The National:

A TORY shadow minister has been relentlessly mocked after posting a “weird” picture preparing to listen to the King’s Christmas Day broadcast.

Charles III sparked controversy with the speech, broadcast from Windsor Castle, which saw him refer to the “hardship” facing unroyal households across the UK this winter.

But for Tom Giffard, a Welsh Tory who sits in the Senedd, Christmas apparently holds few more precious moments than a TV broadcast from the monarch.

“Merry Christmas everyone – we take watching the Kings Speech [sic] very seriously in the Giffard Household!” the MS and shadow culture minister wrote.

He shared an image of six people all wearing masks of members of the royal family. There was the late Prince Philip and the former Queen, Charles of course, Princes Harry and William, and the latter’s wife Kate.

“Nobody wanted to be Andrew then?” one Twitter user quipped in response to the photo.

“I'm guessing the photographer is the one in the Andrew mask?” another joked.

“But only the white ones obviously,” a third person wrote, marking Meghan’s conspicuous absence, while a fourth noted that including the late Elizabeth – who passed just months ago – may not have been in great taste.

“Cult-like levels of weird this mate,” reporter Thomas Wynne Lewis summed up.

Another added: “I don't care what side of the political spectrum you sit. This is batsh*t crazy.”