Difficulty sharing a signer

[cloudhead]

In the code snipper below, I need to use a signer for two purposes: either to sign an off-chain payload, or to sign an on-chain transaction.

The current API makes that difficult (impossible?) as far as I know, without creating two Contract instances. The things I tried are:

1. Cloning the signer (Ledger is not clonable)
2. Calling contract.signer() or middleware.signer() etc. (no such method)
3. Keeping a single Contract, and then using something like contract.connect(signer) when the signer needs to be used with the contract. (doesn't work)

I think either of the above could be a solution, otherwise being able to use a signer by reference would be another possibility. What I really expected to work which didn't was (3).

async fn anchor<P: 'static + JsonRpcClient + Clone, S: 'static + Signer>(
    opts: Options,
    provider: Provider<P>,
    signer: S,
) -> anyhow::Result<()> {
    let abi: Abi = serde_json::from_str(ORG_ABI)?;

    // Read-only contract
    let contract = Contract::new(opts.org, abi.clone(), provider.clone());
    let org_owner: Address = contract.method("owner", ())?.call().await?;

    let safe = ...;
    let id = ...;
    let tag = ...;
    let hash = ...;

    if let Some(safe) = safe {
        let call = contract.method::<_, ()>("anchor", (id, tag, hash))?;
        let data = call.calldata().unwrap();

        // Signer is required here to produce a signature payload.
        anchor_safe(opts.org, data, &safe, &signer).await
    } else {
        // We have to re-create the contract here with a signer instead of
        // provider, to submit a transaction :(
        let signer = SignerMiddleware::new(provider, signer);
        let contract = Contract::new(opts.org, abi, signer);
        let call = contract.method::<_, ()>("anchor", (id, tag, hash))?;

        anchor_eoa(call).await
    }
}