Craig Brown Shares Five Witty Moments With Queen Elizabeth II

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In private, the Queen could be quite acerbic about people, but she tended to be much more diplomatic in public. However, when the BBC were filming her having her portrait painted by Rolf Harris in 2005, Harris asked if she remembered her very first portrait sitting.

‘Yes. László,’ she replied. ‘Horrid he was. Hm.’

'Was he?’ said Harris.

‘Yes,’ she said, pulling a face. ‘Well, he was one of those people who wanted you to sit permanently looking at him.’

Her judgement seems uncharacteristically severe; after all, most portrait painters prefer their sitters to stay in one place, holding one look. Philip de László himself had much happier memories of their sitting, which took place in 1933, when the Queen was just seven years old. He remembered her as ‘a very intelligent and beautiful little girl’ who showed ‘no sign of shyness’. At one of their sessions, she said confidentially, ‘I'm going to tell you something, Mr de László, that will surprise you ... I paint too, and I'm a very good painter. I'll bring some of my work next time and show you.’ But he was to remember her at the next sitting as ‘very sleepy and restless’, having just come from her grandmother's birthday lunch. This may account for her impatience with him.

De László was born in 1869. In 1900, he painted the ninety-year-old Pope Leo XIII. Thus the same man who painted Pope Leo XIII, who was born in 1810, also painted Queen Elizabeth II, who died in 2022 – an extraordinary leap of 212 years across time.

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It is reckoned that, at one time or another, a third of all Britons dreamt about the Queen. In this way, she inhabited our national psyche. Correct behaviour, and the fear of transgression, was at the heart of most of these dreams: she knew how to behave, and we didn't. In Freudian terms, she was our super-ego; in Christian terms, our conscience. 

Writing A Voyage Around the Queen, I gathered a selection of these dreams. The comic novelist Kingsley Amis regularly dreamt of kissing the Queen, but whenever he suggested they take it further, she replied, ‘No, Kingsley, we mustn't.’ Graham Greene's dream found him and the Queen both in fits of giggles during a service in St George's Chapel, Windsor. Then Prince Philip entered, wearing a scoutmaster's uniform. ‘I can't bear the way he smiles,’ the Queen whispered. 

More recently, Boris Johnson confessed to the Queen that he had just dreamt he was late for a meeting with her. ‘Oh yes,’ she replied, in a tone that suggested other prime ministers had confessed to similar dreams. ‘And were you naked?’  

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In dreams and in life, the Queen was a window into her subjects' hopes and anxieties. When they dreamt of her, they dreamt of themselves. When they spoke of her, they spoke of themselves.

The words the Queen spoke often seemed, as if by magic, to vanish into the air. Afterwards, those she encountered could remember only what they had said, and how they had behaved: the Queen's words would evaporate, leaving her subjects with memories only of themselves.

In this way, she acted as a mirror. Those by nature wary of the Queen convinced themselves that she regarded them with equal suspicion. When the burly Labour MP John Prescott first met her in 1970, he had been determined not to bow. ‘When it came to my turn, she mumbled something,’ he said. ‘I couldn't hear what it was, so naturally I bent down. She just smiled. She knew she'd got me. As far as everyone watching was concerned, it looked as if I was bowing.’

In a way, she lived the life of an outcast, to be approached with fear or pity or curiosity or awe, but never with indifference. This meant that few behaved in her presence as they would with anybody else. However much she tried to set people at their ease, the atmosphere around her was invariably sticky. ‘When royalty leaves the room,’ the American socialite Nora Langhorne once observed, ‘it's like getting a seed out of your tooth.’

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The Queen's favourite indoor pastime was jigsaws, the bigger the better. Every Christmas a massive jigsaw puzzle was placed on a large table at Sandringham. Ostensibly, it was for the Royal Family and their guests, but one equerry reckoned the Queen herself did 60 per cent of the work. When Eddie Mirzoeff, the producer and director of the BBC's Elizabeth R documentary, visited Sandringham in 1990, he found her bent double over a 2000-piece jigsaw. ‘That looks terribly difficult,’ he said.

‘It's much more difficult than the one we did yesterday,’ came the reply.

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Jigsaws appeal to those who like to make order out of chaos. Corgis offer the reverse. They are jigsaw pieces gone haywire: jigsaw pieces with legs. In such a regimented life, a life dictated by order, convention, duty and dignity, was it the randomness of her corgis that so appealed to the Queen? They offered her no respect, no awe, and only the barest shred of obedience. They barked when they should have kept quiet, ran about when they should have stayed still and snapped at whoever was to hand, regardless of status. They knew nothing of deference or dignity. They were four-legged dictators, drunken toddlers, hoodlums on the rampage. 

This was what she relished about them, and why she kept as many as twelve at a time. Prince Philip used to grow irritated by the way they kept blocking his path. ‘Bloody dogs! Why do you have to have so many?’ he once snapped. ‘Because they're so collectable,’ she replied.