An 'idiot' PM and the appeal of 'four-legged dictators'
Two new biographies offer revelations about the most enigmatic of monarchs
Last weekend, I got up extra early to watch the BBC coverage of the Remembrance Sunday ceremony in London via a subscription service on my laptop. This year, it fell on November 10, exactly five years to the day since we saw last Queen Elizabeth II at the full service at the Cenotaph. That event will always been remembered as the one at which the stoic monarch wiped away a tear at the solemn event. (The 2020 service was dramatically reduced in size due to pandemic precautions, while the Queen missed the 2021 version due to illness.)
We’d all gotten so used to seeing Elizabeth II at such significant events during the past decades that even though this was the third such ceremony of King Charles III’s reign, I was still surprised not to see the late Queen leading the royal family in laying wreaths at the Cenotaph.
And that reminiscence had me thinking of the revelations that have come out recently about the Queen and Boris Johnson. One of Britain's leading political writers, Tim Shipman, has a new book, Out, about Brexit and the undoing of the Tory party, which contains scathing sections about former PM Boris Johnson and his relationship with the Queen, other royals, and palace officials. In particular, Elizabeth II is shown to be as acerbic as she could be circumspect
In September 2022, Johnson and his successor, Liz Truss, flew to Balmoral Castle so Johnson could resign and the Queen could appoint Truss as PM. Around that time, Shipman writes, the Queen was enjoying the final days of her life with a gathering of relatives and treasured staff. When Boris Johnson’s name was mentioned, the Queen said mischievously, “Well at least I won’t have that idiot organizing my funeral now.”
The disquiet about Johnson extended beyond royal circles. “Can the Queen sack a PM?” one of his advisors asked after the PM persuaded the Queen to prorogue Parliament in 2019 in an effort to thwart anti-Brexit forces in Parliament. The way he acted has been called by “critics as the greatest act of constitutional vandalism since Charles I” and was the subject of a successful court challenge. (FYI: The answer is technically yes, the Queen can sack a PM.)
The reaction to those stories — the surprise that the Queen offered sardonic opinions of her outgoing PM and had a rather cheeky sense of humour — then had me thinking of the newest biography of Elizabeth II, Q: A Voyage Around the Queen by Craig Brown. (My review for Zoomer is here.)
“I wanted it to be as much on the Queen as her effect on the rest of the world and the way she inhabited people’s minds, the way people dreamt about her, the way they reacted to her funeral,” Brown told me in an interview in October. The result is a clever, perceptive look at the most famous, yet enigmatic woman in the world:
Perhaps she was less a painting, more a mirror. With her interior world screened from public view, and her conversation restricted by protocol to questions not answers, she became a human looking-glass: the light cast by fame bounced off her, and back on to those she faced. To the optimist, she seemed an optimist; to the pessimist, a pessimist. To the insider, she appeared intimate, to the outsider, distant; to the cynic, prosaic, and to the awestruck, charismatic.
What makes Q such a good biography is the way Brown weaves together vignettes and thoughts in a way so as to let readers draw their own conclusions about the monarch:
When Eddie Mirzoeff, the producer and director of the BBC’s documentary Elizabeth R, visited Sandringham in 1990, he found her bent over a 2,000-piece jigsaw puzzle.
‘That looks terribly difficult,’ he said.
‘It’s much more difficult than the one we did yesterday,’ came the reply. Jigsaws appeal to those who like to make order out of chaos. Corgis offer the reverse. They are jigsaw pieces gone haywire: jigsaw pieces with legs. In such a planned and regimented life, a life dictated by order, convention, duty and dignity, was it the randomness of her corgis that so appealed to the Queen? They offered her no respect, no awe, and only the barest shred of obedience. They were haphazard, aggressive, demanding and carefree. They barked when they should have kept quiet, ran about when they should have stayed still and snapped at whoever was to hand, regardless of status. They were four-legged dictators, drunken toddlers, hoodlums on the rampage. They knew nothing of deference or dignity. Yet their lack of a language, or at least an intelligible language, ensured their discretion: no Royal corgi ever published its memoirs or poured out its heart to Oprah Winfrey.
If there is one recurring theme of this unusual biography, it is how even the most powerful and famous people on earth would turn into quivering pieces of jelly in her presence, losing the ability to think or speak clearly.
At a Palace reception for the British music industry, the Queen had just finished exchanging a few words with the radio presenter Terry Wogan and the rock star Phil Collins. Possibly out of a sense of relief that his ordeal was over, Collins began whistling the theme tune from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The Queen heard it, and turned and smiled. ‘What was that?’ she asked. Collins was struck dumb, so Wogan attempted to help him out. ‘He was calling ET, ma’am,’ he replied (‘even as I said it wishing I’d kept my mouth shut’).
‘Ah,’ said the Queen, and moved on.
Collins turned to Wogan. ‘Why did I do that?’ he said. ‘What came over me?’
‘The Royal Effect,’ said Wogan. ‘You say the first thing that comes into your head, and you carry the memory of your foolishness with you to the grave.
My latest appearance on Global TV’s The Morning Show on November 11:
My latest article for Zoomer: ‘Cooking & the Crown’: Inside Tom Parker Bowles’ New Cookbook, Plus 4 Royal Recipes
“You may be surprised by the simplicity of many of the recipes,” explains Parker Bowles in his book. Indeed, his first breakfast option is the porridge that his mother, Queen Camilla, eats every day in winter along with a teaspoon of honey from royal beehives. “Food is the great leveler. I want to strip away the pomp and circumstance and get right to the meat of the matter – a collection of wonderful recipes that you really want to cook from over two centuries of regal eating.”