The Queen’s job was to embody us: a personalised British deity to make us preen with self-importance and pity others unlucky enough to be without queens. Her job was to be from everywhere and nowhere, as a god is: Norfolk, Deeside, Windsor, St James’s.
The photograph of a cloud that “looked just like the Queen”, taken just after her death and circulated, loved, and mocked, is not as ludicrous as it seems. We demanded that she be many things to us, so why not a cloud?
She visited every nation, county, town and city in Britain, and she did her best to mirror them all. But she was really a Londoner. The Pearly Kings and Queens call out to her as an equal: Londoner to Londoner. It’s just their jewels are paste.
She was born in London, at the house of her maternal grandparents — the earl and countess of Strathmore and Kinghorne — at 17 Bruton Street, Mayfair, the district where interwar aristocrats commonly lived, at least during the Season from May to July: from the Chelsea Flower Show to the beginning of the grouse season.
No matter the stucco, Kensington and Knightsbridge never had the same lustre. She was the same as the other aristocratic families of her era, who lived in London and the country — you can see the remnants of their places in Mayfair, now let or divided into flats — except that she hung on to her house because her family was immune to the post-war taxation that led so many others to sell up.
Number 17 Bruton Street is now demolished, and there is, instead, an ugly brown building which incorporates a Bentley showroom on Berkeley Square. The state limousine is a Bentley. There is a plaque too: Elizabeth’s story in homes is parts of the more general story of the destruction of pre-war London.
She then lived with her parents at 145 Piccadilly, bombed during the war and now the Intercontinental Hotel at the corner of Park Lane, and then, after the abdication of her uncle Edward VIII, at Buckingham Palace. She lived at Clarence House on the Mall when she married and at Buckingham Palace as Queen.
She may have summered in Balmoral, wintered at Sandringham and spent weekends — and most of the war — at Windsor but if she was anything she was a Londoner. She may not have wanted to be — people called her a countrywoman, happy with horses and dogs and heathlands and big skies — but she was an urbanite too.
She was old enough to be an aristocratic child in Mayfair and it never really left her. She loved St James’s too. She dined at Bellamy’s restaurant on Bruton Place, close to where she was born, Claridge’s, Quaglino’s and the Ritz Hotel. She shopped at Fortnum & Mason: or, rather, they sent out to her.
It is true that she never looked angrier on film than at the Millennium Dome on Millennial Eve but who wouldn’t? Perhaps the final evidence of her status as a Londoner is her response to being asked to go on the London Eye. “I’m not a tourist,” she said.
Royal Garden Parties
I was once invited to a royal garden party. Well, not invited, but if you ring up the Buckingham Palace press office in good time with good reason, they will squeeze you in.
Monarchy needs to be seen to be believed. Pomp welcomes all, and this was pomp with cake. If the carpets in Buckingham Palace are shabby, the Canalettos are superb. Buckingham Palace garden is a big as Green Park.
It has a wonky lake and curious trees. Tiny sandwiches and exquisite cakes were served from ornamental huts so numerous there was barely any queue. The tea was tea to please the nation: strong builders’ tea. This impressed me: I admired the Queen principally as a marketing genius. Eventually she appeared, brightly dressed, to be seen from a distance: essentially, as smiling fog lights.
She lingered in the diplomatic tent, behind velvet ropes, far from rogue iconoclasts.
