Harold Nicolson famously wrote that the Queen became Queen in 1952 “while perched in a tree in Africa watching the rhinoceros come down to the pool to drink”. She was wearing jeans. For much of the succeeding 70 years, she has been the one for whom royal safarists will wait patiently for a short glimpse, which they got on Thursday when she came on to the Buckingham Palace balcony dressed like a particularly fragile Wedgwood vase.
The thing about royal pageantry is that even committed ironists wilt in the face of it. Mark Twain covered Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee, sent over to do the job for American readers by William Randolph Hearst, and only managed a single, final sentence of wryness after several thousand awestruck words. “One can enjoy a rainbow,” Twain reflected, “without necessarily forgetting the forces that made it.”
