How much do you know about your grandmother’s life? What did she eat for breakfast as a young woman? What did her friends think of her at 40? In Craig Brown’s new book, Voyage around the Queen, he points out that Her Majesty’s life has been so meticulously documented that even opponents of the monarchy probably know more about the late queen than their own grandparents. “Whether we like it or not – whether we like them or not – the royal family gets under our skin,” says Brown.
In his new book, out this week, he puts Elizabeth II’s life into historical context, painting a portrait of the monarch by exploring the memories of those who were close to her and met her – from civilians to politicians to celebrities. Oddly, the book also includes a section recounting people’s dreams about the Queen. If you strip that away and go back to actual events, the anecdotes are random and varied, covering her entire life and reign. Some of these stories are fabulous, from Margaret Thatcher being mocked in the palace for her deep curtsy 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 the whole day “curtsying all over the house and even trying to speak with an English accent.” Then, when they actually met, “within a few seconds the Queen had moved on to the next person in line.” The Queen later reported that she “felt sorry for her because she had licked all the lipstick off in her nervousness.”
There’s a crazy, unbelievable story about Elton John, Princess Anne and the Queen dancing together at the “quietest disco in the world.” And a scathing 1987 retort in which Andy Warhol reportedly said, “Prince Andrew has become so ugly, he looks like his mother.” Some stories are less significantly less interesting, and Brown goes to great lengths to ascribe relevance to them. As a child, he explains, even the way the young Princess Elizabeth ate candy (apparently methodically and daintily) showed how she was already “developing a lifelong habit of delayed gratification.” Was she really? Was she… maybe… just a bit boring? “I don’t know how to end this…” Paul McCartney remarked after being introduced to the Queen in 2002, “but she didn’t have much to say.” And that was coming from someone who admitted to having had a major crush on her as a teenager and her in her early twenties. “She was a baby… we always said, ‘Look at how hot she is.'” But how else should she have behaved in her position, Brown realizes?
Brown’s last royal insider book, Ma’am Diaries, about Princess Margaret, was a juicy account of her life, and we all gleefully lap up the tales of her morning routine of cigarettes and breakfast in bed before a vodka pick-me-up at 12.30pm. This one is tamer. But of course the subject matter is not (and could not) be nearly as droll. It’s clear that the Queen simply found it “a little difficult to make conversation” given the restrictions on what she could and could not say, was “an easy target for bores” and relied on the endless repetition of “how very interesting”.
Behind closed doors (albeit under observation), she was a little less forthcoming. Asked what she would have done if Idi Amin had turned up at her silver jubilee celebrations, she nodded toward the Lord Mayor’s mother-of-pearl sword and said, “I would have hit him on the head with it.” She suggested that President Trump “must have ‘some kind of arrangement’ with his wife Melania, otherwise I don’t think she would have stayed married to him.” And she called Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu “a horrible little man.” When he and his wife were staying at Buckingham Palace, she spotted them walking their corgis and “disappeared behind a bush” until they were safely past.
This is a portrait of a very strange life, and a lot of attention is paid to normality vs. non-normality. Did the Queen think the whole world smelled of fresh paint because everything had been spruced up before her arrival? There is a very long and tedious point, spanning several chapters, with countless examples of how, in her eyes, people’s behavior “goes into a different gear,” people lose their minds and start talking utter nonsense. In one example, simply asking a male nurse, “You work here full-time? Really?” caused everyone to “flutter around with mirth.” Actress Miriam Margolyes reports that the Queen once told her to “be quiet!” with “a sharp emphasis on the last ‘t’,” after Margolyes had developed mild verbal diarrhea upon meeting her and dared to interrupt a conversation she was having with someone else.
No subject is off-limits, and Brown eagerly recounts small details as if he had been told all the stories himself. He reports that her childhood friend Alathea Fitzsalan Howard said, “Annabelle thinks Lilibet has enormous breasts!”; this slightly “Ripley-esque” character also asks, “Will she go down in history as another great Elizabeth, or will she be just an ordinary puppet in a rapidly degenerating monarchy?” In fact, the Queen was not convinced of the longevity of the monarchy. “The thing to be clear about the royal family is that they live in a constant state of fear,” a source told Brown. Prince Harry described them in Spare as being riddled with paranoia: “Fear of the public. Fear of the future. Fear of the day when the nation would say, OK, shut down.” Over the course of their long lives, royalist support in the country inevitably waned. We hear that two teenagers in Fleet Street were “almost lynched” for refusing to observe the two-minute silence after the Queen’s death. Yet years later, when a group of North London schoolchildren were reported to have reacted when asked about the Queen on her Jubilee, they replied: “She never worked a day in her life.”
Her accent, too, has weakened over time. In 1953, “had” rhymed 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 witty as his subject, and seems less obsequious and grovelling than the majority of royal biographers. While the titillating revelations didn’t blow me away, they certainly amused me. This is the Queen in the historical and sociological context of the last hundred years—with a few extra gems sprinkled in drop by drop. I probably could have gotten by with fewer chapters on corgis, but thanks to my persistence, I now know that Princess Anne has a criminal record for one of those vicious-sounding ankle-biters. I think it’s nice to know that the Queen’s weekly donation of £5 (only £5!) to the church collection was folded and flattened with an iron.
This collection of memories is entertaining, snappy and told in Brown’s inimitable insider and gossip style. They are relayed without bias and I think it is a useful book, certainly well worth reading even if it drags a little at times. Would a non-royalist want to read it? Probably not. But there are still plenty of us who will. Harriet Addison is features director at the Evening Standard