THE QUEEN MOTHER'S CIRCLE
Nicholas Coleridge on the
surprising mixed company found in a royal sphere of influence
IRANIAN emigres still revere Timur Khan Mir Panji, mother of the last Shah, as the ultimate Queen Mother. Disagree- able, spiteful and vacillating, she gave the most enjoyable dinner parties in Teheran, at the Niavaran Palace. Anybody at all might be there, providing they were rich, and her habit of sending free air tickets to acquaintances in New York, Cairo and Paris, paperclipped to 'At Home' cards, ensured a diverting supply of international gossip. Timur Khan Mir Panji had grasped the sine qua non of being Queen Mother. Almost nobody, deftly approached, can resist an invitation from the Begum. And her circle of influence, absolved from the strictures of protocol, can be wider than that of the monarch.
Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, does not aspire to the louche soirees of Niavaran, where the heat was so intense that ice sculptures were replaced three times during dinner and condensation dripped from the ceiling into platters of Caspian red. On the contrary, the Queen Mother's parties can be chilly. Visitors to Birkhall on the Balmoral estate, where she spends the early autumn, rate it one of the ten coldest houses in Scotland. This citation is the more telling for coming from the hardiest guests in Britain: the succession of port-red worthies, half as old as time, and spirited jock-the-lairds who are invited up for the fishing.
The Queen Mother's circle has changed over the last five years. As her own contemporaries have, one by one, left gaps in the rota of lunch-party guests, so she has sought younger substitutes. (Throughout this analysis the notion 'young' is employed loosely. Youth, in the Queen Mother's circle, means the 60-year-old children of her friends. Fifty-year-olds are approaching maturity. Below that, guests blur into a dizzy adolescence, with no distinction made between the 20 or 40- year-old visitor: 'You're all so young.') The arrival of new faces has been seg- mented. In the improbable event of the Queen Mother knowing what it is, she would see that her circle resembles a Pizza Quattro Stagioni with four distinct areas of texture and taste — venerable slices of peperoni, bland, reliable mozzarella, ele- gant fronds of asparagus and slivers of tangy anchovy — the whole dish underpin- ned by a crusty dough of protocol. Friends entertained at Birkhall or the Castle of Mey in Caithness can only wonder at the less trenchant gatherings at Clarence House and the weekend parties of art experts and musical buffs at Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park, while the drawing- room intellectuals at Clarence House and Royal Lodge are only too relieved to be spared the walking and stalking in the far north.
How much power does the Queen Mother's circle have? None at all in a formal sense. No network of retainers in Tottenham or Handsworth keeps her hour- ly apprised of the state of the nation, nor does she wield any political clout. Her influence, however, especially in the fields of art, racing, chintzy biography and royal- ty is discernible, and she is at pains to keep it so. If people catch her eye in the newspapers or at the ballet, and she is interested by them, then she invites them to lunch. Tycoons and captains of industry particularly intrigue her. She is gratified, when next talking to the Duke of Edin- burgh, to let drop that some beleaguered industrialist was only last week explaining to her the inside story of a dispute. Rivalry between the royal households to be 'street- wise' is considerable.
Her lunch parties at Clarence House are made up of three parts retainers to two parts fresh blood. In common with the rest of the royal family, the Queen Mother will never diminish the home team too much, in case the party becomes over-fun and anarchy breaks out. She relishes poised, witty repartee, but recoils from gossip. The balance is not easy to achieve, and she depends on her courtiers — her private secretary, Sir Martin Gilliat, her treasurer Sir Ralph Anstruther, her comptroller Sir Alistair Aird — to maintain a sense of decorum. One member of her circle com- pares lunching with the Queen Mother to a group of leaving-boys lunching with their headmaster on their last day at school: a certain latitude is permissible, even appropriate, but it is still the headmaster you're lunching with and term isn't quite over. The scene at Clarence House is rendered yet more formidable by the pre- sence of the ladies-in-waiting. There are seven of these, and at least two may confidently be expected to lend gravitas to any placement: the Dowager Duchess of Abercorn, Mistress of the Robes, the Dowager Viscountess Hambleden, Lady Grimthorpe, Lady Fermoy, Mrs Patrick Campbell-Preston, Lady Angela Oswald and Lady Elizabeth Basset. All these women have two or more of the following qualities: deep knowledge of racing, a house in Norfolk or a convoluted kinship with the Princess of Wales. They also, says a historical biographer who recently lun- ched at Clarence House, have a disconcert- ing habit of confusing you with someone else, having briefed themselves beforehand with a potted biography and muddled the names. The resolve with Which one lady-in- waiting discussed through three courses the English Garden, of which the biographer had no knowledge at all, was intimidating.
The Clarence House set tends towards the elderly arts establishment: Sir Frederick Ashton, Lord Drogheda, Sir Alec Guinness, Sir Fitzroy Maclean, Nor- man St John-Stevas, Lord Annan, Sir Hugh Casson, Duke Hussey, Derek Hill, Peter Coates. Conversation is droll, yield- ing and anecdotal, each anecdote leading seamlessly to the next. Stories are relished. The mention of John Piper reminds some- one of how he was once many years ago painting a view of Ely Cathedral from the water meadows, when a heifer nudged his easel. Laughter at the end of each set piece is appreciative.
Scandal, on the other hand, is not only discouraged but disallowed. At the first indication of an intime story, it is headed off, firmly if need be. This is not because the Queen Mother is especially prudish, rather that there is no protocol for reacting to a risque story. Guests associated with scandal, however tangentially, are drop- ped. When the gardening writer George Plumptre married a divorcee, he quietly disappeared from the scene. Kenneth Rose's suggestion in his biography of George V that the King might have allowed the Czar to be killed, removed his card from the Clarence House rota-deck.
The Queen Mother is skilful at dousing hot conversations. She has developed a shemozzle with the pepper pot in which she pretends to search for it on the table, then has trouble making it work, which allows her to appeal mid-conversation to the man on her other side, and not turn back. Bumptiods guests are further disorientated by comprehensive tours of her art collec- tion. Properly guided, it takes a good hour to inspect the Augustus Johns, Wilkies, Landseers, Lelys and Fra Angelico. Her praise of Edward Seago's Norfolk land- scapes, of which she owns several, is fulsome.
Surrounded though she is by anecdotal- ists, the Queen Mother prefers discussing the present to the past. Long reminiscences irritate her; she gets impatient and butts in. She is the only royal who will compete in a conversation. Her voice, on these occa- sions, becomes high-pitched, emphatic and devastatingly grand. 'We're all quite lawst,' she despairs, mid-anecdote. Politically she is informed, despite lacking a Labour politician presentable enough to come into lunch. She misses James Callaghan. Nor has she satisfactorily replaced Norman St John-Stevas as her Tory Cabinet mole. Two particular hetes noires are upper-class socialists (`traitors' — she is dubious of the Mountbatten brand of Fabianism) and the modern novel (`vulgar'). A discussion at a lunch party with the poet Clive James about 'Martian' verse did not reassure her about that, either. A favourite author is P. G. Wodehouse.
She lunches with female friends in their houses and flats. Old-style grands like Molly Salisbury, Sybil Cholmondeley and Sally Westminster give proper lunch par- ties for her once a year. Diana Cooper used to, but lately attends only the return matches at Clarence House. Maureen, Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava is said to spend most of the year choosing 14 amus- ing but not over-amusing friends for her own annual effort. Periodically the Queen Mother lunches with Prince Jean Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge, a mysterious fellow of the kind featured in Town & Country magazine, who arranges chateau tours of
the Loire and also, novelty of novelties, outings to restaurants.
Not a reader of newspapers beyond the racing pages, she does skim magazines. She does not approve of her friends, especially aristocratic ones, being profiled at home 'with great colour photographs'. She affects surprise that anyone should wish to profile her in any detail. The Queen Mother finds no dichotomy be- tween the civil list (£334,400 in 1985) and wishing to safeguard her privacy. She does not subscribe to the theory that the royal family and aristocracy are kept on to help fill the space.
She champions after-dinner games: `doing' games rather than pencil-and-paper ones. The abstract disturbs her; she likes guests to have a properly defined purpose, rather than sitting back being reflective, Charades at Royal Lodge is seen as a leveller of intellectuals; it delighted her to humiliate Anthony Blunt and Sir John Pope-Hennessey by making them imitate elephants. At Royal Lodge she entertains not only her opera friends, like George and Mary Christie, but the racing set — people like Lord Leverhulme — who watch race meetings on television with her and grum- ble when the broadcast switches to athle- tics from Crystal Palace. Royal Lodge is also one of the few places where she sees her Windsor grandchildren. Contrary to the 'radiant supergran' myth, the Queen Mother sees her grandchildren rather in- frequently. With the exception of the Prince of Wales, she finds their conversation insufficiently sophisticated. Securing appropriate youth is a constant problem for her household. Particularly at the Castle of Mey, she likes to include several spirited young men in the party. (But not young women, who are a nuisance to amuse.) As her own friends have be- come older, the supply of readily available candidates has dwindled. From time to time, on glossy magazines such as Harpers & Queen and the Taller, pretty young social girls are required for beauty photo- graphs. On these occasions the magazine staff ring up everyone they know, asking: `Can you think of a girl about 18, blonde, maybe quite grand, who can be photo- graphed next Monday, we're desperate?' The Queen Mother's household uses much the same system in their efforts to find 25-year-old, conventional, reasonably charming, ideally Old Etonian but not essential, good shot, by-all-means Army, young men to take the sleeper to Caith- ness. Considering how arbitrary it all is, the system works well and the right stuff rise instinctively to the occasion. An annual fixture is Sir Martin Gilliat's birthday treat to the theatre. This involves considerable planning since the show must be above reproach. It is surprising how many plays, appropriate enough in the first act, culminate in an uncalled-for sex romp before the final curtain. Four-letter words cause embarrassment, not, she says, be- cause they upset her, but because the entire audience turns round to study her reaction. Sir Martin, a theatrical angel, perseveres. Noel Coward revivals are a happy solution. After the play the Queen Mother thanks the cast. Thanking and leave-taking is her strongest suit. Her gift as a hostess is remembering people's plans and alluding to an earlier conversation with a flattering reference: 'I'm so looking forward to reading your book/ seeing your play/ watching your horse in the Cesarewitch.' Only very rarely will she subsequently express an opinion, esp- ecially of a book. If she doesn't like it, the author won't in any case be around to answer her criticisms.
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