Caitlin Moran: queen for a day

After an hour of hard thought, I finally decided that I must have become queen by the laws of Quantum Leap, in which the mind and soul of Dr Sam Beckett (Scott Bakula) leapt weekly into the body of someone in history, someone who needed help at a crisis point in their life.

I had become queen, I reasoned, because Her Majesty must also be at a secret crisis point – a crisis point only fixable by me temporarily entering her body, in a purely spiritual sense, and helping her “go” on a “journey”, like, from out of everything, ever.

Despite Harry’s “Boom” Obama stunt, right now, the British monarchy needs me to bring some unique Catmo to the royal table. And who am I to argue against the ineffable laws of sci-fi plots?

Actually, I can tell you who am I. I am the queen. And here are the six things I will do.

1 Increase the facts known about the queen. We know very little about the real Queen. Indeed, I can put the sum total of the things we know here: a) “Lilibet”; b) “Crawfie”; c) Corgis; d) Horses; e) Tupperware; f) EastEnders; g) Gin; h) It was perfectly normal not to see your children for six months at a time in the Fifties; i) Everywhere she goes smells of fresh paint. And, apparently, she’s “very funny”, although no hot gag she’s ever said appears in any Google searches under “classic quotes”. Here’s the nearest she comes to a zinger: “I myself prefer my New Zealand eggs for breakfast,” which is only funny because I am imagining her sitting at the table with a huge emu egg in a cup. All the other quotes are about Christmas, duty or science. Non-LOL. Non-revelatory.

To counterbalance this paucity of information, as queen I would try to put out a minimum of THREE new facts about myself every week. Just fun stuff like, “The queen’s favourite rabbit from Watership Down is Bigwig,” or, “The queen has 154 bras.” The world has become chattier, and more over-sharey, in the past 50 years; it’s time the Queen jumped aboard the TMI wagon and said more random stuff that comes into her head. At least, that’s why I presume I’ve jumped inside her body. That’s my key skill. That’s all I can bring to the queen table. Except …

2 State banquets. Time for a massive overhaul here. When it comes down to it, there’s not that much you have to do as queen, really. It basically divides up between: a) Going to open a new orthotics centre in Kidderminster and saying, “I believe we shall have fog later,” to 200 people, in turn, who are standing in a nervous line; b) Holding state banquets. As someone who will watch almost anything on television so long as it’s not rugby or Julia Bradbury, I’ve seen many, many documentaries over the years about the preparation involved in a state banquet, and I know it is a hefty task. Menus are planned months in advance, showcasing the best of British produce but also acknowledging the culinary traditions of the guest of honour (nb, when it’s the Icelandic prime minister, they absolutely ignore this and substitute “puffin jerky” with “just sausages”). Measuring tapes are used to make sure the plates are a precise distance apart; flower arrangements must be exactly the right height, so eye contact can be maintained between nations. Crisp white napkins, eight crystal glasses per guest, gold gilt chairs, chandeliers, candelabra, dozens of footmen and the kind of event choreography that makes the opening ceremony of the Olympics look like a mere bagatelle. After all, London 2012 artistic director Danny Boyle may have crammed the entire history of the British working classes into 4 hours to an audience of billions, but he didn’t also have to get 172 tomato soups on the table while they were still hot.

However. The problem with state banquets is that their grandeur and pomp surely work to defeat their ultimate purpose – encouraging good relations between nations. When you’re at an event that formal and impressive, all that happens is that the guests spend their time struck with incredible nerves, hissing, “Christ, I’m so scared I’m going to drop a fork. I am sweating like a pug in a gilet,” and no bonding, or enlightening conversation, happens at all.

The truth is, incredibly impressive banquets will never get people chatting or bonding. To do that, people need to be engaged in some kind of low-key communal endeavour – helping each other out; feeling distracted enough by some simple task to chat away, unself-consciously, to people they’ve only just met.

This is why, therefore, as queen, in the interests of diplomacy and international relations, I would abolish formal state banquets and, instead, introduce a series of evenings where the guests knit, quilt, sort out jumble, prep a buffet with more than 200 baps to be buttered, collect tinfoil for Blue Peter, drop the clutch out of a Ford Mondeo, or communally help decorate someone’s front room, then put down a new carpet.

During these tasks, as the king of Tonga helps the US ambassador pad out a bowl of mashed-pilchard bap fillings with marge, is when a dazzlingly productive new epoch in international diplomacy will finally be forged, one based on genuine understanding and warmth. This will be part of an ongoing and noble scheme by the working classes, in which we are attempting to improve the lot of aristocrats, diplomats, politicians and royalty by passing on our superior wisdoms on “forging communities”, “getting on with each other” and “getting things done”. After 8pm, there would, obviously, be a selection of light ales, whiskies, sherries and advocaat snowballs and a proper disco, playing Slade, Motown, Madonna and Uptown Girl by Billy Joel.

Of course, I acknowledge that a massive part of these state banquets is to impress the guests with the pomp, power, splendour and, frankly, wealth of the host and her nation. And I am not against this. I see how it is useful.

I would, therefore, send a couple of retainers to the cash machine, an hour beforehand, and make sure that all the knitting/buttering/jumble-sorting was going on in a room where there was £2 million in cash, in the corner, stacked up like a wall, which I would occasionally nod towards, saying, “That’s a lot of cheese, huh? A lot of cheese. And there’s more where that came from, believe me. I am the queen.”

In this way, I feel, I would observe and maintain all the usefulness of being queen.

3 By now it would be gone midday, so I would take to my queenly laptop and bash out an urgent fashion memo to all female members of the royal family:

“What up, lady-bros. Busy quashing a scone here while shouting along to Eggheads. This is just a quick one – after all, we’ve all got boats to launch – but I just wanted to say something that feels increasingly important: I’m fine with you all wearing things that aren’t skirts one inch below the knee.

“I was thinking about it, looking through pictures of you all, from the past 30 years. I’m seeing a lot of skirts one inch below the knee! And I thought you all might have thought that I’d once made a law, or edict, or vellum or s***, insisting that you had to wear skirts one inch below the knee. But I haven’t.

“As far as I’m concerned, you can all wear whatever you like. I’m enclosing pictures of dungarees, jumpsuits, midi-dresses, shorts, skorts, capri trousers, muumuus, leggings, loons, unitards, etc, just to remind you to shake it up a bit. So, just one more time: you don’t have to stick solely to skirts one inch below the knee. I thought you might like to know that. Love, the queen.”

4 Planning a massive increase in jumping out of things. Looking at my career over all, it’s clear to see all the really big, iconic hits – Sexy Wartime Princess; Royal Wedding; Coronation Everyone Gets A Telly For – were really early on in my career. Although I’ve maintained a definite presence since thanks to a combination of brightly coloured hats, great-grandchildren and “being on money”, it had gone pretty quiet, breakout-hit wise.

Quiet, that, is, until the 2012 Olympics, where I jumped out of a helicopter. BOOM! The whole thing goes viral, there are headlines across the world and I’ve got a massive late-period hit on my hands. Everyone’s like, “ZOMG, Britain’s queen is amazing!” Olympic Helicopter Jump totally refreshed my brand. It was like when the Bee Gees went quiet for a decade, then came back with You Win Again.

So, as monarch, I’d like to build on Olympic Helicopter Jump. I’ve decided that the next few years are going to be devoted to consolidating my legacy, and my feeling, backed up with stats, is that said legacy should be “The Best LOL-Monarch At Appearing In Unexpected Places, In Unexpected Ways”.

If it was a globally loved event when I parachuted into the London 2012 Olympics, imagine how pleased fans of that incident will be when I parachute into the Winter Olympics, then the World Cup, then the new Top Gear? I could come in to land halfway through ELO’s set at Glastonbury, floating across the crowd during Mr Blue Sky; or cruise in during the inauguration of the next US president. It’s hard to think of an event that isn’t immediately enormously improved by the advent of the queen in a parachute.

5 Quiet evening chat with Prince William. “Look,” I would say, not unkindly, “shall we be honest? You clearly view the entire concept of being the heir to the throne of Britain with utter dread. Your whole demeanour is of a really nice, shy, quiet, posh guy who has accidentally ended up on a hen night where there are 60 drunken women shouting, ‘DO IT! DO IT! DO IT! DO IT!’ while trying to make you do the dance from The Full Monty. Except the hen night is Britain and the cries of ‘DO IT!’ are for you to become constitutional monarch and ‘focus of national unity’.

“You’re trying not to make a fuss, but you’re just not on for it, are you? ‘Centre of global attention’ is totally not in your wheelhouse. If you’d ever gone to see a careers adviser, it’s the last thing he would have recommended. You can barely make eye contact with your dog. Your top end of dynamic speech-giving would be, ‘How about if I draw the curtains, then bring in a cocoa for everyone?’

“I’ve seen you sitting down the bottom of the garden and crying to Somewhere Only We Know by Keane. You and your missus were at your happiest when you were living in a cottage on Anglesey with s****y wi-fi, knocking around in fleeces and knocking up a rough spag bol from Ocado. You clearly fetishise having a normal, dull life in the way most people would fantasise about being worth £27 million. The stress has made your hair fall out.

“So, here’s the thing. I’m going to let you off. You don’t have to be king any more! I know, right? Amazing! Well done me! I know loads of people act like it would be this huge deal if you don’t become king but, let’s face it, there’s tons of royals knocking around: Harry, your kids, your dad, that playboy one with the face – and, really, what is the point of being queen if you can’t make your grandson happy? Yes, I know the actual point of being queen, ironically, is to embody and defend the entire idea of succession, but I’ll let you into a secret: I’m really Caitlin Moran, inside the body of the Queen, and I’ve only skim-read ‘succession’. I’m wholly ignorant about constitutional matters and I reckon there’s probably a workaround either way.

“So go! You’re free! Put the missus and the kids in the helicopter, and chuck your crown out the window on the way to Wales! Granny will sort out all the paperwork tomorrow – after this gin.”

6 Night-time. My day as queen is almost at an end. Many would presume that, were I queen for the day, I would inevitably end my 24-hour stint by throwing a massive party to which the entire country would be invited. Emptying out the cellars, bankrupting my personal fortune and showing the masses a good time with no expense spared, with the whole thing ending at 7am with thousands of people crashing out on my sofas and in my garden, all having partied like it’s 1999. Party of the CENTURY. All totally on me. The party to end ALL parties.

However, as the parent of two teenagers, this is something I am doing on a regular basis anyway, and so it holds no appeal for me whatsoever. Instead, I would take advantage of being queen by going to bed at 8pm, quashing a six-bag cup of valerian tea – it makes you woozy! – and watching Gardeners’ World while texting my royal gardeners: “Know this sounds odd, but go to this address in Crouch End and plant 6,000 snowdrops, power-hose the moss off the patio and stick in a Versailles-style gazebo in that patch at the back that currently just has a broken trampoline and a bag of gravel. This is a ROYAL DECREE. Bagsy no returns.”

At this point, my job as queen for the day completed, I would then jump back into my own body in a blaze of CGI glory; adventure over. Fate realigned correctly. Everything wonderful again.

Except I’ve watched a lot of Quantum Leap and know that I would not, in fact, return to my own body at all, but would be subject to another unexpected space-time glitch and end up in the body of Elvis Presley, or a confused gorilla, and have to try to make the world a better place all over again, tomorrow. But I have long been resigned to this being my lot. I am noble about it. Don’t worry. If I am Elvis, I’ve got this “syrup of figs” plan all worked out.

Shoot credits
Hair and make-up Helen Bannon at Mandy Coakley using Bobbi Brown and Paul Mitchell. Tiara, earrings and necklace, all Garrard (garrard.com); custom duvet cover and pillowcases, Bags of Love (bagsoflove.co.uk); Union Jack cushion, John Lewis (johnlewis.com). Photographed at the Milestone Hotel (milestonehotel.com)