Читать книгу Corgi and Bess: More Wit and Wisdom from the House of Windsor - Thomas Blaikie - Страница 7

‘I suppose he will want me to call him Tony,’ was the Queen’s way of greeting Blair’s 1997 landslide victory.

Trying to be friendly, Cherie Blair allegedly said to Princess Anne, ‘Do call me Cherie.’ ‘I think not actually,’ was the Princess Royal’s reply.

At Exeter Town Hall, not long after the foot and mouth crisis, the Queen encountered a member of the public who said, ‘This Government doesn’t care about the countryside.’ ‘I know,’ the Queen replied. ‘That’s what I’m always telling Mr Blair when I see him every week.’

Tell me a little more about what you’ve been doing?’ the Queen asked a man whom she was about to invest with a CBE. ‘I’ve been arguing with the Government,’ he replied. Her Majesty seemed to be on his wavelength straightaway. ‘Yes, governments do need arguing with sometimes,’ she remarked.

‘Who will be my conscience?’ the Queen demanded after discovering that Tony Blair intended to abolish the post of Lord Chancellor. She was especially displeased that she had been kept in the dark on this occasion. ‘Nobody tells me anything,’ she complained to astonished onlookers in Edinburgh.

When, in the 1970s, the 1st Lord of the Admiralty was sent for, he found the Queen in a less than amenable frame of mind. Her froideur was occasioned by the public row that was going on about the cost of refitting the Royal Yacht Britannia. But the 1st Lord thought he had got the situation under control. All he needed to do was to explain in great detail what was the matter with Britannia.