Jeremy Clarke Jeremy Clarke

Why I love Her Majesty

As a child I counted it as great good fortune to be born the subject of a queen, and one so beautiful

[Photo by J. Quinton/WireImage]

I’ve often wondered whether Her Majesty the Queen glances through The Spectator from time to time. And if she does, I wonder whether her kindly eye lights on this column. And if it does, I wonder what she thinks of what she reads there.

‘Philip, there’s a man here writing about going to the Cheltenham Festival and messing his pents.’ ‘Very easily done at Cheltenham, my dear. I’ve often wondered why nobody has written about it before.’ Or, ‘Philip here’s that man again, the one who messed his pents at Cheltenham, assisting the ferret-judging at a country show. It’s frightfully interesting. The judge takes so long to judge each class, they drive a car into the tent so that he can judge them in the headlights.’ ‘Does he mess his pents again?’ ‘He doesn’t say.’

Karsh’s 1951 photo portrait of Princess Elizabeth hung in the family home until my mother died in 2019, aged 89. As a child I counted it as great good fortune to be born the subject of a queen, and one so beautiful. The feeling has increased, with the additional wonder that she has ruled over me with integrity and humility until she is the only one left in the kingdom – the one righteous individual staying God’s hand against us in our iniquity.

If the Queen appeared on the telly, my father would stand before the set and sort of gurgle reverently

My parents would never have called themselves royalists, which would have associated the Queen with a vulgar ‘ism’, implying choice. She was our sovereign, the privilege was ours, that was that. Everyone we knew thought the same. To have spoken about the Queen with familiarity would have been an impertinence. If she appeared on the television, my father would stand before the set and sort of gurgle reverently.

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