Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

What is your first recollection of the Queen?

Mine dates back to Coronation Day, 2nd June 1953. I am five and sitting on my father’s shoulders, in the rain in the middle of the crowd in the Mall, holding onto to his forehead with one hand while trying to manage my folding Palitoy periscope with the other. The periscope, made of cardboard and tin mirrors, was designed to let you see over the heads of a crowd, but when I peered into mine all I saw was a murky reflection of my own face. I don’t think we had assembled the contraption quite right.

I do remember the gold Coronation coach trundling past and the cheering of the crowds. And I remember seeing the young Queen’s face in pale grey close-up on television later in the day. We got our first TV set for the Coronation. We did not buy it; we hired it from Radio Rentals. The screen was set in the top part of a wooden case like a bedside cupboard, and I stood right in front of it, so that Her Majesty’s nose and mine were almost touching.

I remember my three sisters (eight to ten years older than me) squawking at me to get out of the way so that they could see what was going on. And I remember, too, how as a family we stood smartly to attention in the sitting room, facing the screen, every time the national anthem was played. It seemed to be played endlessly that day.

I also remember, at the end of the week, going with my parents to the local cinema to see the newsreel footage of the great day.

On the right-hand side of the cinema, no smoking was permitted. My father was a keen smoker (either Olivier or Craven A in those days), so we sat on the left. I sat on his knee and peered up at the screen through a thick haze of cigarette smoke. I think I saw about as much of the Coronation then as I had seen through my periscope on the day itself.

Sixty-nine years on, I am back on the Mall, popping up as part of the commentary team for coverage of the celebrations marking the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. I have even found myself inside Buckingham Palace, perched on a gilt chair, taking part in live editions of ITV’s This Morning and BBC1’s The One Show. The Palace is being refurbished and the State apartments on the ground floor work nicely as a spacious TV studio. The place really is far too big to be in any sense a family home.

In 1952, at the time of the Queen’s accession, Prince Philip wanted his family to carry on living at Clarence House – where the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall live now. Built 200 years ago by John Nash for the Duke of Clarence (later William IV), it’s a manageable size (by Royal standards) and you could live in it (I imagine) without feeling you’re in a huge public building that’s more like a museum than like a home.

I was lucky enough to spend a morning there this month, too, interviewing the Duchess of Cornwall for first episode of the Commonwealth Poetry podcast. HRH was just off to Canada and Rwanda, two of the 54 Commonwealth countries that, with my daughter, Aphra, I am visiting ‘virtually’ for the podcast over the next two years. Each 30-minute podcast will focus on a different Commonwealth country – some huge, like India (population 1.4 billion), some tiny (like Nauru, population 11,000) – and the idea is to learn more about each country and explore its poetic heritage.

I spent the morning with the Duchess talking about John Betjeman and Ted Hughes (and deciding we wouldn’t ‘cancel’ Robert Burns, while deploring some of what we now know about his behaviour towards women).

We left the Mall and trundled down to Worple Road in Merton, south London, to meet His Excellency Sir Iftikhar Ayaz KBE, OBE, PhD, Ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Council and the Commonwealth. He is the London representative of Tuvalu, a tiny island country in the Polynesian subregion of Oceania, situated roughly midway between Hawaii and Australia.

Thanks to the vagaries of climate change, Tuvalu (formerly known as the Ellice Islands) could be the first Commonwealth country to disappear, because at its highest point it is only 15 feet above sea level.

Sir Iftikhar is a remarkable man, more honoured I reckon than anyone I have met since my last encounter with the late Earl Mountbatten of Burma. So many and splendid are his post-nominal initials that his visiting card runs to three sides and his many awards include the World Medal of Freedom and the Glory of India Award.

I liked him enormously, the more so because he explained a mystery that has puzzled me for years. Why was Prince Philip worshipped as a god by the Yaohnanen tribe on the southern island of Tanna in Vanuatu?

‘That is easy to explain,’ smiled Sir Iftikhar. ‘When the Queen became Queen in 1952, she became the most important woman in the world. But she was a woman – so inevitably her husband had to be someone even more important.’

Vivat regina! The 1953 coronation

The fortnightly Commonwealth Poetry podcast begins on Sunday 12th June