A statement from Mr and Mrs Giles Coren of Kentish Town:

After many months of reflection and internal discussions — shut up dear, I’m typing — we have chosen to make a transition this year in starting to carve out a progressive new role for ourselves. We intend to step back as “senior” members of the Coren Family and work to become financially independent, while continuing to fully support . . . yes, darling, I know that’s a split infinitive but that is how Prince Harry wrote it, because, like AN Wilson said on the Today programme, Harry is “as thick as a plank”. Possibly thicker. And he wasn’t talking about a nice new length of pine-smelling four-by-two, either. He was talking about a really dense old, splintery, paint-spattered scaffold board. Or possibly a railway sleeper.

So, where were we? Oh yes, stepping down from the Coren Family and working to become financially independent (although God knows what we’ll do for money — become knee surgeons? Florists? Cat-sitters?), while continuing to fully support Her Majesty, Mrs Coren Sr, my mother. Although we haven’t cleared this with her yet, as our advisers said it would be best to rush our statement out and get all the credit for being independent and modern and woke without having to share the glory with my hateful, old-fashioned, posh, racist, German, bald, ugly . . . sorry, dearly beloved family.

It is with your encouragement over the last few years that we feel prepared to make this adjustment. After all, you love us for who we are, regardless of family, don’t you? You don’t care who my dad was or that I’ve just lazily inherited his Times column and rolled in the lucrative proceeds like a pig in swill ever since. Or that my wife is just a glamorous airhead hanger-on. You’ll follow me wherever I go, won’t you? Like to The Guardian or Netflix or, I don’t know, Canada. And you’ll keep on paying my bills because I’m doing this for all the right, progressive, people-helping reasons and not just because I am a spoilt little public school twerp, fed up with living in the shadow of a much more famous sibling and their incredibly popular spouse.

Because this isn’t about them. It is about me and my modernity and independence. And my wife’s, ahem, projects. Like wearing clothes. And caring deeply about . . . everything. And our deep, abiding concern for the environment. To which end, we now plan to balance our time between the UK and North America — summer in the Hamptons, Christmas at Balmoral, surfing in California, shooting at Sandringham — zigzagging backwards and forwards randomly across the world as if Donald Trump himself were pressing the “fire” button, and nobody caring about our carbon footprint any more because we are no longer Corens. Or not senior Corens, anyway.

Until then, please accept our deepest thanks for your continued mockery. I mean, support.

Indeed, who wouldn’t want to withdraw from public life now, given the chance? Who wouldn’t want to drop out of pretty much everything? And who could possibly argue that Harry and Meghan have not caught the mood of the 2020s way ahead of everyone else?

Haven’t we all had enough of the last few years? Not just of our boring jobs and empty lives, the pressures of status and money and debt and health and family and all the things that have always made the Reginald Perrin option (clothes on the beach, fake drowning, new life elsewhere) seem so appealing, but of the increasingly public life that so many of us lead now, thanks to social media, camera surveillance, reality television . . .

None of us has any real privacy in 2020. Everyone has an opinion about everything we do. Why wouldn’t we go dark, disappear from our lives and resurface in a log cabin by a lake in Nova Scotia?

I actually did very much the digital equivalent of that myself at the beginning of the week, as I mentioned here on Tuesday, deactivating my Twitter account after a distasteful episode online brought followers of the left-wing activist Owen Jones to my front door. Not long afterwards, following a predictable online backlash against him over the distress caused to my wife and children (I wasn’t in), Jones himself (who was really not to blame for it at all) announced that he too was scaling down his relationship with Twitter, taking it off his phone, reducing his usage and asking his million followers to do the same because, “We could all be reading so many more books, spending time with people we love, doing something, anything else.”

And he’s quite right. Since withdrawing from Twitter, I have reclaimed some privacy, got far more reading done (of books by authors who had time to write them largely because they weren’t on Twitter), been much more present in my family’s life (no more saying “yes, yes, in a minute” to small children who are watching hardcore pornography and eating from the cat litter while I try to have the last word over corbynisgod1933 on whether I’m directly paid by Dominic Cummings or not) and completely lost any sense of what the world thinks of me. And thus ceased to care.

I have dropped out. As Jones dropped out. And as Lily Allen dropped out (of Twitter) in December with all her seven million followers, literally weeping as she went. And the American pop star Lizzo, last Sunday, saying elegantly, “Yeah I can’t do this Twitter shit no more . . . too many trolls . . .” And as Harry and Meghan are about to do. That’s what 2020 is going to be, I’m sure of it, the year when everyone just says f*** it, enough is enough, and drops the hell out.

But please, do tell your grandma first