Don’t mention the smut
Warning to Queen over Denmark’s porn industry before she met monarch
IT is hard to imagine that the Queen would feel the need to discuss Denmark’s thriving pornography industry.
But before she met Margrethe II during the Queen of Denmark’s state visit to the UK in 1974, she was advised not to mention the nation’s ‘reputation as the pornography capital of Europe’.
Royal biographer and Mail writer Robert Hardman told the Chalke Valley History Festival yesterday how the information was included in a briefing note for Her Majesty.
‘Whenever she’s meeting any world leader there’s always two files she studies very closely,’ Hardman explained. ‘One is called “personality notes” and the other “topics to be avoided”. They don’t hold back, either.’
One entry in ‘personality notes’ about an unnamed Caribbean prime minister in 1977 described him as ‘ unbalanced, at times to the point of apparent derangement’ and ‘ a ladies’ man with a particular liking for blondes’.
The pornography issue appeared in the ‘ topics to be avoided’ file ahead of the meeting with the Queen of Denmark. It said: ‘Danes are sensitive about Denmark’s reputation as the pornography capital of Europe.’
Hardman, whose book Queen Of Our Times: The Life Of Elizabeth II came out this year, told an audience at the festival, held annually near Salisbury in Wiltshire and sponsored by the Daily Mail: ‘I think two queens are fairly unlikely to stray into that territory.’
On the ‘personal effort’ that goes into her dealings with world leaders, he also revealed the importance of ‘wardrobe diplomacy’ in his talk, which was supported by The Rothermere Foundation.
On her first state visit to Germany in 1965, which was ‘an historic post-war moment’, she ‘absolutely nailed it’ at a state banquet having commissioned a dress matching the rococo decor of the palace where it was held.
Hardman added: ‘She didn’t need to say a word, they were absolutely bowled over by that – what a compliment.’ She has become such an institution that she now even has her own entry in the German dictionary.
He said: ‘Duden does for German what the Oxford Dictionary does for English. It’s got “die Königin” – your bog-standard, regular queen. But now it has “die Queen”.’