The Queen: what’s she like?

The number of verifiable off-the-cuff remarks she has made during six decades of queenship can be counted on one hand. She never gets visibly angry, or makes jokes in public. She has only once been spotted running (to get to the owners’ enclosure, after a race). We know next to nothing about her taste in books, music, television, food or films.

But no one, not even a queen, can hide in the limelight for 60 years without revealing something of their true nature. Over the decades, from the snippets and scraps of revelation, a more complex and interesting individual has emerged from the rigid carapace of formality and discretion that protects her: the Queen is funny, shy, well-informed, occasionally cold, more comfortable with men than women, and more comfortable with dogs than either. She is an expert at small talk, and shies away from big talk on intellectual subjects. She listens to military marches in the royal car. She hates cockles.

She can be waspish, flirtatious and pious. In the evening, she drinks a gin and Dubonnet (one third to two thirds) with a slice of lemon and two ice cubes. Sometimes she drinks two. She keeps her cornflakes in Tupperware containers, and listens to a Roberts radio in the morning while eating toast with a choice of marmalades, and doing the Telegraph crossword. She is known as “Sausage” to her husband. Until 1990, she dyed her hair with Chocolate Kiss hair dye (“the risk-free way to gently blend grey away”). She has been known to strangle dying pheasants.

Back in 1928, when Princess Elizabeth was two years old, Winston Churchill spotted her “air of authority”. Half a lifetime later, Margaret Thatcher noted that the Queen was “absolutely correct”, at all times. This is the manner reflected in most of the royal photographic record: a monarch serious, diligent, steady and reserved.

But the pictures of the Queen in repose, when, for a moment, she has forgotten the camera, tell a slightly different story. The set of her face can seem severe, even dour; even after so long on the throne, she has not entirely mastered the art of concealing boredom. Yet just occasionally her face lights up, with genuine, unadulterated, unmediated and unscripted delight. Her smile is often forced, but sometimes strikingly genuine. As one portrait painter, Michael Noakes, put it, the Queen has “no intermediate expression”, nothing between solemn and radiant.

The latter expression is almost entirely reserved for non-human company. She once observed that she “should like to be a horse”, and was only half joking. Her relationships with her dogs are, in some way, the obverse of the relationship she must maintain with people: she can afford to be cross with her pack of corgis, and openly affectionate; she can ascribe feelings and characteristics to them, mock them, love them and mourn them.

Dogs and horses do not bow or curtsy to her. They are not going to ask awkward questions, or pat her on the bottom like an Australian prime minster. She can talk to them, and about them, in a way that she can never discuss the foibles of people, even with her closest confidants (with the possible exception of the Duke of Edinburgh). When one of her dogs was killed by the Queen Mother’s dogs, she wrote a six-page, intensely emotional letter to one of her ladies-in-waiting, something she would not, and could not, do in response to a human bereavement.

Her knowledge of horses and her dog-handling skills are said to be remarkable, and she is often described as a “natural” horsewoman and dog-lover; but she is horsey or doggy in a way that is also reflective of her thoroughly abnormal life: when she is on horseback she is, both metaphorically and literally, out of reach, private and secure; when she is with her dogs, she can be herself.

The members of her immediate family still stand up when she enters a room, so perhaps it is unsurprising that her reputation as a mother, mother-in-law and sibling is also untypical and demanding. As a person blessed with robust, even rugged good health, she is intolerant of infirmity. She never looks more uncomfortable than in a hospital. When her sister, Margaret, suffered a series of small strokes, Elizabeth allegedly referred to them as her “little turns”.

Diana, Princess of Wales, helped to cement this reputation for emotional detachment, with her description of the moment she turned to the head of the Firm for support as her marriage collapsed: “I went to the top lady. And I was sobbing and I said, ‘What do I do? I’m coming to you. What do I do?’ And she said, ‘I don’t know what you should do. Charles is hopeless.’ And that was it. That was help! So I didn’t go back to her again.”

Even when the Queen famously described her “annus horribilis”, her distress was expressed in a coded circumlocution that helped to disguise what was, undoubtedly, real pain. The marriages of her three older children had fallen apart, Diana’s tell-all book had appeared, and Windsor Castle had burned: “1992 is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure.”

That classic British understatement endeared her to many, yet if an unwillingness to display public emotion has bolstered her popularity for much of her reign, it also contributed to its lowest point. The damage caused by her unwillingness to join the rest of the country in demonstrative grief over the death of Diana was only partly assuaged by her public broadcast to the nation: “What I say to you now, as your Queen and as a grandmother, I say from my heart.” But she was also speaking the truth when she noted that, for her, it was “not easy to express a sense of loss”. She does not express emotion easily, because every element of her training as monarch has taught her not to. Looking back on that broadcast, you can sense that laying her heart on her sleeve, even to a limited extent, she is breaking every sartorial and emotional rule of her reign.

Douglas Hurd once remarked that the Queen “has trained the feelings out of herself”. Yet in older age, her feelings have become more apparent. She was visibly moved when the yacht Britannia was decommissioned. She has been seen with tears in her eyes at Remembrance Day services, a memorial service at St Paul’s Cathedral for victims of 9/11, and at a ceremony to mark the 60th anniversary of D-Day. When the Obamas came to Britain on their first state visit, the Queen and First Lady rested their hands on each other’s backs while walking away, in what was described as “a mutual and spontaneous display of affection”. It is a mark of how rare such extemporaneous moments have been that such a gesture was worthy of remark.

The older queen is a less rigid queen. Her clothes, too, in which she takes a close personal interest, suggest a late flowering of individuality, moving away from the clunky single-colour look towards more elaborate and daring colour combinations. As anyone would, she prefers a crown to wearing a hat: “Hats make me look like a sheep,” she insists. She likes to mock her own technophobia, yet when Kate Middleton bought Prince William a Nintendo Wii, the Queen is said, perhaps apocryphally, to have become “addicted” to it.

Yet even her closest confidants concede that for all her personal warmth, there is always an unbridgeable gap. The late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother was one of the very few people with whom she was able to enjoy an entirely spontaneous relationship. The following exchange between mother and daughter was once heard at a West End opening, apparently following an argument in the car on the way to the theatre:

The Queen Mother (whispers loudly): “Who do you think you are?”

The Queen (whispers loudly back): “I am the Queen, Mummy. The Queen.”

Most people with daughters will recognise this sort of conversation.

The Queen Mother had an aristocratic brio that her daughter has seldom displayed, although it is emerging in later life. Mother and daughter went to some lengths to entertain one another: the Queen Mother was the recipient of the Queen’s only known foray into verse. The guest book at the Castle of Mey contains the following nugget, written by Elizabeth II after a particularly sumptuous banquet:

A meal of such splendor (sic),
Repast of such zest
It will take us to Sunday
Just to digest.

The Queen, it emerges, is actually very humorous, in a mordant, almost subversive way. She has spent a lifetime in strict, protocol-bound social situations, but enjoys nothing more than when these go wrong.

She is a gifted mimic, particularly of individuals prone to pomposity, and is said to do remarkably convincing impressions of Neil Kinnock and Margaret Thatcher. When Clare Short’s mobile phone went off in her handbag during a Privy Council meeting, the Queen observed with a glint: “Oh dear, I hope it wasn’t anyone important.”

Like many people brought up in wartime, she dislikes extravagance, and watches the pennies. “Thank you for the enormous bill,” she once wrote in a note to her dressmaker, “which will take a little time to pay.”

My friend tells a story of being invited to a pheasant shoot at the last minute by people he did not know well, and finding himself at the end of a line of guns, standing beside a small woman in wellies and headscarf. As the bell went off to indicate the end of the day’s shooting, a bird flew up. My friend fired, and missed. Without turning round the lady beside him remarked, in that unmistakable queenly voice: “On this shoot, we don’t shoot after the bell… and we don’t shoot owls.”

Courtiers say that the only time the Queen becomes visibly angry is when someone steps on a corgi’s tail. Her father, George VI, had a fiery temper; Queen Victoria could get spectacularly stroppy. But the Queen has gone out of her way to play down any whiff of wrath, or even mild annoyance. When the BBC aired a documentary trailer for Monarchy: the Royal Family at Work, edited to make it appear as though the Queen had stormed out of a photo shoot with photographer Annie Leibovitz, the royal lawyers were called in to deny the suggestion that she had “walked out in a huff”.

Margaret Thatcher once described the Queen as having “a formidable grasp of current issues”. But if she has strong views on those issues, she can only express them obliquely, through questions rather than statements. She cannot take sides, or argue. Her position requires her to avoid anything that might be termed a conceptual discussion. She uses black blotting paper, to ensure that no one can surreptitiously see what she may have written to others, or herself. She cannot afford depth, because profundity or complexity might court controversy.

According to one member of the royal circle, the Queen is knowledgeable about a vast range of subjects (in addition to the turf) but almost never offers strong opinions – a direct contrast to her eldest son, whose forceful judgments are frequently in inverse proportion to his expertise.

Some detect in her an unwillingness to encourage familiarity, an avoidance of weighty conversation, a certain shyness and a nervousness around what one courtier calls “people of a higher academic field”.

When she ascended to the throne, this newspaper pointed out, in a delicate way, that intellectual exploration was not part of the Queen’s background. “It was not a bookish education,” The Times noted in 1952, “but it was calculated to keep the princess’s mind receptive, her interests wide and sensitive.” The Queen reads the Racing Post, but beyond that her literary tastes, if she has any, remain a mystery. (Although Alan Bennett had fun imagining what they might be in his 2007 novel The Uncommon Reader.)

There is only one recorded occasion of the Queen blushing. The irrepressible Christopher Soames, Britain’s last governor of Southern Rhodesia, once greeted Her Majesty with the words, “Goodness, Ma’am, you look pretty today.” She responded pinkly, “Oh, do I?”

Ben Pimlott, the royal historian, once described her as “an ethnic minority of one”, pointing out that this “did not prevent her relating to people, but it gave her friendships and attachments a lopsided quality”.

This oddly imbalanced slant to her world, her “acquired introversion”, means that although the Queen is constantly surrounded by people, she is always, in some more fundamental way, alone, isolated by an inviolable code of duty. But she is plainly comfortable in her own company in any case. It is said that she quite frequently eats dinner alone, in front of the television.

In Shakespeare’s Henry V, the king wanders among his troops in disguise, to discover their true thoughts and opinions on the eve of the battle. He then reflects on the way that his crown sets him apart from ordinary mortals and their simple, relaxed pleasures: “What infinite heart’s-ease must kings neglect that private men enjoy.”

There was a time when Elizabeth could also move incognito among her people. She and Prince Philip, in the early days of their marriage, would occasionally go to the cinema and watch a film among the people, before slipping away as the lights went up.

It is many years since the Queen mingled undetected with the populace, or met anyone who did not know who she is. But I also wonder if she, too, sometimes envies the “infinite heart’s-ease” of her subjects, their freedom to be themselves rather than the creation and captive of history.

As a young woman, Elizabeth told her riding instructor, Horace Smith, of an alternative life that might have been hers had fate not propelled her to the throne. “Had she not been who she was, she would like to be a lady living in the country with lots of horses and dogs.”

Intriguingly, this is precisely the character that still emerges, from time to time, from behind the veils of dignity, duty and decorum: a countrywoman of simple tastes, fond of a joke and a gin, with a strong and intriguing personality that can never be fully revealed.

Perhaps the most endearing aspect of the Queen’s strange half-hidden life is that, unlike her great-grandmother, she is not “not amused”. Indeed, at times she seems positively tickled by the strangeness of her own existence, permanently on display, but always partly hidden. As the Queen remarked the time the wife of the Ghanaian president got stuck when a Buckingham Palace lift broke down: “What a life one lives!”