How I betrayed Queen

THE convention is that you should not repeat things said to you at the dinner table by the Royal Family. I do not really know why, so long as they are not state secrets or matters disclosed in strict confidence.

When that lovable rogue Woodrow Wyatt — former Labour MP, subsequently high Tory peer — befriended my wife and me, he asked us to dinner with the Queen Mother. It was a merry evening, with stupendous wines, and about a dozen people present.

I was next to the Queen Mother at table. She must have been about 80 at the time. After we got home I wrote down the conversation. It was all harmless stuff, including an anecdote that the present Queen herself tells guests at Windsor Castle — I know she told it to Carol Ann Duffy when she became Poet Laureate.

It concerned T. S. Eliot reading aloud to them from his poem The Waste Land, and their all having the giggles, first the King, then the little princesses and then Queen Elizabeth herself. She was a P. G. Wodehouse fan and you can see that the lugubrious tone and unashamedly obscure modernism of

Eliot’s masterpiece would not have been to her taste.

When the Queen Mother was 90 and the Spectator asked me to write an article to commemorate the fact, I quoted this story. There was a flurry in the Press, with old Woodrow fulminating against my appalling disloyalty in repeating the sacred words of the last Queen Empress.

Not that we truly fell out. Woodrow told me a few years later that the Queen Mother, alluding to this storm in a teacup, said, ‘Shall we forgive him?’

By then, other members of the Royal Family were briefing journalists about the intimate details of their marital misfortunes. A few harmless anecdotes about dead poets could hardly be compared with the Prince of Wales and his wife going on TV, quite unnecessarily, to admit adultery.

But — yes — it was a mistake on my part to quote the royal conversation about Eliot, because it embarrassed my wife Katherine and upset people generally.

In fact, though, I had omitted anything that could have been seen as conceivably embarrassing. For example, Katherine and I had just been to an exhibition of portraits of the Queen, and I asked her mother why it was that, since Annigoni’s masterpiece, there was not a single picture of any merit.

‘It’s because she has no interest in the visual,’ said the Queen Mother. ‘She was born without any aesthetic sense.

‘Princess Margaret and I look at all the designs for postage stamps, for example. They are sent to the Queen by the Postmaster General for approval. She admits she can’t tell the difference between a good and a bad design.’

Sure enough, since the deaths of the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret, the quality of British stamps has declined.

I also censored, in my 90th birthday tribute, the Queen Mother’s political reflections. ‘I don’t like Woy (Roy Jenkins),’ she told me. ‘What’s this new party of his?’ ‘The Social Democrats, ma’am’. ‘He’d like the “social” part of that. Underneath it all, though, he’s still a socialist. This country is naturally conservative and it’s always happiest when there’s a good old Conservative government.’

I was too polite to mention Labour’s landslide victory of 1945, or the acceptance by all three parties of the Labour idea of a properly functioning Welfare State and a health service.