The Queen? She’s just like Andy Warhol
The only time I ever talked to the Queen she reminded me of no one so much as the American pop-artist Andy Warhol, who was, as it happens, only two years her junior.
Of course, in the looks department the two were easy to distinguish. Apart from anything else, Warhol wore a white Worzel Gummidge-style wig at an oblique angle, whereas the Queen’s hair remains resolutely her own. Their clothes, too, were very different, with the Queen favouring more formal tailoring, and Warhol making less of an effort.
But the two of them shared very much the same approach to conversation, which was to express a generalised enthusiasm while giving back very little in return.
I once spent three or four days following Warhol and rarely heard him say anything other than ‘gee’, or ‘gee, that’s great’, no matter who he was speaking to.
The Queen employs the same sort of conversational stonewalling tactic, saying either ‘how interesting’ or ‘ that must be interesting’, and thereby encouraging the other person to rabbit on about themselves.
Last week, Polly Toynbee, The Guardian’s Tut-Tutter-in Chief, celebrated the Queen’s forthcoming record as the longest- serving monarch in British history by describing her sourly as ‘the past mistress of nothingness’.
Coincidentally, this is the type of observation often levelled at Andy Warhol, though, in the bleak world of modern art, ‘nothingness’ is generally taken as a compliment.
The blabbermouth historian Dr David Starkey echoed Toynbee when he wrote in the new Radio Times that the Queen ‘ has done and said nothing that anybody will remember’.
There is, it must be said, a smidgin of truth in their observations. No one on earth has met a greater number of other people than Queen elizabeth II — even if you modestly estimate it as 30 new people for most days of her reign, the total comes to well over half a million. Yet this most closely observed of all women rarely leaves any real impression on those she has encountered, beyond vague notions of her ‘radiance’ and ‘sense of duty’.
She continues to bamboozle countless biographers, too, leaving them with nothing to cling on to. One of her most recent, Sally Bedell Smith, dutifully interviewed a wide range of people with whom the Queen had come into contact, but emerged virtually empty-handed.
Readers of the resulting book, elizabeth The Queen, must have struggled to keep their eyes open at such revelations as (on a 2010 visit to the Castle of Mey): ‘The Queen queried the staff about visitor numbers and inquired about the new radiant heating on the ground floor’; and (on a 2009 trip to Kingston upon hull): ‘ Throughout the day elizabeth II smiled frequently and moved unhurriedly.’
At one point, when she interviews a football manager who has peeked inside the Queen’s handbag, it looks as though Bedell Smith might have a scoop on her hands. But no: he reveals that it containedt ‘ the things youy would expect — make- up, purse, sweeteners she put in her coffee, the normal stuff’.
Small wonder that, after hundreds of pages, even her liveliest biographer, Gyles Brandreth, is driven to conclude: ‘ I can tell you exactly what the Queen is like. She has the interests, attributes and tastes of an english (or Scottish)t countrywoman of her class and generation.’ This may be true, s so far as it goes; but it still doesn’t go v very far.
In recent years, creative writers have striven to fill the void by investing her with a Dalai Lama-style ‘inner wisdom’ quite at odds with Brandreth’s more humdrum assessment.
In both his film The Queen and his play The Audience, Peter Morgan suggests, on precious little evidence, that she is infinitely sharper and wiser than any of her prime ministers or courtiers.
SIMILARLY, Alan Bennett in A Question Of Attribution, his play about Anthony Blunt, has the Queen delivering brilliantly clever oneliners of a standard never matched by her real-life counterpart.
For instance, when Blunt opines that portrait painters are ‘seldom standard-bearers for the avantgarde’, the Queen retorts: ‘ They would hardly be painting me if they were. One doesn’t want two noses. Mind you, that would make one no more unrecognisable than some of their efforts.
‘No resemblance at all. Sometimes I think it would be simpler to send round to Scotland Yard for an identikit . . .’
Blunt then says: ‘It’s true none of them quite capture you.’
To which the Queen replies: ‘I hope not. I don’t think one wants to be captured, does one? Not entirely, anyway.’
In life, as in art, this may prove her trump card: after 63 years and 210 days on the throne, whether by accident or by design, her Majesty has still evaded capture.