Corgi and Bess: More Wit and Wisdom from the House of Windsor. Thomas Blaikie

it was modernised in the 1970s, Sandringham was a terrible fire hazard. Frequent fire drills were necessary, during which members of the Royal Family would stand in one corner of the lawn, waiting to be counted, while other departments of the Household stood in other corners. On one occasion, Princess Margaret failed to appear. A harried maid appealed to the Queen Mother for help in getting her out of bed but the Princess’s mother just said, ‘Oh, well, she’ll just have to burn, won’t she?’

      When the Royal Family were touring South Africa together in 1947, Princess Elizabeth, as she then was, used her umbrella as a kind of cattle-prod if her mother, the Queen, was lingering too long in idle conversation. A quick jab in the ankles usually did the trick.

      Princess Margaret claimed that she drove the Lord Chamberlain up the wall by forever altering her funeral arrangements. At one time she had a whim to be buried at sea. But all the chopping and changing was worth it because what could have been more perfect than the ruse she finally came up with — to be cremated (never mind the indignity of Slough public crematorium) in order to be sufficiently reduced in size to fit snugly into the kingly tomb of her parents, George VI and Queen Elizabeth, leaving Lilibet to fend for herself elsewhere.

      At lunch at Windsor the Queen mentioned Gravadlax, at the time a novelty. ‘It’s pickled,’ she explained. ‘Raw salmon. Pickled. Quite extraordinary.’ The other guests were intrigued, but Princess Margaret took exception. ‘No, it isn’t. It’s smoked,’ she insisted. The Queen explained patiently she had tried it herself, had made inquiries as to how it was made. ‘No, it’s smoked,’ said Margaret. ‘Otherwise it would go bad.’ They carried on like this, good-naturedly, for some time until the Queen deftly changed the subject.^*

      At a military dinner a drunken soldier staggered towards Princess Margaret, but before he could say anything disgraceful, the Colonel-in-Chief had the presence of mind to shout: ‘Go away and sit down!’ As they watched the man lurching back to his place, the Princess said, ‘That’s just what the Queen’s always saying to her corgis but they don’t take a blind bit of notice.’

      It’s bad form to wear white to a wedding — competing with the bride. So why did the Queen choose a white wool coat for the Charles and Camilla Blessing Service in 2005? Especially suspicious when you think it’s not a colour she usually wears. And then, during the service, she upstaged the entire congregation by being the only one who could sing the whole of ‘Immortal, invisible’ without once referring to the service sheet.

      Early on in her affair with the Prince of Wales, Wallis Simpson began to get ideas above her station. Visiting Buckingham Palace at the Prince’s insistence but, as far as everybody else was concerned, absolutely on sufferance, she looked out of the window and saw some of Queen Mary’s favourite flower-beds. ‘When I live here,’ she remarked appreciatively, ‘those will be tennis-courts.’

      There was much controversy over the ‘improvements’ Raine Spencer, Princess Diana’s stepmother, made at Althorp. Particularly loathed was the ugly double-glazing, which was awkward to open and which the present Earl has largely removed. Visiting in the 1980s, Princess Diana complained about the lack of ventilation in her bedroom. But later in the visit she came up with a straightforward solution: she smashed the glass.

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      ‘I suppose he will want me to call him Tony,’ was the Queen’s way of greeting Blair’s 1997 landslide victory.

      Trying to be friendly, Cherie Blair allegedly said to Princess Anne, ‘Do call me Cherie.’ ‘I think not actually,’ was the Princess Royal’s reply.

      At Exeter Town Hall, not long after the foot and mouth crisis, the Queen encountered a member of the public who said, ‘This Government doesn’t care about the countryside.’ ‘I know,’ the Queen replied. ‘That’s what I’m always telling Mr Blair when I see him every week.’

      Tell me a little more about what you’ve been doing?’ the Queen asked a man whom she was about to invest with a CBE. ‘I’ve been arguing with the Government,’ he replied. Her Majesty seemed to be on his wavelength straightaway. ‘Yes, governments do need arguing with sometimes,’ she remarked.

      ‘Who will be my conscience?’ the Queen demanded after discovering that Tony Blair intended to abolish the post of Lord Chancellor. She was especially displeased that she had been kept in the dark on this occasion. ‘Nobody tells me anything,’ she complained to astonished onlookers in Edinburgh.

      When, in the 1970s, the 1st Lord of the Admiralty was sent for, he found the Queen in a less than amenable frame of mind. Her froideur was occasioned by the public row that was going on about the cost of refitting the Royal Yacht Britannia. But the 1st Lord thought he had got the situation under control. All he needed to do was to explain in great detail what was the matter with Britannia.