She never stops changing
The older the Queen gets, the more she changes
Hailing the talent of Elizabeth II for dignified adaptation
At a Palace garden party, I learnt a useful tip for anyone plotting a royal introduction: play down your importance. There are roughly 8,000 guests at every garden party, all of them invited for some sort of contribution to society. A team of retired military men called Gentlemen Ushers meander through the crowd making small talk and picking out people who will be invited to have a chat with the Queen. These wily old birds apply two criteria. The first is variety. ‘If one clergyman turns up and two down the lane is another clergyman, he’s out of luck,’ the senior Gentleman Usher told me. But the second is VIP status — it is a positive handicap. ‘We do avoid those who, in their normal lives, had a better opportunity to meet the royal family — mayors and people like that.’
Before the Queen’s reign, the only people who would be invited to these events were nobility, debutantes and senior politicians. Now, the pyramid has been inverted. Until the mid-Nineties, there was still a rule that guests could only bring a spouse and/or unmarried daughters under the age of 25 (a throwback to the deb days). Then that changed, too. Everyone could bring a guest of whatever ilk and either sex. ‘The Queen said that every guest invited on their own should have the opportunity to bring along a member of the family, a neighbour, a friend,’ explained one of the Garden Party Ladies, the dedicated team of part-timers who spend months writing 40,000 invitations. ‘It’s always lovely to talk about something you’re enjoying if you’ve come all the way from Northern Ireland or Leeds or Truro and you’re wandering round these lovely gardens.’
At an age when all of her contemporaries have long since retired, the Queen is evidently happy to jettison many of the conventions of her own class and generation.
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Suresh Dogra
December 12th, 2007 7:07pmThe Queen is great.It is a personage of her stature that is the strongest argument for the continuation of monarchy in Great Britain.