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Jayne Dawson: My secret love
We all have our secrets. That drab person who has bored you for years – who knows what bizarre activities they’re getting up to?
Secrets are everywhere, so here’s mine. I adore the Queen.
I know, I know, you were hoping for juicier, and better. Well... maybe next time.
For now, let’s stick with the Queen. She has her secrets too because, despite a life in the most public role it is possible to imagine, we don’t really know her.
I like that. I like that the Queen’s real personality is hidden from us. I believe her inaccessibility to be the real secret of her success. Monarchs ace it with a bit of mystery, is my belief.
Recently, there has been a surge of popularity for Our Liz as she reaches 60 years on the throne. Suddenly she is our gem, our diamond Queen, and that’s to be expected.
But I believe most people had already come to regard her as the ultimate national treasure anyway.
It is because, as time has gone on, the Queen has come to represent the opposite of the way life is going. Which is, if nothing else, refreshing. Personally, I find it reassuring.
As everything has become faster, more frantic, more celebrity-obsessed, the Queen has stayed calm and dutiful.
That she has been able to do this because of her privileged position there is no question but, still, all credit to her. She could have handled it much differently – and much worse. Many do.
The key to it all is that the Queen is both a huge celebrity and the very opposite of a celebrity all at the same time. It’s a clever trick, and one that only a very determined woman could pull off.
So though crowds gather, she determinedly has no presence; though she is always on parade, she refuses to put on a show.
Just watch the Queen walk – she always has the look of a country housewife off to buy some eggs. Who knows what she is really thinking? It’s a secret.
It doesn’t matter who is there, what pomp surrounds her, what ceremony is being performed in her honour.
It doesn’t matter if she has been hauled aloft a camel, or dragged onto a raft of reeds and carried shoulder high; it doesn’t matter if an exuberant foreign tribe has decided to give her the birthday bumps, or enrobed her in feathers, or encased her in jewels.
It doesn’t matter if her sensible shoes have been dragged off her feet, or if she has been forced into fluffy socks, or slapped under a headdress of old tin cans. Inside the Queen’s head, in the slope of her shoulders, the angle of her handbag, and the set of her mouth, she is off to buy half a dozen of the freshest she can find. As far as we can tell.
If that isn’t enough of a smokescreen, she has an even smarter trick up her sleeve, alongside her hankie. The Queen has spent a lifetime perfecting the art of delivering a speech as if it is her grocery list.
She can be speaking at the United Nations, in the American House of Representatives, in the House of Lords. It matters not. The Queen can make anything sound like a shopping list from the mid-1950s. Meanwhile, her mind could be running riot, for all we know.
Over time, we have grown to love this quality about her. I have anyway – and let’s not pretend I’m alone. We all love her.
Who the Queen really is, we will never know. She will always present the image of a woman out shopping for eggs. If you know someone who looks like that – look again.
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Print this page- Politics: Mark Hookham's Westminster blog - 5.33pm
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