There is a mad, amazing tale about Elton John, Princess Anne and the Queen dancing together at “the world’s quietest disco”. And a bitchy retort from 1987, where Andy Warhol reportedly said, “Prince Andrew has gotten so ugly, he’s looking like his mother”. Some tales are less markedly less interesting, and Brown works hard to ascribe them relevance. As a child, he explains, even the way that the young princess Elizabeth ate sweets (methodically and daintily, apparently) illustrated how she was already “embarking on a lifetime’s habit of delayed gratification”. Did it really? Was she… possibly… just a bit bland? “I don’t know how to break this…”, remarked Paul McCartney after being presented to the Queen in 2002, “but she didn’t have a lot to say”. And this was from someone who admitted to having an enormous crush on her when he was in his teens, and she in her early 20s. “She was a babe… we used to say ‘just look at the heat on her’”. But how else, Brown recognises, could she act in her position?
