Dear Rowley,
You’re not the first to contact Bloomsbury Towers and ask when they can view the body. Well, I’m not ready for the pall bearers and requiem mass quite yet and have in fact been hush-hush for the past fortnight working like a peasant in a paddy field on the layouts for the Royal St. James’s book. No excuse for being incommunicado but I’m on the captions now. I consider captions to be the literary equivalent of tarts in a Reeperbahn window. Their sole purpose is to entice the punter beyond the beaded curtain.
Terribly bad project management on my part to land a book deadline so precisely on Wimbledon fortnight. More than a few hours of hard graft were squandered pondering Del Potro’s stamina and Virginia Wade’s sentence structure or lack thereof. I was most taken by the women’s game: never so thrilling in my opinion since Chris Evert retired. Adored Aggie Radwanska – she of the glacial poise and Radio City Music Hall eyelashes – and would have liked to see her in the final but it wasn’t to be. Still, there was something heartening to witness Marion Bartoli gambolling around Centre Court on finals day as untidy as a bag of knitting but so determined to lift the trophy.
As for our first British men’s singles final since dinosaurs roamed SW17, I’ve got to say Andy Murray was a worthy champ. One can’t call the man charismatic but then again he’s a tennis player not a gameshow host. Nobody mal y penses John Barrowman because he can’t chip and charge. There was rather a famine of royal family members at the Wimbledon finals and I wondered what Victoria Beckham was doing lurking in the Royal Box until a clued-up commentator pointed out that Andy’s girlfriend Kim Sears was wearing a VB frock and Messers Murray and Beckham shared the same management company. As Private Eye would say, ‘isn’t life grand?’
So what’s new on the Rialto? Thursday morning to Buckingham Palace for the royal preview of the Coronation Festival; a garden gathering of some 200 Royal Warrant Holders to celebrate HMs crowning. I arrived in time to see The Queen, Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall sally forth in glorified golf buggies for their tour of inspection. Such is the pernicious world of mass communication devices that HM was pursued by bovine hoards waving smart phones above their heads. The photo, it seems, is more important than the reality of seeing The Queen and bobbing a curtsey.
That said, if Team Queen ran UK Plc I think we’d be in a whole lot better shape than we are with the Coalition at the helm. I’ve rarely seen such a ruthlessly, courteously efficient machine at work. Those tactless enough to try and take mobile phone snaps of Her Majesty were wafted away like midges at a Balmoral barbecue. The gardens were kept immaculate by an army of unobtrusive Wombles and security surrounding the royal party was all but invisible though ever present. The Boss is in very safe hands and is allowed to sparkle like the Williamson Pink while the public part like the Red Sea.
The Coronation Festival was a triumph aided by a July heatwave doubtless organised by the palace press office. The nay sayers who were calling it a trade fair entirely missed the point. The Royal Warrant Holders are a fascinating group of businesses at the top of their respective games be that gilding, coach-making or couture. There was a huge amount of curiosity and respect amongst exhibitors and not a little competition as to who attracted the most royal visitors. Did I get to bow the head and ‘ma’am to rhyme with jam’? Not on this occasion.
I spent the evening with Henry Poole’s Head of Ceremonial Tailoring Keith ‘le grand moustache’ Levett. Because Poole’s stand was at the East corner of Buckingham Palace we had a terrific view of the royal party re-emerging for the concert. Despite the absence of the Duke of Edinburgh (who is recuperating at Windsor Castle) and the Princes William and Harry, we had a royal flush of Windsors. The Countess of Wessex looked as light and lovely as a soufflé in a champagne silk cocktail dress trimmed with ostrich plumes. Prince and Princess Michael of Kent possess a movie star glamour reminiscent of Fairbanks and Pickford in their prime.
How the royal party kept a straight face during the Festival Gala is beyond me. Do the directors never stop and ask what The Queen might like to see rather than serve-up the inevitable gumbo of cliche-riddled PC, multi-cultural crapola? I only need to say ‘WOMAD’, ‘East London Dance’ and ‘Courtesy of Big Dance’ and you get the gist. At the end of Act 1 the royal party retreated to the palace bloodied but unbowed. They did not return. Keith was the first to notice the Royal Standard had been lowered confirming that The Queen had left the building.
With The Feeling giving ‘A Tour Through British Pop’ and ‘Only Boys Aloud’ as a finale one could hardly blame her. No prizes for guessing Katherine Jenkins closed the show. For some reason the Jenny Lind de nos jours has the monopoly on royal concerts. Her Majesty must have nightmares that one morning instead of a lone bag-piper giving the wake-up call in the grounds of Buckingham Palace, Katherine Jenkins will leap out of the bushes singing eight bars of Rule Britannia. But despite the rather gruesome gala, a good time was had by all. Until next time…