The Unrivalled Omnipresence of Queen Elizabeth II
For any author, pre-publication attention is an infinitely precious commodity. So it must have been with great delight that Craig Brown, the British satirist, learned last month that his book “Q: A Voyage Around the Queen” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) had come to the attention of that well-known influencer Donald Trump. The former President makes a brief appearance, in a chapter dedicated to the late Queen Elizabeth’s encounters with controversial foreign leaders. (Others mentioned include Bashar al-Assad, Idi Amin, and Vladimir Putin.) The monarch told a guest that she’d found Trump “very rude,” Brown writes. “She particularly disliked the way he couldn’t stop looking over her shoulder, as though in search of others more interesting.” When asked about the characterization, which was excerpted in the Daily Mail, Trump obligingly delivered the money quote: “I think it’s a shame that a sleazebag can write an article that’s totally false. . . . I know nothing about him. I have no idea who he is.” Brown’s publisher must already be redesigning the dust jacket to incorporate the accolade.
There’s no reason to doubt Brown’s unidentified source, especially given Trump’s contrary claim to be the Queen’s “favorite President.” But to be—deep breath—fair to Trump for a moment, it was surely hard for him to look anywhere other than over the Queen’s shoulder. The head of the British head of state stood lower by at least a foot than that of her American counterpart; owing to her propensity for wearing broad-brimmed hats, the challenge of maintaining eye contact might have daunted even the most emotionally intelligent of statesmen. Could the Queen possibly have been indulging in a moment of self-referential humor about her own exalted social status? Elsewhere, Brown cites a stock joke of Her Majesty’s. If, while speaking to one of her subjects, the individual’s cell phone should inopportunely ring, the Queen would urge her interlocutor, “Oh, do take it—it might be someone important!”
The Queen’s singular importance—constitutional, historical, psychological—is the subject of Brown’s book, which, like an earlier book on her younger sister, Princess Margaret, depicts the monumental figure at its center with magnanimous levity. There is a rough chronology—“Q” begins with a catalogue of the monarch’s coevals (also born in 1926: Hugh Hefner, Miles Davis, the television, the aerosol can, the word “totalitarianism,” and the phrase “publicity stunt”) before proceeding through the subsequent near-century of her life. Brown’s career was established in the nineteen-eighties, at the savagely satirical magazine Private Eye, where he delivered parodic diaries of famous people; he now contributes to the right-wing, net-curtain-twitching Daily Mail, for which, he told a recent interviewer, he writes “with the intention of pleasing a 16-year-old whose parents might get the Daily Mail but they want a view of life beyond.” In accordance with his métier as a columnist, Brown offers a series of approaches to the monarch from differing angles. His attention settles here before hopping there, like a pigeon in Trafalgar Square alighting on a statue’s arm before fluttering up to its head.
Brown has read dozens of earlier royal biographies and memoirs, from the work of Robert Lacey—a consultant on “The Crown”—to that of Angela Kelly, formerly the Queen’s “dresser,” who for more than two decades curated the monarch’s wardrobe and advised on her outfits. One research method, he has explained, was to scour for mentions of Her Majesty in the indexes of every twentieth- and twenty-first-century book on the biography and memoir shelves at the London Library. Regrettably, his book does not have an index, but if it did it would include everyone from Anne Frank, who pinned a picture of Princess Elizabeth to her hideaway wall, to Jacques Derrida, in 1992 the recipient of an award from the Duke of Edinburgh—who was heard to mutter afterward that his own family seemed to be deconstructing—to P. G. Wodehouse, who, Brown says, suggested that the Queen’s coronation, in 1953, “would have benefited from a cut of half an hour and dancing girls to replace the archbishop’s reading from the Gospel.” Brown seems more or less fond of his subject, but his portrait is far from deferential: one early story tells of an occasion when the young Princess Elizabeth was so bored and frustrated by her lessons with her French governess that she did, as it were, the pigeon’s work for it, turning her silver inkpot upside down over her head and sitting there, “with ink trickling down her face and slowly dyeing her golden curls blue.”
The Queen left little other evidence of impatience or irascibility, but Brown does give an account of her ruthlessness toward Major Dick Hern, a horse-racing trainer whom she considered to be unfit for the job; Hern, having been paralyzed in an accident, then debilitated by a heart attack, was informed the day before he was due to undergo a tracheotomy that his services were no longer needed, and that his right to live in the house tied to the position was being terminated. Not often discussed by other biographers—who, in Brown’s words, “can’t see how it fits in with their overall picture of the Queen as measured and loyal and fair”—the event has been characterized by one intimate of Hern’s as “the saddest, nastiest episode in racing history.” For Brown, it is proof of the Queen’s fallible humanity. He writes, without judgment, “All our characters are made up of a variety of warring impulses, and when we give some of them a free rein, they may carry us away.”
Brown, who attended Eton, has some personal experience of being in the orbit of royalty; attending a posh party at the age of twenty, he was presented to the Queen and burbled to her about English humor, an anecdote he offers as an example of the monarch’s immediately deranging effect upon those who met her. (Terry Wogan, a familiar radio and television personality for decades in the U.K., described the Royal Effect thus: “You say the first thing that comes into your head, and you carry the memory of your foolishness with you to the grave.”) Then, there is Brown’s account of running into his neighbor in Suffolk, Peter Shand Kydd, the stepfather of Princess Diana, only hours after the announcement of Diana’s death, in a Paris underpass, in 1997. “What do you expect to happen if you get a lift from a driver supplied by Mohamed Fayed?” Shand Kydd asks. Beyond such jaw-dropping personal testimony, however, there is little in the book that will come as news to anyone who has read more orderly biographies of the Queen, such as the one by the historian and political biographer Ben Pimlott, or by Gyles Brandreth, the former Member of Parliament turned author, television personality, podcaster, and, according to his Web-site bio, much-in-demand after-dinner speaker, who is frequently cited in Brown’s pages.
Still, no chronicler before Brown has thought to explode the platitudes of royal taxonomy with a chapter entirely comprising quotations in which the Queen is described as “radiant” by observers. Sylvia Plath, in 1955: “The queen looked quietly radiant in a kelly-green princess style coat and hat.” Cecil Beaton, in 1972: “Her eyes flashed like crystal, her teeth dazzling, her smile radiant.” The former Labour minister Chris Mullin, on September 6, 2022, two days before the Queen’s death, at her Scottish castle, at which she performed what would be her final official duty, appointing a new Prime Minister: “Liz Truss flew to Balmoral to be anointed by the Queen, who is looking radiant but very fragile.” Nor has anyone before Brown mined an academic essay called “Monophthongal vowel changes in Received Pronunciation: an acoustic analysis of the Queen’s Christmas Broadcasts” for a chapter devoted to the monarch’s changing diction over the decades: she stopped rhyming “had” with “bed” by the nineteen-eighties, but she never ceased saying “orf” for “off.” Nor could anyone but Brown follow that up with a chapter (a chepter?) offering a phonetic phrase book of the Queen’s speech, with illustrative usages. These range from “Fessin Etting: Of extreme interest” to “Kennew medgin?: Beyond belief” to “Fraw lino: To the furthest extent of my knowledge. ‘Fraw lino, President Trump will want to lend his helicorpter on the lawn.’ ”
The Queen spoke for attribution so rarely—she never gave an interview, and delivered only a handful of formal addresses to the nation—that a reader is grateful for the moments at which Brown gives her to us speaking in her own voice, or what is reported to be her own voice. “I miss seeing their eyes,” she says, of the crowds raising their cell phones to record her on walkabouts. “Do you get your children confused?” she snaps at a Prime Minister who asked how she could distinguish between her dogs. “I will be pleased to be in Kingston, but I will not be very pleased,” she tells an aide accompanying her on a royal visit to the Yorkshire town, after crossing out the word in her prepared remarks. As Brown points out, people tend to project their own personality traits onto her. His Queen, fittingly enough, is often amused, sometimes subversive, and occasionally waspish. Annoyed by the existence of the twenty-eight-floor Hilton hotel on Park Lane, which overlooks Buckingham Palace, she tells a visitor, “I wish they’d spend as much time pulling it down as they spent putting it up.”
Why write yet another book about the Queen, beyond the obvious temptation of besting Gyles Brandreth on the lucrative after-dinner-speech circuit? “Q” is plausible evidence for the case that any book about the monarch is also a book about the realm and its populace—as well as that much larger sphere of non-subjects over whom Queen Elizabeth somehow still managed to reign. (Brown cites the New York Times’ condemnation of NBC’s decision to interrupt its coverage of her coronation with images of the “Today” show’s chimpanzee mascot: “Utterly disgraceful. No apology can be adequate.”) Her omnipresence was unrivalled, and her temperament and tastes were ideally suited, or adapted, to her symbolic role. In a chapter about the Royal Family’s devotion to dogs, in which Brown gives an extensive genealogy of the Queen’s kennels, he notes that being ankle-deep in corgis might be regarded as eccentricity in someone more proletarian. But, as he also notes, “no Royal corgi ever published its memoirs or poured out its heart to Oprah Winfrey.” In her canine and equine relations, the Queen carved out a necessary zone of privacy in which she could experience an unregulated wildness and unpredictability denied her in almost all other areas of life.
Her heir, King Charles, long ago found his own narrow zone of freedom within horticulture: at the hour of his mother’s demise, he was wandering in the woods near Balmoral Castle, gathering mushrooms. Brown’s narrative of the Queen’s death is at moments in danger of becoming unexpectedly moving. The new king goes among the crowd outside Buckingham Palace: “I’ve been dreading this day,” he says. John Lydon, formerly Johnny Rotten, of the Sex Pistols, who in 1977 rhymed “God Save the Queen” with “fascist regime,” tweets, “Send her victorious.” Gulp. But Brown remains reliably alert to the absurd; he cites a Daily Mail article that reports, “An incredible photograph of a 150-foot wave during a storm in Sunderland shows a remarkable resemblance to the late Queen Elizabeth II.” His ear is exquisitely attuned to the hypocritical and the tone-deaf, as when he lists a variety of actions taken “as a mark of respect” during the week of national mourning that followed the Queen’s death: a supermarket chain turning down the volume of the beeps on its cash registers; the Duke of York pub, in York, cancelling happy hour; “The Crown” suspending production, delaying for a few days the filming of the scene in which Princess Diana is driven to her death.
Brown is particularly interested in the ways in which the Queen, a familiar presence in the daily lives of so many for so long—for decades hymned at the start and end of every theatrical performance, her likeness fingered on coins and licked on stamps—also appeared unbidden in her subjects’ imaginative lives. Among members of the British establishment in whose unconscious fantasy life the Queen recurringly figured was Kingsley Amis, who dreamed of kissing her and urging her to go off with him somewhere. “No, Kingsley, we mustn’t,” she would reply. (When Amis was knighted, in 1990, he was terrified of a different kind of incontinence; according to his son Martin Amis, he swallowed so much Imodium before going to the Palace that “there was some doubt, afterwards, whether he would ever again go to the toilet.”) In an irresistible story that has the ring of utter fabrication, the former Prime Minister Boris Johnson tells the Queen of a nightmare in which he is late for an audience with her: “ ‘Oh yes,’ she replies, in a tone that suggests she has heard it all before, probably from other prime ministers. ‘Were you naked?’ ”
