Queen Mum: The Official Biography

Bad news first: You have to get through 1,000 pages from cover to cover. The meticulous retelling a life spanning more than a century takes up space. So many words, yet the author managed to skip everything relevant. If you belong to circles where you are expected to have this book lying around, you might want to put four legs on it and use it as a coffee table. Or is that a gin table?

Macmillan published Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother by William Shawcross. The book suffers from the usual bug all authorized biographies and autobiographies suffer from: It shows the life of the subject as the writer wants it to be remembered, not as it was. Or maybe the author was just told to stick to safe topics.
 

William Shawcross is the guy who exposed the secret bombing of Cambodia by the United States. If you are expecting journalism from, you will be disappointed. The book is frivolously empty and devoid of any news items. It is crammed to the rafters with everything already known. It manages in a spectacular way to leave out anything that might even resemble a revelation. Even old news is left out or glossed over if it could so much as scratch the glossy surface aimed for in the presentation.

Obviously, as Queen Consort of the United Kingdom (plus some other countries) and Empress of India, she had to be a top notch performer on the world stage. The book covers everything about the performance and completely forgets the performer. If you want to believe the book, the Queen Mum was all sugar and oh so sweet. You never get to see the ruthless politician with an iron core that was the real her. Margaret Thatcher looked like a cuddly toy when compared to the Queen Mother. Her political views are never mentioned; they would make Prince Philip look like a model in political correctness.

The book completely fails to show up how the woman who didn’t want to become a Queen Consort was such a success at it. Sugar and charm were not ingredients in that success, only its icing. It also doesn’t show her as the driving force behind the complete exile of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (the former King Edward VIII), and why she was so right in doing so to get rid of two prominent Nazi sympathizers.

Is there anybody who should read this book? Maybe there are some few people who might glean something from it, apart from the undiscerning fan crowd, obviously. It contains pages upon pages of description of each and every piece of fashion ever made for the Queen Mother. As a historical compilation of fashion over a century, the book might just serve a purpose. But be warned, the writing is as bad as any coming from Dame Barbara Cartland’s pen.

I can’t recommend the book as a good read. The repetitions were boring and tedious, and when the author used the words ‘delightful’ and ‘thrilled’ for the thousandth time (about page 30), I could happily have throttled him. What is exciting about the book is the fact that it shows an Empress of India who never quite came to grips with the fact that she had become an ex-Empress after the war. She never understood that she was not a prime player in world politics anymore, but queen consort on a small island on the very edge of Europe. Even more fascinating: As the book progresses, the author loses his perspective more and more and regresses into that warped world view himself.
 

It is, in that sense, a perfect representation of the United Kingdom of today. Britain is a country lost in a dream of grandeur long past. Its government is laboring under the delusion that Europe needs it. People hardly able to write and read when leaving school, thanks to the shambles the government calls education. Yes, mass delusions are a reality. Americans know how it works, too.

Further reading
Christmas The Royal Way
Queens Consort of England
How Many Monarchies Exist in Europe?

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