THE QUEEN: ER indoors
Most portraitists who paint the Queen report what a happy, chatty, patient sitter she is. But then, unlike Annie Leibovitz, they don’t have the naked gall to ask her to take off her crown, an act of lese-majesty that would have had earlier monarchs calling for the man with the big axe. In public Elizabeth II does jowly Hanoverian glum to perfection, but it’s only the default setting of her face, not because she has just swallowed a wasp or is bored witless by having to shake her gloved hand with yet another toadying provincial mayor. It’s also down to a bit of nerves; she is surprisingly shy, and does not wholly relish those walkabouts, despite the adulation and the bouquets that the crowds tend to lavish on her.
After a lifetime of service she is a perfectionist, and likes the clockwork of royal ceremonial to be well oiled, unlike a state visit to Morocco in 1980, when King Hassan II kept her waiting for two hours in a boiling desert tent. Her tether near its end, she told the attendant photographers to hang around and witness the biggest walkout in history. But, being Elizabeth II, she waited a bit more until her entirely unapologetic host turned up. When a policeman took almost as long to arrive and escort the intruder Michael Fagan from her bedroom she was far less sanguine, allegedly shouting down the phone to the Palace police station: “For God’s sake, get a bloody move on.”
She knows that she is the boss, and doesn’t like being told what to do – except by her husband, to whom she always defers; after nearly 60 years of marriage, he of course knows how to handle her, although she used to shut herself in her cabin if he was having one of his legendary fits of temper on board HMY Britannia. And she abhors discord in her family; during the protracted marital breakdown of Charles and Diana she tended to adopt the ostrich position, until forced by a tsunami of bad publicity to write to her son and tell him to get on with the divorce.
That the latest act of treason should have been committed by an American is surprising, as they are a generally polite people who greatly like George III’s direct descendant. It’s an irony that she is particularly admired in the world’s two oldest republics; France and the US, having both got rid of their monarchies, are now fascinated by other people’s.
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Off the set, the star of the show is a relaxed elderly lady, whose party piece – for family and close friends only – is to perform wickedly accurate impersonations of the boring and the pompous people she has met that day. She can be allowed the odd hissy fit, because, at the age of 81 her workload never ceases, even during those long holidays when the red government boxes still arrive for her daily attention. She has better things to do than have a photographer queening it over her.