How much do you know about your grandmother’s life? When she was young, what did she have for breakfast? When she was 40, what did her friends think of her?
In Craig Brown’s new book, Voyage around the Queen, he points out Her Maj’s life has been so faithfully chronicled, that even anti-monarchists probably know more about the late Queen than their own grandparents. “Like it or not — like them or not— the royal family are under our skin”, Brown says. In this new book, published tomorrow, he puts the late Queen Elizabeth II’s life (for ease, I will follow Brown’s lead and refer to her as ‘the Queen’) into historical context, presenting a portrait of the monarch by exploring the recollections of those who orbited and encountered her, from the civilians to the politicians to the celebrities.
It also, oddly, has a section reporting people's dreams about the Queen. Ignoring that, and moving back to actual events, the tidbits are random and varied and cover the scope of her life and reign. Some of these stories are fabulous, from Margaret Thatcher being mocked in-house (in-palace) for the depth of her curtsey, to the Christmas present Prince Philip gave her in 1944.
Marilyn Monroe was so nervous at the prospect of meeting the Queen that she spent all day “curtseying all over the house and even trying to talk in an English accent”. When they did meet, “within a few seconds the Queen has moved on to the next in line”. The Queen reported later that she“ felt sorry for her, because she was so nervous that she had licked all her lipstick off”.
There is a mad, amazing tale about Elton John, Princess Anne and the Queen dancing together at “the world’s quietest disco”. And a bitchy retort from 1987, where Andy Warhol reportedly said, “Prince Andrew has gotten so ugly, he’s looking like his mother”.
Some tales are markedly less interesting, and Brown works hard to ascribe them relevance. As a child, he explains, even the way that the young princess Elizabeth ate sweets (methodically and daintily, apparently) illustrated how she was already “embarking on a lifetime's habit of delayed gratification”. Did it really? Was she… possibly… just a bit bland?
“I don’t know how to break this…”, remarked Paul McCartney after being presented to the Queen in 2002, “but she didn’t have a lot to say”. And this was from someone who admitted to having an enormous crush on her when he was in his teens, and she in her early 20s. “She was a babe… we used to say ‘just look at the heat on her’”.
But how else, Brown recognises, could she act in her position? Brown’s last Royal insider book Ma’am Diaries, about Princess Margaret, was a juicy account of her life, and we all gleefully lapped up the stories about her morning routine of cigarettes and breakfast in bed, before a 12.30pm vodka pick-me-up. This is more tame. But then, of course, the subject matter is not (and could not be) anywhere near as droll. It is clear, with the restraints upon what she can and can’t say, that the Queen simply “found it a little difficult to make conversation”, was “a sitting target for bores”, and had to rely upon the endless repetition of “how very interesting”.
Behind closed doors (though still observed), she minced her words somewhat less. When asked what she would have done if Idi Amin had turned up to her silver Jubilee celebrations, she nodded in the direction of the Lord Mayor's pearl sword and said “I’d have hit him hard over the head with it”. She suggested that President Trump “‘must have some sort of arrangement’ with his wife Melanie or else why would she have remained married to him? And when it came to the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, she referred to him as “a frightful little man”. When he and his wife were staying at Buckingham Palace, she spotted them while out walking the corgis and “disappeared behind a bush” until they’d safely passed by.
This is a portrait of a very odd life, and much is given to the normality vs not-normality. Did the Queen think that the whole world smelt like fresh paint, as everywhere was spruced up before her arrival? There is a very long and laboured point over several chapters with myriad examples that people's behaviour “goes into a different gear” in front of her, that people lose their minds and start spouting utter nonsense.
In one example, simply saying “you work here full time? Really?” to a hospital orderly resulted in everyone “falling about in merriment”. The actor Miriam Margolyes reports that the Queen once told her to “be quiet!”, with a “crisp emphasis on the final ‘t’, after Margolyes got slight verbal diarrhoea when meeting her and dared to chip into a conversation she was having with someone else.
No subject is off limits (we even find out what present Prince Philip gave her for Christmas back in 1944), and Brown hungrily recounts little details as though he’s been told all the stories himself. He reports that her childhood friend Alathea Fitzsalan Howard said “Annabelle thinks Lilibet has an enormous chest!”; this slightly ‘Ripley-esque’ character also asks “Will she stand out in history as another great Elizabeth or will she merely be a commonplace puppet in a rapidly degenerating monarchy?”.
Indeed, the Queen was not confident in the monarchy’s longevity. ‘The thing you must realise about the Royal Family is that they live in a constant state of fear,’ a source told Brown. Prince Harry described it in Spare as being defined by paranoia “Fear of the public. Fear of the future. Fear of the day the nation would say: OK shut it down”.
Inevitably, as the years of her long life went by, the country’s royalist support diluted. We hear that when two youths in Fleet St refused to observe the two minute silence after the King’s death were “nearly lynched”. Yet years later when reporting how a bunch of north London school children reacted to being asked about the Queen, at the time of her jubilee, they replied “she’s never done a day's work in her life”. Her accent diluted over time, too. In 1953 “had” rhymes with “bed”. Thirty years later it rhymes with “bad “. In 1954 she wished people a “heppy” new year, in 1980 it rhymed with “nappy”.
Brown is as sharp and dryly funny as his subject, and seemingly less sycophantic and genuflective than the majority of Royal biographers. While I wasn’t blown away by the exciting revelations, I was certainly amused by them. This is the Queen within the historical and sociological context of the past hundred years – with some added nuggets drip-fed throughout.
I probably could have done with fewer chapters about corgis, but by persevering, I do now know that Princess Anne has a criminal record because of one of these vicious-sounding ankle-biters. I like knowing that the Queen’s weekly £5 (only £5!) donation to the church collection was folded and pressed flat with an iron.
This collection of recollections, as it were, is fun, fizzy and told in Brown’s inimitable insidery, gossipy style. They are shared without judgement, and I think it’s a useful book, certainly very readable, though it does at times go on a bit.
Would a non-royalist want to read it? Probably not. But there are still plenty of us who will.
