Just don’t mention the Danish blue...

IT TURNS out that the Queen, rather like my husband, is given a list of “topics to be avoided” when she meets world leaders. Not that my husband meets many world leaders, but I do like to give him the heads up when we attend a social event. Better to be safe than sorry.

Don’t ask X how his wife is, I tell him, because they’re getting divorced and she’s gone to Dubai with her toyboy.

Don’t ask after Y’s second cousin because he died in 2020.

Don’t say anything awful about that bloke in the Treasury, because he was at school with Z’s son.

And don’t go on about trans, because last Christmas our hostess’s daughter said that she had to be called Humphrey.

The Queen, according to royal biographer Robert Hardman, gets two folders when she meets someone new. One is called “personality notes” and the other “topics to be avoided”.

In 1974 when she met Queen Margrethe of Denmark she was advised not to mention the country’s “reputation as the porn capital of Europe”. Reasonable advice, even if it seems most unlikely Her Majesty would ever embark on a discussion of Danish blue... unless it was the cheese.

Though it’s possible Prince Philip could have blundered into the royal chit-chat with a fruity appreciation of the 1971 Danish art film 24 Hourswith Ilse.

The trouble with “topics to be avoided”, is once you know you are not supposed to mention something you invariably do.

Like Basil’s mantra in Fawlty Towers – “don’t mention the war” – when the German guests arrive. It is inevitable he would end up goose-stepping out the dining room.

Jeremy Hunt’s surname is another hostage to fortune, most recently misspoken by Sophy Ridge on Sky News.

But it’s not the first time. Victoria Derbyshire, James Naughtie, Nicky Campbell and Carrie Gracie have done it.

Top broadcasters all... irresistibly drawn to the C-bomb like moths to the flame. Poor Hunt. Perhaps he should change his name.

The actress Diana Dors wisely changed her name from Diana Fluck.

But when she was invited to open a fete in her home town of Swindon the presiding vicar was so terrified of getting it wrong that he said: “We have with us today Diana Dors, whom many of you here in Swindon will remember as Doris Klunt.”

Years ago I went to a charity do for a well-known hospice.

The main speaker was the recently married Duchess of York whose gaffe-prone tendencies were yet to be fully recognised.

She was very effusive about the good work of the hospice and announced she was “dying” to come back for another visit.

You could have heard a pin drop.

‘You could have heard a pin drop’