Barack Obama’s 2011 state visit to London appears to have produced one of those perfect little Queen Elizabeth II vignettes.
In Valentine Low’s new book, Power and the Palace, which is being serialized in the Times, the author writes that as the evening of the state dinner dragged on, the Queen leaned over to finance minister George Osborne and said: “Will you tell President Obama it’s time to go to bed?”
The leader of the free world had outstayed her patience; she wanted her single room with the jack-and-jill sitting room she shared with Prince Philip, not another round of pleasantries.
It’s very funny, and very her.
The book also makes a bigger claim: that the Queen was against Brexit. Low cites as his evidence for this her telling a minister, “It’s better to stick with the devil you know.”
Sources have told the Royalist she used to challenge her dinner guests: “Tell me three things Europe has done for us.” That hardly sounds like the line of a committed Europhile.
There’s also the bigger philosophical and structural point: the project of monarchy is completely incompatible with the project of a federal Europe. The EU is designed to pool sovereignty; the crown exists to embody it.
Even if Elizabeth expressed some preference for stability, that’s not the same as quietly waving an EU flag in her heart. More likely she was a reluctant pragmatist, fond of continuity, cautious about upheaval.
But I know what I really want to hear about is Obama being told to run along to bed, so here is what Low writes on the matter:
George Osborne attended the Buckingham Palace banquet for the state visit by U.S. president Barack Obama in 2011. Towards the end of the evening, with everyone still enjoying themselves after dinner, the Queen came up to him and said, “Will you tell President Obama it’s time to go to bed?”
Osborne recalls, “I could see Obama surrounded by this big crowd. Am I supposed to go and tell him to go to bed? It was about midnight. And the Queen’s private secretary, Christopher Geidt, stepped in and said, ‘We are handling the situation, Chancellor.’ ”
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