“In the news footage we see the Queen asking her simple, direct questions, looking firmly into each face and listening to the answers – nothing earth-shattering and yet something few politicians seem able nowadays to manage.”
But I don’t think the British people draw their curiously counterintuitive view of the Queen from novels or histories or even from the newspapers. We spun it ourselves, out of all those photographic images, stretching back almost a century. It starts very early on.
Meanwhile those youthful party dresses – be they ever so perfectly fitted – were always somewhat unconvincing. You can see her longing for middle age, even in her twenties: and then finally it comes, bringing theof tweed skirts, headscarves, helmet hair and those shiny black court shoes with the buckle that she has worn now almost without pause since the mid-Eighties. It is in this look that I believe the Mrs Windsor of our minds finds her fullest expression.
Of course amid all this cosiness there remains the awkward question of why a perfectly nice lower middle-class lady, with an admirable work ethic and strong sense of duty – who never forgets to match her hat to her dress – should yet receive millions of pounds from the public purse. Born of the lower orders myself – and no Royalist – I confess I can’t think of a rational answer to that one.
Before writing this, I undertook an unscientific mini survey: asking friends, relatives, my dentist, a few cabbies, for their first, gut response to the idea of the Queen. Not the political concept of the Queen, nor the state’s relation to the Queen, nor even the question of whether a Queen should exist – but the Queen herself as she appeared in their mental landscapes. I did not expect the answer I got, which was variations on what I would describe as a strange breed of pity.
I met her briefly once, in 2004. It was a palace luncheon for several hundred “women of achievement” and I was going to write here that “my mum made me go” – she certainly would have killed me if I hadn’t gone – but that is getting me far too easily off the hook. My Irish husband was scandalised I’d even consider it – but I wanted to go. I was curious.
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