The Queen on Her Platinum Jubilee: Her Reign, Part 1

The Queen does not speak like that now, but it is doubtful that she has made any conscious effort to ‘dumb down’ her accent, unlike some politicians who feel compelled to lapse into ‘Estuary English’ when they feel it is advantageous to do so. The simple fact is that her accent has evolved, without undue effort, into a reflection of how English is spoken by most of her subjects. So far as it is known she has never submitted to an elocution lesson, however much spin-doctors might try to update her image.

Her Majesty is not an actress, and as one royal observer put it: ‘She would be extremely wary of any conscious attempt to change her voice to anything else that smacked of a public relations gesture. She has always been true to herself.’

Dressing

Her style of dressing has changed little over the decades and although she fully accepts that she has to look like a Queen, and spend the money to do it, she is very much of the ‘turn, and turn again’ school, and outfits are frequently recycled.

Her clothes are part of the job, and have to be in clear colours which make her instantly identifiable. She makes no concessions to fashion fads, and although her hemlines went up in the so-called ‘Swinging Sixties’, she would always check the length of a skirt by sitting down in it, to see how far it rode up, before venturing out.

The Queen’s hairstyle has also virtually remained the same since her adolescence; a continuity which has been beneficial to milliners, and to those who design her image for the coins of the Realm, bank notes and postage stamps. The single most dramatic change in her appearance came when she abandoned the hair colouring which hid the encroaching grey; giving herself a flattering silver crown, framing and giving emphasis to her perfect complexion. The result was that she looked, and still looks, even younger.

One concession to the ageing process was, however, made in the mid-1970s when she read the speech from the Throne at the State Opening of Parliament in Ottawa. Delving into her handbag she produced a pair of spectacles. There was a scarcely concealed gasp from the assembled notables, and the image of the Queen with this necessary accessory was repro-duced in pictures that went round the world.

The Queen is sometimes criticised for her glum expression (one courtier was caught out describing it as her ‘Miss Piggy’ look, but survived to tell the tale). This rather stolid manifestation of her Hanoverian ancestry, particularly in repose, hides, however, a wry, some-times wicked sense of humour, a facet of her personality which is dismissive of humbug, sycophancy, and puffed-up self importance.

It is a part of her which she rarely, if ever, dares to show in public, but those who know her put it more diplomatically: that she has an acute appreciation of the foibles and eccentrici-ties of human nature, accumulated over almost five decades of meeting a huge and diverse cross section of people.