The Queen can say more by the gnomic method of talking less

When you meet the Queen you are not meant to question her. This made things more difficult for Alastair Bruce when he spoke with her for The Coronation, a documentary to be shown tomorrow. It wasn’t an interview. The Queen doesn’t give interviews.

Discussing the heavy crown, Professor Bruce almost breaks into a question: “You have to keep your head very still…”

“Yes, and you can’t look down,” the Queen replies. “Because if you did, your neck would break.”

Their interchange might be called stilted. I think it would better be called gnomic. The gnomic convention of poetry in English, which goes back to the glory days before the Conquest, affirms the reality of things by stating facts. Fire burns. Ice freezes. Iron is hard. Or: “Your neck would break.”

Imagine having to meet some youngsters in hospital you had never met before, all of them wounded in the Manchester Arena bombing. What on earth would you say? The Queen last year managed it magnificently with minimal fuss. “Very wicked,” she said of the act that left so many injured. Then, when someone made a hopeful remark, she said: “It’s very interesting how everybody has united.”

By saying these commonplace things, the Queen affirmed what everyone recognised to be true. Her intentions – to comfort, in the twin senses of consoling and strengthening – were made plain by the very fact of her being there. The things she said aloud consisted, as it were, in the things that went without saying.

This exercise was naturally one of trust. The Queen was not, like some here today and gone tomorrow politician, concerned with the impression she would make. It was taken for granted that the wounded and the medical staff would be pleased by her presence, which, as she is head of state, was another way of the nation saying its thoughts were with them.

The gnomic convention of royal conversation is eminently given to calling a spade a spade. It does so in spades. Meeting a woman police commander at a Buckingham Palace garden party, the Queen was told that she had been on duty during a visit by the Chinese. “Bad luck,” said the Queen, and then “They were very rude to the ambassador.” This wasn’t said for public consumption, but it was true and said to someone who knew it was true and knew that her dutiful police work was recognised as being no walk in the park.

All this is very different from the emoting, gushing and explaining how things felt, which are the staple of eye-witness interviews given for news broadcasts. Being the monarch is a condition, not a prize to strive for (like leading a political party), and by straining least it is most easily heard. As the Queen puts it in tomorrow’s programme: “There are some disadvantages to crowns, but otherwise they’re quite important things.”

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