by Alan Bennett
‘One is often said to have a fund of common sense, but that’s another way of saying one doesn’t have much else and accordingly, perhaps, I have at the instance of my various governments been forced to participate if only passively in decisions I consider ill-advised and often shameful. Sometimes one has felt like a scented candle, sent in to perfume a regime or aerate a policy, monarchy these days just a government-issue deodorant.
‘I am the Queen and head of the Commonwealth, but there have been many times in the last fifty years when that has made me feel not pride but shame. However,’ and here she stood up, ‘we must not lose our sense of priorities and this is a party after all, so before I continue shall we now have some champagne?’
The champagne was superb but, seeing that one of the pages doing the serving was Norman, the prime minister lost all taste for it and slipped along the corridor to the toilet, where he got on his mobile to the attorney general. The lawyer did much to reassure him and, fortified by his legal advice, the prime minister was able to pass the message round the members of the cabinet, so that when Her Majesty came back into the room it was a more resilient group that awaited her.
‘We’ve been talking about what you said, ma’am,’ began the prime minister.
‘All in good time,’ said the Queen. ‘One hasn’t quite finished. I wouldn’t want you to think that what I am planning to write and indeed have already started writing is some cheap, tell-tale life-in-the-palace nonsense beloved of the tabloids. No. One has never written a book before but one hopes that it will,’ she paused, ‘transcend its circumstances and stand on its own. It will, I trust, be a tangential history of its times and, you’ll perhaps be reassured to learn, far from exclusively to do with politics or the events of one’s life. I’d like to talk about books, too, and people. But not gossip. I don’t care for gossip. A roundabout book. I think it was E. M. Forster who said: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant – success in circuit lies.” Or was it,’ she asked the room, ‘Emily Dickinson?’
Unsurprisingly, the room did not answer.
‘But one mustn’t talk about it or it will never get written.’
It was no comfort to the prime minister to reflect that whereas most people when claiming to want to write a book would never get it written, with the Queen and her terrible sense of duty it could be guaranteed that she would.
‘Now, prime minister,’ she turned to him gaily, ‘you were saying?’
The prime minister rose. ‘Respectful as we are of your intentions, ma’am,’ the prime minister’s tone was casual and friendly, ‘I think I have to remind you that you are in a unique position.’
‘I seldom forget it,’ said the Queen. ‘Go on.’
‘The monarch has, I think I’m right in saying, never published a book.’
The Queen shook her finger at him, a gesture that in the moment of making it she remembered was a mannerism of Noël Coward’s. ‘That isn’t quite true, prime minister. My ancestor Henry VIII, for instance, wrote a book. Against heresy. That is why one is still called Defender of the Faith. So, too, did my namesake Elizabeth I.’
The prime minister was about to protest.
‘No, one knows it isn’t the same, but my great-grandmother Queen Victoria, she wrote a book also, Leaves from a Highland Journal, and a pretty tedious book it is, too, and so utterly without offence as to be almost unreadable. It’s not a model one would want to follow. And then of course,’ and the Queen looked hard at her first minister, ‘there was my uncle the Duke of Windsor, he wrote a book, A King’s Story, the history of his marriage and subsequent adventures. If nothing else, that surely counts as a precedent?’
Furnished with the advice of the attorney general on this point, the prime minister smiled and almost apologetically made his objection. ‘Yes, ma’am, I agree, but the difference, surely, is that His Royal Highness wrote the book as Duke of Windsor. He could only write it because he had abdicated.’
‘Oh, did I not say that?’ said the Queen. ‘But . . . why do you think you’re all here?’