The Queen is one Brit Macron can warm to

He may not have much respect for the ‘Clown’, but when it comes to the Queen Emmanuel Macron is as smitten as his compatriots.

With political relations between France and Britain at their coldest for decades, and Macron reportedly regarding Prime Minister Boris Johnson as more suitable for the circus, the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee has provided the French president with an opportunity to warm up his rhetoric.

In a video address to Her Majesty published on Thursday, Macron praised the constancy of the Queen’s Francophilia throughout her 70 years on the throne. ‘Times have changed, Europe has evolved, our continent is again experiencing war,’ said Macron. ‘Through these transformations, your devotion to our alliance and to our friendship has remained, and has helped build the trust that brought freedom and prosperity to our continent.’

There were clues in the two-minute homage that perhaps the president wants his second term in office to bring better relations between Britain and France. ‘You are the golden thread that binds our two countries,’ he told the Queen. ‘The proof of the unwavering friendship between our nations.’

There were historical references: a mention of Charles de Gaulle, and the courage and determination of the wartime generation, the Queen’s generation, who ‘fought for the freedom we now enjoy’.

Macron ended his address in French, a language the Queen speaks, declaring that the Jubilee is an occasion to ‘celebrate the sincere and deep friendship that unites our two countries, and your devotion to it. Your Majesty, it is my privilege to extend to you, on behalf of the French people, my heartfelt congratulations’.

There was an accompanying gift, a seven-year-old grey gelding of the ceremonial French Republican Guard which was delivered to Windsor Castle on Wednesday. The present will be appreciated by the Queen. According to one French news broadcaster on Wednesday evening, over the decades she has made several private visits to France in her capacity as a racing aficionado, either attending races or casting an eye over horses that might have enhanced her stable.

The coverage of the Jubilee has been extensive in France, in the print and broadcast media, and Thursday’s celebrations were screened live on France2, one of the main free-to-view channels. The British Ambassador, Menna Rawlings, appeared on television to give her thoughts on why the French have so much warmth for the Monarch.

For some, it’s because they know the Queen’s affection for France is deep-seated; her visit in 1948 aged 22, with her new husband in tow, was her first time she had been outside the United Kingdom. Between 1957 and 2014 she made five State visits, each one generating huge crowds of well-wishers.

For others the Queen’s immutability is what they admire. When she came to the throne the president was Vincent Auriol, the first of the Fourth Republic. Macron is the eighth of the Fifth Republic, and the youngest she has known. In fact, when the Queen celebrated her Silver Jubilee Macron was a foetus. Probably just as well the president didn’t mention that in his address.

Boris looks doomed, but can he escape the inevitable?

Is Boris Johnson’s government about to fall apart? Twice since World War Two, Tory governments have broken up after a prolonged period of rule. They have died not because of a single crisis, but slowly expired due to sheer exhaustion, disunity, and lack of purpose or ideas. Now Boris’s regime, after another lengthy Tory period in power, looks as though it may be heading towards a similar exit. But can it avoid its fate?

The parallels between today’s events and those of 1963 and 1992-7 are inescapable. In all three cases we have a tired team of Tories bereft of ideas simply running out of steam. In all three we have a derided Prime Minister becoming the butt of media jibes and popular dislike. In all three we have a slew of petty scandals, trivial in themselves but collectively fatal.

The bad news for Boris is that even if he can avoid – or survive – a vote of confidence among Tory MPs, he has a fight on his hands to convince Brits that he deserves to hold on to the keys of No. 10.

If he fails, he will follow in the footsteps of Harold Macmillan. In October 1959, the Tories stormed to their third election victory in a row with a 100-seat majority dwarfing even Boris Johnson’s thumping 80 seat triumph in 2019. Under their progressive One Nation leader – dubbed ‘Supermac’ – the Tories had recovered from the debacle of the 1956 Suez crisis which had forced his predecessor Anthony Eden to resign in disgrace. Eden’s offences included lying to Parliament to cover up his covert collusion with France and Israel in invading Egypt. A rather more serious matter, it may be thought, than lying to Parliament about boozing in Downing Street.

Within two years Suez was history, the economy was booming, and ‘Supermac’ was able to boast to voters – with complacent justification – ‘You’ve never had it so good’. The Tories were wafted back into power under the cheery slogan ‘Life is good – don’t let Labour ruin it’. Then, just like in 2020, it all started to go horribly wrong.

In 1958, before the election, Macmillan’s entire Treasury team – chancellor Peter Thorneycroft and junior ministers Enoch Powell and Nigel Birch – resigned en masse in protest at Macmillan’s wild spending (another foretaste of current Tory worries) which, they claimed, was only fuelling inflation. The unflappable Mac airily dismissed the resignations as ‘a little local difficulty’. But the dry rot had set in for his government even as the votes for his election victory were being counted.

In 1962, seeking to rejuvenate his regime, Macmillan sacked seven ministers (a third of his Cabinet) in a brutal reshuffle that critics likened to Hitler’s murderous ‘Night of Long Knives’ purge. The following year the key cornerstone of his government’s economic and foreign plans – entry to the Common Market, forerunner of the EU – collapsed when France’s president de Gaulle contemptuously rejected Britain’s application to join. ‘All our policies,’ Macmillan lamented in his diary, ‘…lie in ruins’.

According to Shakespeare, troubles ‘come not as single spies but in battalions’, and it was the unmasking of a whole troupe of British Soviet spies in the early 1960s that really put the skids under a Mac who had suddenly stopped looking super. Master spy Kim Philby defected to Russia after his treachery was revealed; a gay Admiralty clerk called John Vassall was blackmailed by the KGB into betraying naval secrets; a long-term mole named George Blake was sprung from jail where he was serving a 42 year sentence, and smuggled behind the Iron Curtain. Britain’s security services at the height of the Cold War looked – and were – not just leaky but lethally incompetent.

Groggy from this series of scandals, Macmillan began to be mocked on TV satire shows like ‘That Was The Week That Was’ and ‘Beyond The Fringe’ as deference to his hitherto respected ruling caste fell apart. The elegant Edwardian in No. 10 was portrayed as a fossilised fuddy duddy, out of touch and out of time. It was then that the death blow of the Profumo affair kicked in.

Macmillan’s war minister, John Profumo, was found to be consorting with a good time girl, Christine Keeler, who was also enjoying the attentions of the Soviet military attaché Eugene Ivanov. In a world that had barely escaped atomic annihilation the previous year in the Cuban missiles crisis, this was a nuclear scandal to end all others. Profumo, who had lied to the Commons in denying the affair, honourably quit and spent the rest of his life atoning by doing good works for charity. But by then the damage was done. It was, as a vengeful Nigel Birch told Macmillan, quoting Robert Browning: ‘Never glad confident morning again’ for him or his government.

Within months, Macmillan reluctantly resigned, like Eden, on grounds of ill health after his enlarged prostate gland was misdiagnosed as cancer. As he did so, rival candidates for the succession publicly fought like ferrets in a sack at a chaotic Blackpool Tory party conference. From his hospital bed, Macmillan loftily ignored them and smoothed his foreign secretary, fellow Old Etonian Lord Home, into No. 10 in his place.

It did no good for the fourteenth Earl Home to renounce his title so he could sit in the Commons as plain Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Labour’s new democratically elected leader Harold Wilson successfully painted the new PM as a feudal relic, out of place in an egalitarian Britain ‘forged in the white heat of the technological revolution’. After a year in office, Sir Alec lost the 1964 election and ‘thirteen years of Tory misrule’ were over.

In 1990, just as in 1963 and today, a sea of troubles threatened to swamp the Tory ship after a similarly long time in office. The 1980s had been the uninterrupted Thatcher decade. The combative Iron Lady, a very different sort of Tory from the emollient, languid Macmillan, was running out of road. Despite trouncing Labour in three successive elections, winning the Falklands War, defying the IRA, taming the unions, giving tenants the right to buy their own homes and a stake in capitalism, and helping to bring down Soviet Communism, she had finally begun to grate on the nation’s collective nerves.

Thatcher’s increasingly strident tones, her espousal of the electorally toxic poll tax, and her resistance to the EU’s steady and stealthy encroachment on British sovereignty fuelled plots. The Europhile wet wing of the Tory party, who had never really been reconciled to having a woman bossing them about anyway, were out to get her. Finding a challenger in lion-maned Michael Heseltine, and an unlikely assassin in the sheepish shape of Sir Geoffrey Howe, the plotters struck. Thatcher was out.

But it was not quite the end for the Tories. Flinching from the charismatic Hezza, they chose as PM John Major: a much-mocked grey man of zero charisma and Pooterish manners, hoping for a quiet life after the storms and stresses of Thatcherism. Instead they got wars in the Gulf and Yugoslavia, and a debilitating guerilla conflict at home as Thatcherite MPs resisted more EU encroachment. Above all, they got Black Wednesday.

Having unexpectedly seen off Labour in the 1992 election, Major embarked on a doomed attempt to board the EU express by tying the pound to the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, a forerunner of the Euro. An economic disaster ensued, losing billions to speculators on the eponymous Wednesday, pricing people out of their homes, and depriving the Tories of their reputation for fiscal competence. After Major abandoned his attempt to join the ERM he was as vulnerable as Macmillan following De Gaulle’s ‘Non’.

Popular hatred of the Tories curdled into complete contempt when a parade of the party’s MPs were embroiled in a series of absurd sexual scandals that made them despised figures of fun. After Labour acquired a glamorous new leader in Tony Blair, the landslide electoral defeat that swept the Tories away in 1997 was impossible to prevent.

Is there anything that the Tories can do to stop the rot? Or are they doomed to face a similar fate to Major’s party? Changing their colourful leader for a less controversial figure as they did in 1963 and 1990 and are contemplating doing again today could recoup some lost support, but is unlikely to avert a final reckoning, especially if the next two years see us engulfed by an economic tsunami.

When a rueful Jim Callaghan was defeated by a triumphant Thatcher in 1979, he said: ‘There are times, perhaps once every thirty years, when there is a sea-change in politics. Then it does not matter what you say or what you do’. Today’s Tories should not be too surprised if they are drowned in the next such sea change. Boris has a fight on his hands if he is to avoid a fate that is increasingly looking inevitable.

What makes the EU think it can run an army?

The German political economist Benjamin Braun recently made an astute observation about the editorial position of a German newspaper – in fact, it is an observation about the German policy consensus in general. “Eurobond? Never, it’ll kill us all. Eurobomb? Bring it on.”

Incomprehensibly, the EU is now discussing yet another field of political integration: a defence union. But the big task it set itself 20 years ago remains (to put it politely) incomplete. Amongst other things agreed in the recent two-day EU summit was the need to press ahead with defence strategic procurement and coordinating capability. There is a ‘Strategic Compass’ plan for an ‘EU Rapid Deployment Capacity of up to 5,000 troops’ and much more besides.

All this while the EU’s flagship scheme – monetary and economic union – remains dysfunctional and plagued by ever-widening imbalances. Integration of banking has been going in the reverse direction. The European banking supervision system is up and running, but the dispute-resolution regime is a joke. The debate on deposit insurance is stuck. And the impetus for a capital markets union is lost. This is not just a flaw, but a first-order policy failure.

Rather than fix this, the European Union is discussing a security and defence union – another opportunity for these attention-deficit, hyperactive disorder-afflicted policy makers to pretend that they are pro-European. If you can’t do a proper economic union, you should stop right there, and fix the problem. Otherwise you end up with a dysfunctional economic union, an ineffective foreign policy regime and – to top it all – an army that can’t fight.

The future success of the EU will depend primarily on boring economic matters like innovation and the capital markets union. The EU will require a eurobond: a real one, not a ‘recovery fund’ that is ultimately backstopped by national governments. The purpose of a real eurobond is to stabilise a currently-unstable monetary union, not to bankroll reform in member states.

Storms lie ahead. Power structures in global banking are about to be upended by a slew of fintech innovations: this requires banking reforms and a capital markets union for Europe to participate fully. That (and climate change) is what the EU needs to focus on. And for that to happen, it needs treaty change.

But this is not going to happen. The discussions are all about issues like who gets to do what in Brussels. The Russia sanctions are turning into a political disaster. You can’t blame veto-wielding member states, or the lack of quality majority voting. The problem lies in the fact that countries like Germany are allowed to pursue national economic strategies at the expense of the union.

So the European Union is now entering a twilight zone of reverse integration – coupled with a sense that it is still moving forward because it’s talking about new projects.

Is Emma Raducanu a one-hit wonder?

If there is one thing that could salvage this year’s Wimbledon it would be a decent showing by the tournament’s undoubted star attraction: Emma Raducanu. Engulfed in a controversy of its own making since it banned Russians and Belarussians players in response to the war in Ukraine, and facing the loss of rankings points as a result, Wimbledon 2022 is desperately in need of a feel-good story and some positive publicity. The public will be similarly demanding. The US Open Champion may be expected to bear an especially heavy burden in her second Wimbledon appearance. But is it realistic, or fair, to expect her to shoulder it?

Raducanu has won just nine and lost 12 of her tour matches since Flushing Meadows and was most recently well beaten in the French Open by the Belarussian world number 47 Aliaksandra Sasnovich (Raducanu is ranked 12th). Various theories have been advanced to explain her apparent protracted ‘after the Lord Mayor’s show’ slump. The player herself believes she may now have ‘a target on her back’ with her dramatically elevated status helping motivate opponents who a year ago might have mistaken her for a ball girl. Others point to a natural preference in her game for the hard and true surface of the US Open’s Flushing Meadows as opposed to the fickleness of the brick dust of European venues like Roland Garros. Some say she’s been ‘overwhelmed’ by sudden fame; others reference her injury niggles.

Much has also been made of her high turnover of coaches. Raducanu’s father apparently believes coaches have one specific area of expertise which should be quarried, until the deficiency has been addressed, after which they should be replaced with a coach with a different specialty. The thinking, it seems, is that piece by piece this is the way to assemble the perfect tennis player. Yet this rather complicated and unorthodox approach has provoked some high-level criticism: commentator John McEnroe has declared himself baffled by it.

All of this may be valid, but there is an alternative answer to the Emma Raducanu conundrum, which is simply that it is unfair to expect her to repeat her greatest success, at least not yet, and that, all things considered, she is doing fine. In the hyper competitive world of professional tennis, for a still developing player who just a year ago was ranked 364th and was playing in front of a few hundred at the Connaught Club in Chingford, her progress has been remarkable.

Indeed, to calculate Raducanu’s true level, there is an argument for subtracting the US Open from the equation altogether. Raducanu’s victory was phenomenal, with the phenomenon in question being perhaps the rare but thrilling, and slightly surreal, spectacle of the come-from-nowhere victory, from which little can be deduced about the victor’s true strength, or likely career outcome.

Consider potentially analogous cases: in 1978 unseeded Chris O’Neil won the Australian Open but failed to get beyond a quarter final thereafter. Or in other sports: in 1986, 150-to-1 outsider Joe Johnson won the Snooker World Championship, but rarely featured in the latter stages again. He went on to have a respectable career, reaching one more World Championship final and winning a few lesser events. Keith Deller won darts’ World Championship as a qualifier in 1983 but failed to qualify the following year and apart from the odd flourish here and there saw his career fizzle out. In team sports there is the classic example of Leicester City, who won the English Premier League in what still seems like something of a dream sequence season back in 2016. They have done reasonably well since then, but a repeat of that unique achievement seems highly unlikely.

The common denominator in all these cases is that talented individuals, liberated by ultra-low expectations, can occasionally defy the laws of sporting gravity by maintaining an elevated level of performance for a protracted period. By doing so they somehow create a momentum that changes the atmosphere, making their opponents quake, and engendering a sort of film-like inevitability to what had once seemed a hugely improbable outcome.

It could even be that sport itself creates these periodic micro-miracles as a form of self-preservation. Sport is about stories after all, and if the stories become too predictable – the same old small coterie of stars winning every time, as has been the case with women’s tennis in recent years, the public loses interest.

Emma Raducanu will light up Centre Court for sure, but she probably won’t win Wimbledon. She may do reasonably well, or she may crash out in the first round. She may end her career with a vault full of trophies, or finish with just the one. She may be at the very start of her journey to a place in the game’s firmament, or she may have already peaked. It is simply too early to tell.

So, let’s remember: how Wimbledon’s organisers resolve their predicament is their prerogative. Raducanu is only 19 and the tournament’s mess is not her responsibility to clear up. And let’s lighten her load by not expecting her to redeem what might be irredeemable by repeating what might be unrepeatable.

The art of the State Banquet

The French epicure Jean-Anthelm Brillat-Savarin, writing in the early decades of the nineteenth century, remarked, ‘Read the historians, from Herodotus down to our own day, and you will see that there has never been a great event, not even excepting conspiracies, which was not conceived, worked out, and organized over a meal.’ And indeed it is true that State Banquets are amongst the most important opportunities for discussion and diplomacy.

Her Majesty The Queen has over the past 70 years received well over 100 inward State Visits. She has undertaken over 260 official visits overseas including nearly 100 outward State Visits, making her the most travelled monarch in history.

As TRH The Prince of Wales and The Duchess of Cornwall say in their joint foreword toThe Platinum Jubilee Cookbook, ‘On all Royal Visits, food plays an important part, presenting opportunities to enjoy a taste of the host nation’s culinary heritage, while also offering a chance to share the best of British cuisine’. And that culinary aspect to the Royal Family’s work often finds its greatest expression in State Banquets.

Preparations begin over a year in advance. Typically held at Buckingham Palace or sometimes Windsor Castle, the room features a horseshoe-shaped table seating up to 170 guests and takes between three and five days to set. George IV’s Grand Service is unpacked for the occasion – the 4,000 pieces for dining and display are all silver-gilt, in the King’s attempt to rival the gilded collections of Napoleon I. Napkins are folded in a Dutch bonnet and each place setting is 45 centimetres from the next.

The procession of dishes at a State Banquet is time-honoured: a starter (often fish), followed by a meat-based main course with accompaniments, then dessert, followed but fresh fruit and petites fours. The starter was once typically preceded by a soup course but in more recent years it has often been dispensed with. The legendary French chef Auguste Escoffier would be turning in his grave: he considered soup to be the ‘agent provocateur of a good dinner’.

The menus may be written in French but The Queen has used the occasions to champion British produce. Thus the State Banquet for President Trump in 2019 featured steamed halibut with watercress mousse, asparagus spears, and chervil sauce to start, a main of new season Windsor lamb (served with ‘Pommes Elizabeth’) and a port sauce, before finishing with a strawberry sable with lemon verbena cream. To drink, the guests were offered Windsor Great Park 2014 English sparkling wine (which has its roots in Windsor Castle’s own ancient vineyard, planted in the 12th century in the reign of Henry II), and Churchill’s 1985 Vintage Port – though of course the teetotal President stuck to soft drinks. When it comes to flying the flag for British food and drink, Her Majesty is as meticulous in her approach as in the other parts of her work.

The guests at State Banquets are of course dominated by the visiting country’s delegation and their opposite numbers from within government. But one of the glorious eccentricities of these occasions is the eclecticism of the guest list: Royal family relations, hereditary aristocracy, luminaries and celebrities from both the UK and the visiting country, and of course spouses. The peculiarities of the Order of Precedence leads to rather surprising seating plans. At the 2016 State Visit of the Colombian President the Foreign Secretary was placed halfway down the room (sat next to the wife of the Colombian Ambassador) because space at the top table needed to be found for The Viscount Hood and The Duchess of Norfolk.

On overseas trips the excitement of the hosts when receiving a State Visit from The Queen is palpable. Our Ambassador in Brazil, Sir John Russell, reported back to London the scene at the presidential reception for The Queen in Rio in 1968: ‘Spurs and a lit cigar came in very handy and I realised that in a previous incarnation I must have been a police horse’. In Sao Paolo meanwhile, the heaving crowds were such that the poor Sir John ‘lost two buttons and a CMG.’ The State Banquet is often the focus for such excitement.

Another former Ambassador, Sir Anthony Brenton, recalled that during the first ever State visit by the Queen to Russia they had to fly in a planeload of dinner jackets for the Russian elite attending. When George H.W. Bush, who loved to entertain, hosted the Queen in May 1991, he went to great lengths to impress: the dessert featured marzipan cobblestones topped with a ten-inch, dark chocolate carriage filled with mousse. The Queen, who is known to love chocolate, presumably came away reassured that the special relationship was in robust health.

State Banquets have likewise been a regular feature of Jubilees. For Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887, fifty foreign kings and princes, along with the governing heads of Britain’s overseas colonies and dominions, attended a feast at Buckingham Palace. Queen Victoria recorded the event in her diary: ‘Had a large family dinner.’ For George V’s Silver Jubilee in 1935 there was similarly an evening banquet for foreign royalty. The regal spread began with ‘Aguillettes de Caneton Reine Mary’ and finished with ‘Soufflés glacés Roi George V’.

The dining will, for this Jubilee, have a different, more inclusive, feel. There will be no royal banquet; rather the focus will be on an equally venerable British tradition – the street party. With their roots in the ‘peace teas’ held for children at the end of the First World War, street parties have been an established way of celebrating royal weddings and Jubilees for over a century. This year these community gatherings are being encouraged as part of a ‘Big Jubilee Lunch’. Eight and a half million people took part a decade ago for the Diamond Jubilee and the organisers hope to top the number this year. The festivities won’t be limited to the UK: more than 600 Big Jubilee Lunches are planned in more than 70 countries across the Commonwealth and around the world. And, following a nationwide competition, there is a new dish to act as a centrepiece of the food spread: the Platinum Pudding, which will take its place alongside Victoria Sponge, Cherries Jubilee, and Coronation Chicken in the pantheon of royal foods. It has all the makings of a right royal feast. Bunting at the ready.

Why your summer pudding needs a splash of elderflower

Is there a sight more pleasing, more cheering, than the vermillion dome of a summer pudding? Its vibrant colour cannot fail to raise a smile, even on dreary June days, suggestive as it is of all that is best about the British summer when it plays ball: gluts of sweet, juicy fruit, that sweet-sour tightrope that our summer crops walk so deftly, long lunches in the garden, and sticky fingers.

Each time I make a summer pudding, I am convinced it won’t hold. That, after a day of soaking, the flimsy bread frame will give way, spilling forth its berry contents all over the plate. Each time I turn out the pudding, I am freshly delighted and surprised; triumphant, as if it is my structural skill rather than berry juices that is to be congratulated. It is a pudding which defies gravity and sense, and rewards faith. Its simplicity is the key to its success: plain, slightly staling white bread (brioche seems altogether too rich, too sweet to suit a dish like this, and for goodness sake, don’t bother making your own), showcasing the best of summer fruits. On the one hand, it is elegant in its simplicity; on the other, it seems distinctly British to name soggy, stale bread stuffed with fruit after an entire season. I love it.

When it comes to the fruit, raspberries, redcurrants and blackcurrants are to my mind the non-negotiables, but they can be supplemented with cherries, blueberries, even tayberries, loganberries, and strawberries – although I rather love chef and pudding king Jeremy Lee’s addition of gooseberries. A splash of elderflower cordial gives the pud an even fresher, floral, summery note. Like all the best puddings, it should be served with the thickest double cream you can find.

Summer pudding

Makes: Serve 6

Takes: 45 minutes, plus overnight soaking

Bakes: No time at all

750g mixed summer berries (raspberries, blackcurrants, blackcurrants)

2 tablespoons elderflower cordial

2 tablespoons caster sugar

1 loaf, sliced white bread

Butter, for greasing

1. Place the berries, caster sugar and elderflower cordial in a pan, and simmer gently until the sugar has dissolved. Remove from the heat and leave the berries to stand for 30 minutes.
2. Grease a 1 litre pudding basin with butter: this will help the pudding release to serve.
3. Cut a disc from a slice of bread about the size of the base of the pudding basin. Dip this into the liquid that sits on top of the berries, making sure it is fully coated with the juices, and place in the base of the basin.
4. Remove the crusts from the bread, and cut it into segments which will fit neatly around the inside of the pudding basin. Soak each in turn in the berry juices, and place in the basin you have lined the entire bowl.
5. Spoon the stewed berries and any remaining juices into the lined basin, and top with a lid of bread (you may need two slices of bread, trimmed, to make this lid; that’s ok).
6. Place the basin on a plate, as some of the juices are likely to spill out. Place a saucer that will fit inside the mouth of the basin on top of the bread lid, and weight down with food tins, or a large bag of rice, and leave in the fridge overnight.
7. Remove the weights and saucer, and turn the pudding out onto a serving plate (it may need a little bit of wiggling, but should slip free without issue). Serve with thick cream.

Queens on screen: a cinematic guide

When Queen Elizabeth II (Elizabeth I of Scotland) began her reign on 6 February 1952 (after the premature death of her father George VI) the British Empire was still very much in existence, with more than 70 overseas territories, despite the independence of India/Pakistan (‘The Jewel in The Crown’) in 1947.

But, in the words of Harold Macmillan, there was soon an inevitable ‘Wind of Change,’ as the UK relinquished its colonies and embraced the woolly concept of The Commonwealth of Nations (formerly The British Commonwealth).

Aside from the United Kingdom, the Queen is Head of State in 14 other nations – although, as recent Royal tours of the Caribbean have demonstrated, this may well decrease in the not-too-distant future.

There have been many depictions of female monarchs in the movies and television, with Victoria, Catherine the Great, Anne Boleyn and her daughter Elizabeth I especially popular subjects.

Here’s my choice of the best motion pictures about queens as sole rulers, as opposed to queen-consorts.

The Queen (2006) Netflix, Amazon Prime

Very much the precursor to writer Peter Morgan’s Netflix series The Crown, The Queen examines the reaction of the senior Royals in the days following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997.

Helen Mirren plays the monarch, winning kudos for her depiction of a woman constrained by tradition, duty and a life being constantly deferred to.

Morgan manipulates the viewer throughout the picture, notably in a scene where the Queen admires the stag that her husband Philip (James Cromwell) had been obsessively pursuing over their stay in Balmoral, an obvious allusion to the relationship between Diana at the press.

A well-acted, but ultimately hollow picture, as the absence of Diana herself in the movie inevitably makes viewers speculate whether she was worth all the undignified keening evidenced at the time, which effectively forced the Windsors to play along with the popular mood of hysterical grief.

The film features the second (after 2003’s The Deal and before The Special Relationship in 2010) of Michael Sheen’s portrayals of Tony Blair for Morgan.

Alex Jennings plays a more sympathetic than may be expected Prince Charles, whilst Sylvia Syms is conversely a selfish, booze-tippling Queen Mother.

Mirren has also played Elizabeth’s ancestor Queen Charlotte (of Mecklenburg-Strelitz before her marriage into the British Royal Family) in The Madness of King George (1994), Elizabeth I (2005 Ch4 mini-series) and Catherine the Great (2019 Sky Atlantic mini-series).

Morgan is now taking on Russian oligarchs in his timely new play Patriots.

Farewell, My Queen (2012)

Benoît Jacquot’s (Diary of a Chambermaid) film adds a sapphic dimension to the life of Marie Antoinette, as we follow her life at Versailles when the Revolution erupts in 1789.

The queen (Diane Kruger) is pursuing a romantic relationship with Gabrielle de Polastron, duchesse de Polignac (Virginie Ledoyen).

After the storming of the Bastille, Antoinette decides to spirit her lover away to safety, using her commoner reader Sidonie (Léa Seydoux) as a disposable lookalike to fool the revolutionaries.

Queen Victoria’s apparent refusal to believe that lesbianism existed (she was wrongly attributed as saying ‘women do not do such things’) is a myth, born from a misreading of the passing of Criminal Law Amendment Act in 1885.

Victoria & Abdul (2017) Amazon Rent/Buy

Speaking of Queen Victoria, I tend to feel that Edward, Prince of Wales gets the short end of the stick in depictions of his mother’s reign, especially in Stephen Frears’ Victoria & Abdul.

The fun-loving heir to the throne had a lot to put up with, his mother often evidencing a very Hanoverian streak of manic behaviour, blaming Edward (Eddie Izzard) for the premature death of his father/her husband, pious killjoy Prince Albert.

After her dalliance with a Scots gillie (Billy Connolly) in Mrs Brown (1997, where the Prince of Wales is similarly blackguarded) a much older monarch becomes maternally enchanted by her Indian ‘Munshi’ (attendant/teacher/clerk) Abdul Karim (Ali Fazal – Death on the Nile).

Her courtiers and heir become jealous of the new favourite, but Victoria stands by him even when it is revealed that he is suffering from the clap and had allegedly sold some of the jewellery she gifted him.

Judi Dench played the monarch in both Mrs Brown and V&A, also Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love (1998) and a critically acclaimed Cleopatra in Shakespeare’s Antony & Cleopatra at the National in 1986, with Tony Hopkins as the tarnished Triumvir.

Cleopatra (1963) Disney+, Amazon Rent/Buy

Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s (Sleuth) epic is best known for what happened offscreen rather than the movie itself, as Richard Burton (Mark Antony) and Elizabeth Taylor (Cleopatra) began their scandalous affair when shooting the picture.

Cleopatra is epic in its length, as well the subject-matter, with the restored cut running over four hours.

It’s an enjoyable watch for a wet Sunday afternoon, with unintended hilarity: Taylor occasionally resembles a Beverly Hills hostess rather than the descendant of Alexander’s chief lieutenant Ptolemy.

Rex Harrison (Caesar) looks sceptically on, grateful that he doesn’t have to wear the dinky mini skirt that Burton sports.

Although after donning similar garb in The Robe (1953) and Alexander the Great (1956), the actor should have been used to it.

In one memorable scene, Cleopatra enters Rome in no little state – Marcus Antonius comments to Caesar on the spectacle (somewhat nonsensically):

‘Nothing like this has come into Rome since Romulus and Remus!’

Not quite the Mark Antony of ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’ fame then.

The film features three cast members later to find fame in long-running TV comedies: George Cole (Minder), Richard O’Sullivan (Man about the House/Robin’s Nest) and Carroll O’Connor (All in the Family/Archie Bunkers’ Place)

La Reine Margot (1994)

Patrice Chéreau’s (Intimacy) blood-soaked recounting of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572) and its consequences is not a film for the faint-hearted.

The picture uses Alexandre Dumas’ 1845 novel as source material, but anyone expecting a Three Musketeers-style romp will be sorely disappointed.

For a more mature audience, it’s a great film, with wonderful performances and a real evocation of the tumultuous years of the French Wars of Religion.

Particular praise should go to Isabelle Adjani as the apparently incestuous but essentially kind-hearted Margot of Valois, Daniel Auteuil as the future Bourbon King Henry IV, Virna Lisi as the scheming Catherine de’ Medici and Jean-Hugues Anglade as her unhinged son Charles IX.

Vincent Perez stars as Margot’s true love, the Huguenot chevalier La Môle.

Elizabeth (1998) Amazon Rent/Buy

Michael Hirst (Vikings/The Tudors) wrote the screenplay for Shekhar Kapur’s biopic of The Virgin Queen and his 2007 sequel (STARZPLAY).

The film plays extremely fast and loose with the facts, with parts that may appear jarring to viewers in 2022.

Most notably Vincent Cassell’s mincing, cross-dressing would-be suitor Francis, Duke of Anjou. There is no evidence to suggest that he was, so the assumption must be that Hirst wrote the character as comedy relief.

Elizabeth featured the final film appearance of John Gielgud, who played Pope Pius V.

Kapur cast including a mixture of film veterans (Richard Attenborough, Fanny Ardent etc) and new faces/quirky choices including Eric Cantona, Kathy Burke, Daniel Craig, hoofer Wayne Sleep, Emily Mortimer, and the Allen (Lily/Alfie) siblings.

Upcoming STARZPLAY series Becoming Elizabeth follows the early years of the future monarch; German actress Alicia Gräfin (Countess) von Rittberg (Fury) stars; no problem assuming the hauteur of royalty, one would imagine.

The Favourite (2018) Amazon Rent/Buy

Olivia Colman plays the last Stuart monarch, whose largesse is fought over by established favourite Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough (Rachel Weisz) and her impoverished newcomer cousin Abigail Masham (Emma Stone).

Yorgos Lanthimos’ (The Killing of a Sacred Deer) film holds the viewers’ attention, but since all the characters exhibit varying degrees of unpleasantness, there is no-one to really root for. A likely reflection of the Stuart court at the time.

Queen Anne’s ill-health, frequent painful pregnancies, and inability to provide an heir no doubt accounted for her behavioural problems; in Michael Caton-Jones’ underrated Rob Roy (1995), the cynical Earl of Montrose (John Hurt) comments:

‘Our poor queen cannot find the time to die in peace. I fear she may pass over and leave the matter unresolved. Would that she had seen a child of hers live to comfort the kingdom.’

Lady Jane (1986) Amazon Rent/Buy

Theatre director Trevor Nunn brought the tragic story of Lady Jane Grey ‘The Nine Days’ Queen’ to the screen in 1986.

To avoid his Catholic half-sister (Mary Jane Lapotaire) becoming Queen, the dying teenage King Edward VI nominates his staunchly Protestant cousin sixteen-year-old Jane (Helena Bonham-Carter) to take on the throne on his death.

This was at the urging of chief minister John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland (John Wood) who had earlier engineered the marriage of Jane to his eighteen-year-old son Lord Guildford Dudley (Cary Elwes).

Although proclaimed Queen by the Privy Council, Jane’s support soon ebbs away, and after just nine days as monarch she is deposed and imprisoned in The Tower of London when Mary takes power.

Initially inclined to spare the lives of the couple, Mary has them both executed when Jane’s father Henry Grey, Duke of Suffolk (Patrick Stewart) raises an unsuccessful rebellion to save her.

A sad story and one that is well-acted, but Nunn’s obvious lack of facility with the craft of movie-making undermines the material.

Boudica (2003) full movie available to watch on YouTube

ITV haven’t had much luck with period dramas set in pre-Victorian times.

In the same year as Ray Winstone’s Gorblimey Henry VIII, the broadcaster transmitted Boudica, a bargain-basement attempt to cash in on the success of Gladiator (2000).

Alex Kingston (Moll Flanders/Dr Who) plays the titular queen, who after being flogged by the occupying Romans is forced to watch the rape of her daughters before being turfed out of her Norfolk-based kingdom. Understandably Boudica prefers not to forgive and forget, launching a savage campaign against the decadent invaders.

Watch out for early screen appearances from Emily Blunt and Dominic Cooper.

Contrary to urban legend, the monarch is not buried beneath Platform 10 at London’s King’s Cross station.

Or is she? As a wag once said: ‘did she die waiting for the train to Royston?’

Season 5 of The Crown debuts this November (TBC).

Tories pay tribute to our Queen

The economy may be tanking and Boris in peril but MPs were grateful this week for a four day respite to mark the Queen’s platinum jubilee. Many chose to flee Westminster for home pastures elsewhere: Brandon Lewis got to press the flesh at Hillsborough Castle while his backbench colleague Laura Farris snapped pics in Newbury with a Churchill impersonator. But a fair few decided to remain in London to pay tribute to our long-suffering monarch at the Trooping of the Colour on Horseguard’s Parade. Somehow Mr S blagged a ticket – they let anyone in these days – and enjoyed the chance to see our elected Tory masters pay tribute to our unelected ones.

The Boris bashers were out in force among the Tories, with Wimbledon’s Stephen Hammond – formerly of the ‘whipless 21’ – impressing with a rather spiffing morning suit. Aspiring grandee Sir Charles Walker mingled with youthful upstart Elliot Colburn as a beaming Sir Graham Brady looked on, sporting a smile as wide as the parade ground. Enjoying the calm before the storm, perhaps? A somewhat bedraggled Sir Bill Cash meanwhile managed to (just) survive the heaving throngs clutching a Union Jack with new boy Louie French enjoying the chance to mingle with nearby colleagues including Shailesh Vara, Andrew Rosindell and Flick Drummond. There were one or two rogues in attendance too: former Health Secretary Matt Hancock arrived sans Gina but avec lounge suit while the suspended Rob Roberts must have enjoyed his placement behind government whip Alan Mak.

Will they be all smiling when it comes to this time next week? For their future sakes, Mr S hopes they don’t make a right royal mess of it.

Macron vs the deep state

French diplomats are on strike today. But will anyone notice?

Not to be immodest, I am especially well qualified to comment on French diplomacy. Some time ago, between gigs in Washington DC, I was employed as a consultant by the French embassy there. The embassy is a modern building in Georgetown, conveniently near all the best restaurants, although the food at the embassy itself was both fabulous and cheaper than McDonalds. The wine list was, obviously, exceptional.

I was not allowed to see deeply into the embassy’s most sensitive operations (there was a mysterious wing that seemed to be entirely occupied by spooks) but must admit that in the scientific service where I worked as an astonishingly well-paid editor, there was very little sign of stress. The only discernible excitement was on Tuesdays, when there was a scramble by my colleagues to get in their orders for wine and unpasteurised cheese, flown into Dulles airport weekly in sealed diplomatic containers on an Armée de l’Air Airbus. On Friday morning, we all assembled on the loading dock as the containers were emptied, to pick up our shopping.

So the life of a French diplomat is rather peachy. Anyone might think that with the housing allowances, generous pay, immunity from ever being sacked and talent for deflecting blame onto others, it’s not a bad job.

But that’s an opinion not shared by the diplomats, who are enraged that President Macron sees them as a ‘deep state’ sabotaging his will. He wants to strip them of their privileges and open foreign service positions to all.

Perhaps the President has a point. French diplomacy is not especially decisive in world affairs, and its failures are dramatic. France’s embassy in Canberra failed to notice when Australia prepared to throw in its lot with the Americans and British in the new Aukus partnership, ditching the French. Macron was infuriated. French diplomacy has contributed to embarrassing failures in the Sahel, Venezuela and Egypt and has dragged modern-era Anglo-French relations to an unprecedented low. A frustrated Macron has subsequently developed his own line in diplomacy, without much apparent recourse to his smug, bloated diplomatic service.

One senior diplomat has admitted that French diplomacy service has achieved almost nothing since the 2015 Cop climate agreement in Paris, even though it has is the world’s third-largest diplomatic network, with some 1,800 diplomats and 13,500 more at the Quai d’Orsay in Paris.

Few doubt that the brigade of diplomats could be ruthlessly cut. It seems to have passed unnoticed in the hallowed corridors of foreign relations that the entire notion of embassies, with their grand buildings, elaborate protocols and pompous, self-regarding functionaries, dates from the days before it became possible for governments to communicate by Zoom and email.

The French diplomatic service is hardly unique. The British embassy in Paris employs 300 people. The question that Macron has dared to ask is: what do they all do? Once upon a time it was said that diplomats were sent abroad to lie for their countries. Today, more frequently, they tweet.

According to some, the strike comes at a bad time for Macron, with France holding the EU presidency until the end of June. It’s extremely hard to imagine that anyone will notice, to be frank. Macron has sought to play a leading role in the bloc’s response to the attempted invasion of Ukraine and is looking for fresh impetus to his new presidential mandate. His success is thus far undetectable but he’s hardly needed diplomats to achieve nothing. He’s just picked up the phone and called Putin himself.

Half a dozen diplomats that Reuters spoke to said Macron’s reform was merely the culmination of years of malaise that have seen staffing fall some 20 per cent since 2007 and repeated budget cuts just as the demands on the service have supposedly increased. Conditions have worsened during the pandemic, diplomats claimed, as if they have been singularly affected.

Macron’s appointment of the career diplomat Catherine Colonna as foreign minister was supposedly an effort to appease the diplomatic corps. It’s not working. Colonna, the former ambassador to the UK, was not an especially popular figure in London where she tweeted aggressively against Brexit and infuriated Whitehall, although she did establish close relations with Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish first minister. She’s now foreign minister and it’s been made clear that she must do exactly as she’s told.

The exemplar of French diplomacy is the recently retired ambassador to Washington, Gérard Araud, who has rushed to defend his colleagues, warning of an ‘Americanisation’ of French diplomacy that would give Macron greater discretion to choose ambassadors on a personal whim from all ranks of French public life.

‘Diplomats will serve as ambassadors to Burundi’, he said. ‘Rome or London will be reserved for friends’.

But the president can already name anybody he wants as an ambassador. Araud was parachuted into Washington by former president François Hollande. His diplomacy was marked mainly by his addiction to Twitter, where he promiscuously blocked criticism of his constant undiplomatic remarks aimed at his hosts.

On the night of the election of Donald Trump as president, Araud tweeted: ‘It is the end of an era, the era of neoliberalism. We don’t yet know what will succeed it.’ He inserted himself into the 2017 French presidential election campaign, he would not work for Marine Le Pen, even if she were democratically elected. Before leaving his post in Washington, Araud described the city as being full of provincial early-bird dinners wearing sad, baggy suits.

Was it really necessary for French taxpayers to install Arnaud and his husband in the grand ambassador’s vast residence in Northwest Washington to know this? If this is the standard of diplomacy practiced by France, Macron will do well to bring it to heel.

Where’s our world cup?

There was that frenetic drama of the last day of the Premier League just a fortnight ago – City down, Liverpool in, City up, Liverpool out! Then we had Real Madrid further chipping away at Liverpool’s quadruple ambitions, leaving them with a mere double, closely followed by Nottingham Forest clinging on against Huddersfield to finally get back into the Premier League. Then on Wednesday night Ukraine caused delight everywhere in the world except Scotland and Moscow to set up a play off this Sunday against Wales for the last available World Cup slot.

But after that…nothing. Some people, to misquote Kenneth Wolstenholme, aren’t on the pitch – it’s all over.

Just when we should be settling down for a glorious summer of the very best sporting event that there is, a football World Cup, we aren’t. After that Wales-Ukraine game there will be no meaningful football matches until the league resumes in August.

Last summer’s glorious, colourful Euros brought the nation together like nothing else in recent times – who can forget the surge of pride when that lad put a firework up his backside in Leicester Square, for example. It kicked off a year ago next Saturday.

Italy beat Turkey 3-0 in the opener. I was so excited that I insisted on formally celebrating the moment with a pre-match nod to both countries’ culinary cultures by having a doner kebab with an Aperol spritz. I had a wallchart taped above the TV. I even had Panini stickers and album to get started on like I was nine years old.

And it didn’t let me down. The proper big football tournaments never do, particularly World Cups. Even the poorest ones – South Africa, 2010, USA 1994 – are still brilliant.

But this year, instead of a glorious summer, the World Cup will be on at Christmas.

Christmas, for goodness sake.

It’s now 12 years since the scandalous decision to award successive host duties in 2018 and 2022 to those twin paragons of human rights, Russia and Qatar. And it’s an indication of just how rotten both selections were that even Putin’s subsequent war crimes in Ukraine don’t unequivocally make the case for Russia as the worst decision of the two.

Because Qatar getting it stunk from the outset and has just got worse since: rancid corrupt bidding allegations, the deaths of dozens of immigrant labourers building the stadia, the concerns over the rights of gay fans, women supporters and those just partial to a beer at the match never properly addressed.

But for the armchair fan the biggest consequence of choosing Qatar – flagged repeatedly but ignored by those well-fed FIFA delegates until it was too late – were those summer temperatures of up to 50 degrees centigrade. It was always going to be too hot to play in June and July.

And so only after Sepp Blatter and his stooges had backed Qatar did we end up with this temporal shift in the axis of the football universe – a winter instead of summer World Cup.

We armchairs have had to deal with some challenging timings before: remember the weekday morning fixtures that the timezones threw up in the Japan and South Korea co-hosted 2002 tournament, for example. But those lager breakfasts now seem like small beer next to a World Cup in December.

Most fans will at some point have had a wedding or similar that clashed with a must-see match – which can result in ‘doing a Likely Lads’, as it’s known: trying to avoid knowing the score before watching as-live later. But this year this could happen to almost everyone: millions will have to choose between doing what they’re expected to do – going to their children’s carol concert, their office bash or some old friends’ drinks party – and mean-spiritedly staying in to watch a tasty football clash instead. We are inevitably going to make the invidious decision of whether to miss key games or have ourselves cast as Scrooges by family, friends and colleagues. Absurdly I just had to check I hadn’t booked our early-bird family Nutcracker tickets on the same night as the Final. And it finishes just two days before my wedding anniversary. That really would have been tricky.

There’ll be four and a half weeks of this stuff to negotiate come 21 November: 64 matches that could all clash with something festive and obligatory.

It’s terrible news for the High Street too: with the economy all over the place we could really use one of those every-other-summer En-ger-land mini booms driven by a rush to spend on beer, barbecues, replica kits. Shifting this demand to December isn’t going to balance the books as people tend to spend money fairly freely on booze and food then regardless.

And 2022 is already disorienting enough already: here we are in a four-day weekend when all your biorhythms will be telling you there shouldn’t be one – there’s no turkey or lamb leg to roast, just perhaps a street party to avoid if you can. It’s all disorientingly odd. The last thing we need is more change.

Finally, Christmas itself doesn’t deserve this. After Covid-compromised festivities in 2021 and – unless you lived or worked in Downing Street – a Covid-cancelled Christmas 2020, this should be our first stab this decade at a normal December. Instead, for football fans at least, it’s going to be the most abnormal yet.

Of course, it’s two or three years too late for anything to be done to change this. They had three months’ notice to arrange to move a single game recently – belatedly punishing Putin by moving that Champions League final from St Petersburg to Paris and look what a shambles that ended in. No, the ridiculous and infuriating Christmas World Cup is set in stone now.

And yet despite all this resentment and regret, deep down I know that once it starts, I and in all likelihood the vast majority of other armchairs, will soon be completely caught up.

We’ll be guiltily huddled around meant-to-be-off TVs surreptitiously watching Colombia-France at that drinks party, in the back pew at the carols watching Senegal-Brazil on our silenced phones. And we’ll be loving it.

What’s going on with the Russian economy?

The Russian economy is headed for its deepest recession since 1991. That’s the British government’s latest assessment of whether sanctions are successfully, in the words of Liz Truss, ‘choking Putin’s war machine’.

As the West’s most effective non-military tool for putting pressure on the Kremlin, sanctions have been under the microscope from the beginning: are they working? Are they targeting the right people? Could they actually benefit Putin’s regime?

Indeed, just last month it was reported that Russia had doubled its fossil fuel revenues since February, by some accounts raking in as much as €62 billion (approximately £53 billion), benefiting from global prices driven skywards by the sanction-induced shortages. By the end of March, the rouble seemed to have recovered its pre-war value.

The EU’s most recent round of sanctions has been panned in some corners for only introducing a partial ban on Russian oil. Critics have said they won’t do enough to successfully cut Putin off from his oily money-making lifeline.

So are sanctions working then, or not? Are they the juggernaut the West is so hoping they will be?

The signs on the ground suggest that, yes, sanctions are indeed beginning to bite. According to the Russian media, gold reserves in the country dropped 20 per cent between February and March, reaching their lowest levels since summer 2019, as the central bank buys up gold to stabilise the rouble and fund the war.

More tangibly, new legislation came in on June 1, raising the national minimum wage and pensions by 10 per cent. According to the broadsheet Izvestiya, some Russian banks also have stopped advertising their loan interest rates in response to the high base rate set by the central bank.

Although the papers won’t admit it, both of these measures are clearly a response to soaring inflation and a rise in the cost of living for ordinary Russians. Anecdotally, reports suggest the price of food and other commodities has begun to rise sharply. Unemployment is taking hold.

It seems the Russian government is beginning to realise it is running out of road when it comes to hiding this from the public.

In an extraordinary announcement on May 23, the head of the Russian parliament’s Accounts Chamber, Alexei Kudrin, said the country was entering a second ‘Perestroika’, with at least two years of economic difficulty ahead.

There would be a fall in real disposable incomes and salaries, with unemployment expected to peak in the autumn of this year.

Aptly calling the country’s current predicament a second ‘Perestroika’, Kudrin’s words will have sounded the alarm for Russians, many of whom still remember the harsh economic circumstances the fall of the Soviet Union brought just over thirty years ago.

Even the usually ever-optimistic Kremlin-supporting online paper Pravda sounded spooked, calling Kudrin’s words ‘somewhat frightening’.

It seems the Russian government’s plan is to try and restructure the economy while artificially maintaining living standards in the hope that as few Russians as possible realise the reality of the country’s situation.

The Western powers are continuing to tighten the screws on sanctions – but just how much and how quickly they inflict damage on Russia’s economy remains to be seen. One way or another, though, the Kremlin will not be able to sustain a facade of economic health indefinitely.

Why Georgia is going mad for Ukraine

Georgia seems to have gone Ukraine crazy since the outbreak of war in February. Taxi drivers have the Ukrainian flag on their dashboards. Takeaway coffees come in blue and yellow paper cups with ‘Glory to Ukraine’ written on them. Medicines come in blue and yellow bags. There are Ukrainian-coloured scooters for hire in Tbilisi and written on the huge city metro telescreens are the words ‘Be Brave like Ukraine’. There is so much glory for Ukraine in Georgia you wonder whether the Georgians have any left for themselves. They might well argue, however, that the two things are inseparable. In a recent interview, the Georgian president Salome Zourabichvili described Ukraine as ‘another self that is now under attack, adding ‘We have already had this experience.’

And to a lesser extent, they have. In 2008, the Russians invaded Georgia, occupying two of its separatist territories, Abkhazia and Samachablo (South Ossetia), leaving over 400 Georgians dead and many more injured. For at least a month Georgia was the world’s post-Soviet martyr country of choice, with sympathisers worldwide trying to track it down on a map (‘No, not the American state, stupid!’) and newspapers in Estonia publishing Georgian recipes like Kharcho soup and Chicken Satsivi. At least 10,000 Russian troops are still stationed there and there are frequent border incursions. Ukraine’s current situation may well become Georgia’s next, and if Putin achieves his aim of dominating the Ukraine Black Sea coast it will clearly be catastrophic for Georgia economically and militarily.

As soon as the invasion took place in February, the yellow-and-blue started to appear on Instagram and Facebook pages – like ‘a volcano’, one Georgian said to me. By the evening of 24 February, the outbreak of war, as many as 30,000 Georgians waving Ukrainian flags were out on the streets in solidarity, with demonstrations in cities like Kutaisi, Batumi and Poti. YouTube posts show masses of people carrying banners, with slogans like ‘Today we are all Ukrainians’ and ‘Ukrainians, we’re proud of you.’

However, another reads: ‘Georgian government, F off to Russia’, and here is where things get complicated. The Georgian people may have fervently supported Ukraine, but their government has not. On February 25, the day after Putin’s invasion, Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili said he wanted to ‘state clearly and unambiguously’ that Georgia did not plan to take part in economic sanctions against its vast northern neighbour, ‘as this would only damage our country and populace more.’

Moves were also made by Garibashvili to stop Georgian nationals volunteering to fight in Ukraine, which led to Zelensky, in some disgust, recalling the Ukrainian ambassador to the country. It was also a position that failed: though there are no precise estimates of how many Georgians are currently fighting in Ukraine at least nine Georgians have died and had heroic funerals back in their country.

A split then opened up between president and prime minister. Zourabichvili attended the funerals, Garibashvili did not. And although Zourabichvili has tried to make her pro-Ukrainian statements as cautious as possible, she has still been warned by her government to leave the fray, with the ruling Georgian Dream party taking steps to sue her in civil court for making unauthorised visits to Paris and Brussels to discuss the Russian invasion. It is a rum situation indeed, though it’s clear the president is close to the people on this. In the past week Garibashvili has been forced to row back, making placatory speeches about the government’s ‘full solidarity’ with Ukraine and ‘strong support’ for the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

I meet David, an historian from Georgia in a café in his home city of Kutaisi to discuss the conflict. The beer garden wall is covered with the Ukrainian colours and has become an informal graffiti-board for locals and tourists. ‘The Hague is waiting, Putin, said one daub. Another, written by Ukrainians in Cyrillic, said ‘Russian tourists, while you are relaxing here, your soldiers are killing our children. Please stop.’ My personal favourite, for its brevity, was just two words: ‘Puck Futin.’

David is clear about Georgia’s vulnerable relationship with Russia: ‘We’ve had this situation… for centuries. We still couldn’t believe it when Russia invaded Ukraine like this. This is like something from the 11^th Century.’ What does Georgia need to defend itself? ‘We need EU membership, we need Nato membership. We need to get eco-independence from Russia. But all this takes money. If we want better institutions, we need to sort out our economy as well.’

He was clear that the Ukrainians’ fight was Georgia’s too. ‘If you want to be free, if you want to be a stronger country, and if you want to be a member of those civilised countries which respect each other, you must know that Ukraine is the country where this battle is being fought.’

And would he himself fight, I asked, if Russia invaded? David didn’t look like a soldier. ‘Absolutely,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to be a slave. So I will fight for my country, my city, my family, my generation, my future.’

We were joined by Gizo, the restaurant’s owner, who painted that blue and yellow wall. ‘Whatever happens, the Ukrainians have won this war already,’ he said. ‘They have finally shown the world Russia’s true face.’

Both were fanatically pro-Boris, in ways that might raise eyebrows back home. ‘He’s amazing,’ said Gizo. ‘For me, he’s amazing. Because he’s not afraid… I see him taking action, not just offering words.’ I thought cynically of that meme doing the rounds, of Boris and Zelensky sharing one speech bubble: ‘Thank you for rescuing me’ both are saying.

Was there anything else they wanted to add? I asked David and Gizo. ‘Absolutely,’ said David expansively. ‘Glory to Georgia. Glory to Ukraine. Glory to the Heroes. And Glory to that group of countries which respect each other and the law.’

As for old Futin, for Georgians he can just go Puck himself.

Will Sadiq make a Commons comeback?

Fresh from their impressive gains in last month’s elections, attention in London Labour circles has now turned towards the future intentions of Sadiq Khan. The capital’s mayor won re-election last year and is due to see his term expire at the beginning of May 2024. But after two terms in office, will he be running for a third? In January he told James O’Brien on LBC that he was ‘looking forward’ to standing again for the mayoralty and said he ‘doesn’t want’ Sir Keir Starmer’s job.

But such claims have not dampened speculation that Khan could return to the Commons, depending on the date of the next election. If, as expected, this parliament lasts until spring 2024 – another election could technically be put off until January 2025 – then Khan could relinquish the mayoralty and stand as an MP once more, without facing charges of double-jobbing. Even if Boris Johnson calls an early election and there is some overlap in timings, Khan could simply point to the example of his two predecessors. Both Ken Livingstone and, er, Johnson himself held elected posts in City Hall and the House of Commons simultaneously – the former at the beginning of his mayoralty and the latter at the end.

It may well be the case that Khan doesn’t want to take Sir Keir’s job off him – i.e help depose him – or indeed ever mount a leadership bid himself. But a plum Cabinet post such as Justice Secretary might well hold its allure for a lawyer whose most senior government role to date was minister of state for transport. Two constituencies where Sadiq could stand are thought to be the newly-created seat of Brixton and Clapham and the existing area of Camberwell and Peckham, where veteran Harriet Harman will stand down at the next election. Both are set to be Labour strongholds who’d no doubt welcome the former Tooting MP as their man in Parliament.

One Labour source points to Khan opting to muscle in on Lambeth Council’s decision to give planning permission to the Hondo Enormo-Tower along Pope’s Road in Brixton. Opposing a controversial local planning decision would go down very well with some local activists there, were Khan to run for the seat next time…

Asked for comment, a spokesperson for Khan told Mr S that: ‘Sadiq has the best job in the world as Mayor of London, making real improvements to the lives of ordinary Londoners while leading the city’s recovery from the pandemic. He has absolutely no plans to stand for Parliament.’

‘No plans’ could be the new ‘unforeseeable circumstances’ should Sadiq do a Hezza and stand again…

Harry Styles has entered his imperial phase – but his music still has no distinct identity

At the turn of this century, looking back on the late 1980s when the Pet Shop Boys could do no wrong and everything they touched turned to platinum, Neil Tennant coined the concept of a musician’s ‘imperial phase’. You can be hugely popular at other times in your career – you can sell just as many records – but the imperial phase is something different.

The imperial phase is when an artist isn’t just selling records; it’s when approval of them has reached such a pitch that they can do no wrong. It’s when every magazine and newspaper uses any excuse to run photos of them, when their peers garland them with approval, and they seem to have a golden key that unlocks every day. This period usually defines a star for the rest of their life: a young Elvis swivelling his hips; Marc Bolan with tumbling curls and glitter on his face; Michael Jackson – whose empire stretched further than anyone before or since: the Alexander the Great of pop – in a red leather jacket and a single glove.

Harry Styles is just on the cusp of entering his imperial phase. Don’t be fooled by this show being in a theatre: next month, he’s playing six UK stadiums, which is half a million tickets. He’s got the old guard of pop and rock falling over him. He’s got critics salivating. At this point, if you don’t know what Harry Styles looks like, you may as well drive to Barnard Castle to test your eyesight. He’s a pop star for our times: he projects not rebellion or aloofness, but kindness and decency. He’s an amorphous blob of concern all wrapped up in soft linen. Yet he is so indefinite that you can project whatever you want on to him – as fan, as critic, as anyone.

The vast majority of the show was a top-to-tail run-through of Styles’s coronation, his new album Harry’s House. Once the screams had faded a little – I wore earplugs, and not because of the PA – it didn’t quite work as a live experience, because of a mid-set run of ballads, and because, like his previous two records, it’s two thirds of a really good album. You could tell he was proud of ‘Matilda’ – which is essentially ‘She’s Leaving Home’ for a new generation and the emblematic song of the Kind World of Harry Styles – which called for rapt attention. But a hot, packed room wanted to dance, and the best moments came when they were allowed to.

The amorphousness extended to the music. Styles’s pop identity has been shaped by his style: he communicates visually (want to show empathy to the gender non-conforming? Wear a dress on a magazine cover!), and musically he doesn’t have a clear identity yet. Nor is his voice distinctive enough to stamp an identity. So instead the very best songs here sounded like expert pastiches of other things: ‘Sign of the Times’ is early 1970s Bowie crossed with Robbie Williams’s ‘Angels’; ‘Music for a Sushi Restaurant’ can’t decide whether it wants to be a Mark Ronson or Pharrell Williams production; ‘As It Was’, I suspect, has been studied intently by a-ha for its proximity to ‘Take On Me’. They’re all great reference points, but they are reference points.

Pet Shop Boys, though, sounded like nothing else: an extended exercise in arching one’s eyebrows, set to jackhammering synths. Their current tour pretty much celebrates their own imperial phase – no matter that it is long since passed – which, given that their run of great 1980s and 1990s singles is one of pop’s greatest, was a treat. In one song, ‘Left To My Own Devices’, you could hear how nothing was off-limits during their imperial phase: an absurd, pompous orchestral opening, giving way to a club pulse, and a lyric that went wherever Tennant wanted it to: ‘I was a lonely boy, no strength, no joy/ In a world of my own at the back of the garden/ I didn’t want to compete, or play out on the street/ For in a secret life I was a Roundhead general.’ Even more than 30 years on, I can’t quite believe there was a top five hit with a verse that melded Nazism, childhood loneliness and the English Civil War.

Every song was stunning. You could scarcely have picked a better setlist (unless you’d skipped a couple of the later singles, perhaps). Just one caveat: the O2 is a very big room indeed, and from the top and back of it, this show was not big enough. It would have been great in a theatre, like their run of Royal Opera House shows a few years back. I don’t just mean there wasn’t enough going on; it literally wasn’t big enough. The staging was dwarfed by the vastness of the arena, as if someone had propped an iPhone on its side and invited you to watch it from the kitchen.

But those songs? Perfect. As they put it themselves: ‘Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat.’

Are republicans becoming an endangered species?

How disappointing. Come Jubilee time and the Guardian can usually be relied upon to lead the way in publishing sour pieces moaning about ‘jingoism’, attacking the extravagance of a royal procession and trying to claim that the people who turn up to watch and join in with the celebrations are somehow outnumbered by people who would rather get rid of the royal family and live under a republic.

At the time of the Queen’s Golden jubilee in 2002, Mary Riddell wrote of a ‘family that knows how to command a deference out of kilter with its popularity’, adding that ‘a third of the population wants a republic, a third couldn’t care what befalls the monarchy, but damp-palmed curtseyers abound.’ Jubilee celebrations, she asserted, were ‘bogus and temporary’. For the Diamond Jubilee in 2012 Polly Toynbee upped the rhetoric further, writing that ‘the louder the bells, the more gaping the grand vacuity. What are we celebrating? A singularly undistinguished family’s hold on the nation, a mirage of nationhood, a majestic delusion.’

Surely, then, the platinum jubilee ought to be an excuse to wheel out the same sentiments again, bleating about the royal family and denigrating anyone and everyone who might be tempted to join a garden party. But apparently not. In vain have I waited for Dame Polly’s latest missive on Her Majesty, but she seems to be more preoccupied with Boris Johnson. Indeed, all we have had so far from the Guardian is a column from Rafael Behr moaning not about the Queen but what he sees as the Prime Minister’s efforts to exploit the platinum jubilee for his own ends. Indeed, Behr laid in to fellow leftists who attack royal occasions like the jubilee, writing ‘each generation of left activists has to learn the hard way that denigrating patriotic symbols is self-defeating; that it amounts to surrender in the battle to narrate history, ceding control of the story to nationalists.’ So there: leave the poor Queen alone and go after the statues of slave-traders instead.

Just where have all the republicans gone? They are hardly anywhere to be seen. True, they might have realised that it is a bit off-colour to attack a 96-year-old widow – but then was it all that much better to lay into an 86-year-old woman or a 76-year-old one? I think there is something else going on here. The left has finally worked out the whole point of a constitutional monarchy, and what a republic would really mean. The ingredient that we have this time around, but didn’t have last time, is Donald Trump. The left has understood that in a republican Britain there would be no guard against a Trumpian figure becoming our head of state. That is exactly what the Queen is there to prevent: to keep the prime minister in his place, to humiliate him by keeping him on a low table at royal banquets and to remind him that he is a servant of the British state, not its master.

There could hardly be anyone better to perform this role than Elizabeth II, who has herself fulfilled her duties with humility. The poor Queen has been obliged to entertain a number of rogues at Buckingham palace over the years, among them Nicolae Ceausescu, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping – and of course Trump himself. But one thing unites all the most unsavoury figures: each one of them was a president, not a monarch. Finally, the left can see in its full horror what a British republic could look like: with a president Boris throwing his lockdown parties at Buckingham palace rather than the pokey confines of No. 10. They might even end up with Nigel Farage.

It might be too much to expect Dame Polly to turn up at a street party, but if the left has worked out that the monarchy in its modern manifestation is a harmless institution led by people whose powerlessness serves a purpose, that is better late than never.

Is Shakespeare racist?

Shakespeare’s Globe has a new wheeze to popularise its shows. The latest production, Henry VIII, is supported by a seminar about racism in this late play which the Bard co-wrote with John Fletcher. The online event, hosted by the Globe’s Dr Will Tosh, features dramatist-in-residence, Hannah Khalil, and Mira Kafantaris, a critical race theorist from the US. Both these experts proclaim their status as migrants and they examine Shakespeare through the lens of racist exploitation. At first glance it seems tricky to link racism with Henry VIII who was born four years before Columbus sailed for the Caribbean. But racism is everywhere, it seems.

‘Anne Boleyn’, explains Kafantaris, ‘was foreign born, raised in a French court, and our reading of her conduct and manner is very much a racialised one.’ She asks us to study ‘colour coding’ and to read up on theories that explore the ‘racialisation of Anne Boleyn as non-white.’

Sex trafficking is another hot topic. The literary experts regard Catherine of Aragon, Henry’s first wife, as a kind of Hispanic call-girl who was smuggled across the Channel by her abuser. Kafantaris talks about ‘the slippage between a queen as a monarch and a queen as a sex-worker whose sexuality is transgressive.’

Khalil points out that Shakespeare portrays Catherine as a powerful matriarch whose emotive speeches, ‘get the audience cheering for her’. And Dr Tosh says Catherine was considered a ‘peach of a role’ in the 19^th century. He wonders why Henry VIII was ‘shunted aside’ while the plays featuring Prince Hal and Falstaff grew in popularity. Kafantaris blames jingoism and misogyny.

‘Those plays were politically and ideologically more fitting to the 20^th century, and the waning of the empire, and the need to marshal this idea of Englishness that Henry V gives us…But Catherine, in her complexity, would muddy the water,’ he says.

Khalil disagrees: the budget is the deciding factor, she says. Henry VIII requires dozens of elaborate costumes and a company of nearly 50 actors. The discussion becomes more opaque as the experts start to trade weird terms like ‘hybridity’ and ‘symbology.’ Both words are commonly pluralised.

‘Racial hybridities are inevitable,’ says Kafantaris of Henry’s Spanish wife, ‘but that doesn’t matter because Englishness absorbs foreignness and can withstand the infection that a foreign queen imposes on the realm – as long as it’s connected to the riches of settler colonialism and capitalism.’

What does that mean? Kafantaris explains her Delphic utterance in relation to the play’s opening, in 1613, at a time when James I was busy marrying his children off to European royalty.

‘He’s the new Solomon, the new conqueror, who’s going to have places in Virginia named after him in the lands of indigenous people. And the idea of his material presence in the Indies is connected to the settler colonial project…You can propagate your power if you make smart geo-political marriages that give you access to trade-routes in the Americas.’

Here’s a vague stab at a translation: Henry VIII’s impregnation of his Spanish bride was a trial-run for the expansionist adventures that began under James I. And Henry’s taste for exotic concubines foreshadowed Britain’s lust for world conquest.

It seems perverse to cram all this retrospective theorising into an obscure Shakespeare play. But there are modern resonances too. Kafantaris enlarges on the problems faced by Meghan Markle, ‘a black foreign divorced woman,’ as she joined the royal family. She hints that Meghan’s arrival was underplayed in comparison with Kate’s ‘gilded’ reception. But does she consider that Meghan warranted less attention because she was marrying a second son and not a future king? Anyway, never mind that. ‘We all know the racism she received,’ says Kafantaris although she doesn’t cite a single example. ‘And that blew the lid off it.’

‘Amen,’ says Khalil.

They make the play itself sound intriguing. But their historical analysis is plainly demented. No amount of ‘racialising’, whatever that means, can alter the colour of Anne Boleyn’s pale skin and auburn hair. To suggest she might be ‘non-white’ because she spent time in France is nuts. Imagine if a British academic told Indians to consider Gandhi as a white man because he studied for the bar in England.

And the critical race theorists break their own cardinal rule. If you take their blinkered creed to its logical conclusion you find yourself arguing that Shakespeare, (‘a white property’, as they call him), is being exploited in this webinar by two commentators whose job more properly belongs to ‘indigenous’ analysts. That’s where critical race theory takes you: the colour of your skin determines whether you may perform or discuss the Bard. How ridiculous. And any outsider who joins in must be guilty of ‘settler colonialism’. What a daft theory. And what a sad way to view culture and history. 

How Poland came back from the brink

Poland is back. Not so long ago, the country was seen as an effigy of democratic backsliding, rather than a post-communist success story. In 2017, the European Commission made its first use of the Article 7 procedure against Poland over concerns about eroding separation of powers between the executive and the judiciary. On the campaign trail in 2020, Joe Biden warned about ‘what’s happening from Belarus through Poland and Hungary and the rise of totalitarian regimes in the world’. In doing so, he placed the Polish government in the company of some of the worst dictators on the planet.

But within days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Poland managed to reclaim its place as a sober regional power. It ditched the excesses of its recent past in favour of a laser-sharp focus on building a global coalition to help Ukraine succeed.

If that sounds like an overstatement, it shouldn’t. By mid-April alone, the Polish government handed over military aid worth over €1.5 billion (approximately £1.3 billion), including 200 T-72 tanks. At a time when many Western governments continue to withhold heavy weaponry, Poland is sending 18 self-propelled AHS Krab howitzers and training Ukrainians crews to use them. Polish diplomacy has been indispensable in building momentum for additional sanctions on Russia, including the partial oil embargo, and for keeping the prospect of Ukraine EU accession alive notwithstanding resistance from ‘old’ member states.

Without so much as a peep from domestic opponents of large-scale immigration, the nation of 38 million has taken in perhaps as many as 3.6 million Ukrainian refugees. They have been provided with shelter, food, medical treatment, and economic opportunities, very often thanks to spontaneous, bottom-up efforts of civil society organisations and volunteers.

Poland’s leadership by example is heartening to everyone, familiar or not with the country’s centuries-long struggle for independence and freedom, including from Russian and later Soviet dominance. Hand-in-hand with its stepping up on the world stage, the putative threat posed to Polish democracy by its ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS) seems more abstract and distant than ever.

It’s true that fears over the undermining of independence of the courts and media have not been unfounded. Poland’s government has lowered judges’ retirement age and fired a big segment of the judiciary, including 27 out of 74 judges of Poland’s Supreme Court. The justice minister concentrated powers over judicial appointments, dismissals, and disciplining judges. Last year, through special legislation, the government threatened to revoke the licence of TVN24, a US-owned news channel that has been frequently critical of the PiS government.

But the problem of ‘incumbent entrenchment’ – where a leader outstays his welcome – has never progressed as far as in Hungary, a country with which Poland is, not always fairly, often compared. Poland has demonstrated not only a capacity for Orbán-like brinkmanship but also for changing its ways for the better. President Andrzej Duda, a PiS loyalist, vetoed the ‘Lex TVN’ bill which threatened the freedom of the country’s media. After a European ruling against PiS’s efforts to roll back the retirement age of Supreme Court justices, the Polish government backed down and allowed the judges to return. PiS recently backtracked from its efforts to subject judges to further political control by scrapping the ‘disciplinary chamber’ at the country’s Supreme Court, created as part of its PiS-driven ‘reforms’.

The European Commission’s threat to withhold EU funds if the politicisation of courts was not reversed was an important contributing factor. No less important, however, are the vibrancy of Poland’s civil society and media scene, and the existence of a far greater number of independent players and veto points than in Hungary. In Budapest, some self-styled conservatives are happy to play a supporting role to Moscow while engaging in US-style culture wars. But in Warsaw, the looming threat of Russia has revived a cross-partisan ambition to establish Poland as a trusted counterweight to the appeasement policies of Germany and France. President Duda is also playing a growing role as a moderating force, with the view of positioning himself favourably for post-presidential life after 2025, either in Polish politics or internationally.

While this is all happening against the background of a much larger, tragic story to the East, Poland’s return to the forefront of European politics – together with the toning down of its domestic illiberalism – is a welcome development. It is a course correction for the largely self-inflicted marginalisation suffered by Poland after PiS’s arrival in power in 2015.

For PiS, this change has not meant an abandonment of its distinctly Polish brand of conservatism, blending a Catholic view of social and cultural values and the embrace of a muscular economic role played by the government. The governing majority has not given in on its restrictive abortion legislation or its fiscally expensive natalist agenda. Both may be irking progressives but neither is in itself a challenge to liberal democracy.

Yet by taming the excesses to which such ideas have led in the past, Poland may provide a glimpse into the future of right-wing politics after the populist-driven realignments across the Western world. And whatever one thinks of particulars of PiS’s policies, the picture of Warsaw today is not one of an unmitigated disaster, quite the contrary.

The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee is a tribute to her legacy

The most recognisable woman on the planet was once told by a customer in a shop at Sandringham that she looked like the Queen. ‘How reassuring,’ came the reply from the headscarf-wearing head of state.

Reassurance is what the Queen has provided to millions of people and what she will be rewarded for during the Platinum Jubilee festivities. A significant chunk of the population revere someone they don’t really know. For decades, a shy woman who’s not a natural ‘people person’ has been in our midst, yet set apart. When she opened the Elizabeth Line last month, the Queen was given a travelcard. She last commuted on the London Underground as a princess in 1939.

Oversharing isn’t in the lexicon of the fast-dwindling wartime generation for which the Queen remains a figurehead. The monarchical upper lip doesn’t droop and, according to her cousin, she keeps things buried. When she allowed the BBC to broadcast previously private home movies, the footage stopped in 1953. Elizabeth: The Unseen Queen is a very accurate programme title.

Remaining enigmatic is part of her success. So too is the fact she enjoys performing the role she wasn’t born to undertake. There’s a cushion in her sitting room at Balmoral that’s embroidered with the words: ‘it’s good to be Queen’. She has thrived on the regimented nature of the job and chafed during the lockdowns. Even in the darkest days, of which there were plenty in the Nineties, the red box was opened, and the job done.

She is sustained by her deep Christian faith and her belief that the coronation had a divine dimension. She has only thought about abdication once, a friend told me, and that was during a bad storm on the Royal Yacht Britannia.

Her rollercoaster reign began with Prince Philip by her side and when butter was still rationed. The nation is savouring her achievements at a time when she is adjusting to widowhood and war is once again raging in Europe. Sheer longevity has ensured several milestones have been passed. What she most wants to do is embed the Windsor line. A probable Buckingham Palace balcony appearance at the climax of the weekend events alongside Prince Charles, Prince William and Prince George will satisfy her greatly.

The widespread celebrations will prove a pleasing antidote to the ongoing challenges on the royal horizon. Increasing frailty and a job for life are uncomfortable bedfellows. In the months ahead, a virtual Queen will be complimented by in the flesh princes, Charles and William.

What to do with Prince Andrew remains unresolved. Lock the door and throw away the key isn’t the approach she favours. Harry and Meghan have gone, but the nature of their departure continues to inflict damage. They’ve abandoned their full-time positions in a family that will have to come up with an answer to the question of reparations for slavery in the former colonies where the Queen is still head of state. Laughing awkwardly, as Prince Edward did in Antigua, was toe-curlingly embarrassing and best not repeated.

For now though, a humble woman not given to pomposity can revel in the adoration she will receive. On her seventy-year long watch, the House of Windsor has suffered fractures, but no irredeemable faultline has appeared. The Queen has succeeded in being a unifying figure during times of dizzying change.

Her successors may struggle to pull off the same trick.

The holiday spots beloved by royals

Royal tours in glorious destinations might look like fun but they are technically classed as work. So where do the Royal Family choose to go to get their fix of sunshine and rest? Balmoral and Sandringham have always been favoured by the Queen but there are also several overseas spots that have become firm royal favourites.

Malta

Between 1949 and 1951 Princess Elizabeth, as she was then, and Philip lived in Malta in a small town called Pieta very near the Maltese capital of Valletta. Their home was the Villa Guardamangia, an eighteenth-century ‘garden palace’ loaned to Philip by his uncle Lord Louis Mountbatten while Philip was stationed in Malta for naval duties with HMS Magpie. Villa Guardamangia has since fallen into disrepair but the eighteen-bedroom limestone building is set to be turned into a museum according to recent reports. The Government of Malta purchased the building in June 2020 and it was entrusted to Heritage Malta who add that ‘Villa Guardamangia is the only property outside Great Britain in which the royal family has resided’. The building has a large garden complete with historic wells so will no doubt be a popular place for locals and tourists to visit.

Until the restoration is complete, non-royals can enjoy Valletta’s architectural beauty. A walled World Heritage City, highlights include the beautiful Upper and Lower Barrakka Gardens. A place for verdant reflection, both gardens overlook the sea. In the Upper Barrakka Gardens, cannons are fired at noon each day.

St John’s Co-Cathedral (so-called because it shares duties with St Paul’s Cathedral in Mdina 13 kilometres away) is another must-see. Its magnificent marble and gold interiors and central location make it an essential and significant place to visit.

Mustique

Princess Margaret described Mustique as ‘the only place I can relax.’ She stayed on the Caribbean island regularly at her home, Les Jolies Eaux, on the southern tip. It was here that she was photographed by the press with Roddy Llewelleyn, the landscape gardener, while she was still married to Lord Snowdon. News of her affair led to her eventual divorce from Snowdon but seemingly did little to colour her time on the paradise island. She would continue to visit Mustique at least twice a year for the rest of her life.

Les Jolies Eaux has been renovated into several villas and is now a popular holiday resort. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have holidayed there with the Middletons. Tourists can take in the same picturesque sea views after a spot of swimming, beachcombing, golfing or horse-riding on the ten acres of land. A one-week stay in the luxury Plantation House (hosting a maximum of twelve guests) at the height of the summer will set you back $68,000 excluding connecting flights and food but including a butler, a chef, two housekeepers and mosquito nets.

Corfu

Prince Charles and Camilla have long been regular visitors to Kerasia on northern Corfu (once arriving there via a British Airways flight). Whichever way they choose to travel, one element remains constant: they always stay at the luxurious Rothschild villa. The Greek City Times states that the villa is widely known as the ‘Kensington Summer Palace’, an appropriate title as it was formerly a favourite of Princess Diana as well. The villa boasts beautiful gardens and views of the Ionian Sea, yet it feels distinctly secluded among olive groves.

Non-royals can enjoy the peace and quiet on Corfu with a walk on Kerasia Beach an hour away from the capital Kerkyra (Corfu Town). Treelined and secluded with clear waters ideal for snorkelling and swimming, it’s the best place to take in all of Corfu’s beautiful natural features. There are over 250 churches and monasteries on the island. A trip to Palaiokastritsa and its Monastery is an absolute must: twenty minutes north west of the capital, it’s a picturesque destination with villages up on a hill with very rewarding views from the top.

Klosters

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge love to ski and Klosters is a favourite destination for hitting the slopes. Klosters is a diverse ski resort with a variety of skiing options available, including an off-piste area for the pros. A pretty train ride takes you through the picturesque valley to Kublis and Davos. Many restaurants can be found on the mountains, although party goers might find Klosters a little flat, as hotel bars, sophisticated and chic, are the height of the après ski activity.

And closer to home…

Queen Victoria adored going to the Isle of Wight. Osborne House was her and Prince Albert’s holiday home and they would usually visit four times a year, aiming to spend their birthdays together there for private, family celebrations. When Albert died, Victoria went to Osborne House to grieve. His dressing room became the focus for family ceremonies and in the early days of her widowhood, Victoria used it for Privy Council meetings. Beatrice, Queen Victoria’s youngest daughter, brought her family up at Osborne in the new wing built specially to accommodate her family.

Queen Elizabeth II, meanwhile, treasured every visit to St Mawes in Cornwall. A scenic fishing village at the end of the Roseland peninsula in southern Cornwall, there is lots of fun to be had on the beaches between sampling local produce from family-run restaurants and delis. Tourists can even stay in the same house as Her Majesty. ‘Penvola’ is a waterfront property run by St Mawes Retreats and offers a picture-perfect view straight across the water, with direct sea access via a private slipway.

Or, for a fun day trip in the style of royalty, visit Polesden Lacey in Surrey where King George VI and the Queen Mother spent their honeymoon.

The legendary food at Lord’s

Whatever the problems faced by England’s Test cricketers on the field lately – and they are legion – the players know that one thing at least will go right in this week’s match against New Zealand at Lord’s: the food. The fare at the home of cricket is legendary.

Ex-England and Middlesex batsman Mark Ramprakash says that in county matches he and his team-mates would sometimes deliberately get out just before lunch so they could ‘pile into’ the food. Even the two batsmen who were still in would promise each other, as they walked back out to resume play, that they wouldn’t run quick singles for a while. David Lloyd’s first lunch at the ground was accompanied by lager. He was dismissed soon afterwards.

Both players started their careers during the reign of Nancy Doyle, who ran the kitchen for over 35 years until her retirement in 1996. She never followed recipes, or even used scales to weigh ingredients, relying instead on the instincts she’d learned from nuns in her native Ireland. So impressive were the results that the players worshipped her. Too much, according to England captain Mike Brearley, who one day dared to suggest to Nancy that her typical lunch (soup, starter, roast lamb with roast potatoes, chips and vegetables, dessert accompanied by custard, cream or ice cream) might not be ideal for professional sportsmen. ‘Tell you what, Michael,’ replied Nancy, drawing herself up to her full height of five feet nothing, ‘you don’t tell me how to feed my boys, and I won’t tell you how to bat. OK?’

Such culinary excess is out these days, with dieticians and nutritionists ruling the sporting roost. Not that the players always listen. Glenn McGrath had seconds every time he played at Lord’s, according to Doyle’s successor Linda Le Ker. Shane Warne stuck to toasted cheese sandwiches (and cigarettes). One of Le Ker’s specialities was pasticcio, a layered pasta and mince dish that Marcus Trescothick loved so much he begged her for the recipe. This from a man whose nickname was Banger, after his love of sausages.

You can see why Australian players might remain unconcerned about healthy eating. England arrived down under for the 2013-14 Ashes armed with an 82-page cookbook of healthy meals, including ‘quinoa with butternut squash, apricot and parsley’ and ‘mung bean and spinach curry’. They lost the series 5-0. The following summer, back in England, the home players saw the visiting Indians getting McDonald’s and Nando’s takeaways delivered to the nets during training. The score in the one-day international series at that point was reflected in the Daily Mirror headline ‘Mung Beans O, Big Macs 3’.

There’s every chance that Nando’s could figure at Lord’s again this week, given new Test captain Ben Stokes’s fascination with the chain. During an under-15 festival in 2006 he spiked Joe Root’s Coke with Nando’s peri-peri sauce. And the night before his most famous innings of all (the match-winning 135 not out at Headingley in 2019), his dinner comprised a Nando’s and two Yorkie Raisin and Biscuit chocolate bars. The following night, he and Root celebrated the miraculous win by joining team-mates Jos Buttler, Chris Woakes and Rory Burns in a £55 McDonald’s drive-thru feast.

Cricketers have always loved their grub. W.G. Grace, who favoured champagne during drinks breaks and whisky with lunch, dined one night during the 1878 Cheltenham Festival on ‘lobster patties, stewed pigeons, veal cutlets and curried chicken’. Ian Botham’s famous Shredded Wheat adverts failed to reflect the player’s real appetite: ‘I don’t like sawdust with milk all over it’. However Derek Randall remained unimpressed with caviar when he tasted it for the first time on the 1976/7 MCC tour to India: ‘This champagne’s all right, but the blackcurrant jam tastes of fish.’

So famous has the players’ food at Lord’s become that the ground sometimes release the menu on Twitter. A typical offering from 2017 included monkfish wrapped in panchetta with lemon beurre blanc, braised lamb shank with baby onion gravy, and pea and shallot tortellini with watercress purée.The desserts on offer during the 2019 World Cup final included fruit tartlet with vanilla brulée.

So if a player has a bad morning session in the Test this week, don’t feel too sorry for him as he trudges back to the pavilion. His average might have taken a battering, but his stomach’s in for a treat.