then a benefactor appeared, who bought the country’s shabby-genteel relics – first a castle in Scotland with mountains and ospreys attached, then a so-called palace in Knightsbridge (actually a department store) – and turned them into opulent facsimiles of their former selves. In a cartoon, Mr Punch – once an ogre, now an angel – wafted to heaven on a puffy cloud.The second story is a parallel one. It narrates the decline of Great Britain, whose doughty, quirky spirit Mr Punch supposedly personified. A cover in 1960 put him on skis, and in 1971 Punch parodied Playboy, more in envy than in anger. The magazine catered to a beefy, beery notion of Britishness which no longer existed. In 1992, during another election campaign, its owners closed it down.

The editor consoled himself by prophesying (wrongly) that the Conservative government would share its fate. Britain lost its pre-eminence, while Mr Punch, now a grumpy, grizzled elder, made ghoulish efforts to look modern. In the 1940s, joking was suspended while the Punch Comfort Fund appealed for donations of food and clothing for our fighting men. At the coronation in 1953, Mr Punch forgot that he was an adversary and turned to patriotic cheerleading: the magazine puffed the “natural and inherited genius of the British people” and their “pre-eminence in all walks of life”.
That cocky supremacy did not last long. But the magazine’s initial editorial concluded with an assault on capital punishment: satiric mockery was a more effective remedy for abuses than execution Radicals, however, soon age. Mr Punch became smug and portly, a member of the Establishment he once bludgeoned.

Surviving into the 20th century, he found reality to be no longer a laughing matter. Wan, stoical cartoons in the 1930s showed the bourgeoisie struggling to do household chores without servants. Here are two separate stories, serenely travelling towards the point where they intersect, or collide. In 1841, during an election in which the Whigs were ousted by the Conservatives, Punch published its first issue. On the north-facing wall I have also planted a “New Dawn”, which has a much stiffer habit than I like, but it is so dependable, with its shell-pink flowers, that it had to earn a place somewhere.Below the house, the south-facing sheds to the left of the path that goes down the side of the summer garden are prime sites for climbers. Their scale is small and I have never had quite enough room for everything I want to grow.