Around the World: The Queen’s Travels – Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Tribute

Leaders

She has met virtually all the world’s leaders, some since died or deposed; she has made six visits to America, the last in 2007, to reaffirm the solidarity of Anglo-US relations. In her 1991 visit to George HW Bush there was an amusing diversion at her ceremonial welcome on the White House lawn in Washington, when she virtually disappeared behind a podium designed for the much taller President Bush. The world media saw not the Head of State, but the Hat of State. But two days later the Queen adroitly turned it round when she addressed a Joint Session of Congress, the first time ever by a British sovereign, and even for the Queen, a nerve-wracking occasion.

Anyone eavesdropping on the informal rehearsal in the Speaker’s Room would have heard Her Majesty say that the unfortunate matter over the size of the podium was not something she would ever actually have thought of beforehand, but then the President was ‘huge, really, very tall’.

Her then Private Secretary, Sir Robert (later Lord) Fellowes, was able to assure her, however, that this time the podium had been built for her, not for anyone else, and a little bit of business, ‘a very good ice breaker’, had been inserted as a foreword to her address, if she wanted to try it.

Minutes later it was curtain-up time. ‘Mr Speaker, Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II,’ declaimed the official announcer, as the Queen entered the Chamber. And then, looking Joint Congress straight in the eye, Her Majesty declared: ‘I do hope you can see me today…’ Joint Congress just dissolved!

Commonwealth

As Head of The Commonwealth she has visited all the Commonwealth countries, and, of course, was in Kenya at the time of her accession to the throne on the death of her father, King George Vl, on February 6 1952. She usually attends Commonwealth Heads of Government Meetings, a summit to which she attaches particular importance.

Along the way she has endured extremes of heat and cold; wrinkled her nose only very slightly when she had eggs thrown at her in New Zealand, carried on regardless in the face of death threats from French separatists in Canada, and tried to make the best of it when she was virtually abandoned in a desert tent by a king with an eccentric sense of timekeeping. But invariably she is cheered and applauded wherever she goes; occasionally hugged and once, even kissed by an over-excited admirer in downtown Washington.

And she has been called upon, in the course of duty, to eat and drink some very strange mixtures indeed. At the Chinese State Banquet in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People she ate her way through a 10-course menu, including sea slugs and shark fins, deftly handling a pair of chop sticks, while the band of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army played Handel’s ‘Water Music’ and the traditional English air, ‘Greensleeves’. This was one occasion when she felt obliged to disregard Prince Philip’s golden rule when abroad: ‘Never drink anything in small cups.’

In tiny Belize she was served dressed-up rodent, Roasted Maskall Gibnut, which, she was assured, was a local delicacy tasting something like pork, but the newspapers back home inevitably delivered the headline: ‘Queen Eats Rat’.