William Shawcross’s biography, the first official royal ­life since 1990, has already stirred up tremendous excitement. Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother valued discretion highly, gave only one interview in her life, and betrayed few thoughts and opinions during 80-odd years in the public spotlight. Now at last we will have the truth about her relations with Wallis Simpson, her machinations ­during the Diana crisis, as well as her salty views on what, ­according to the BBC’s Edward Stourton, at least, she referred to as “Huns, wops and dagos”.

Any reader really expecting all this, however, is going to be sorely disappointed. There is no reference to the ­Stourton quote, for instance. The most interesting ­revelation is what a wonderful letter-writer the Queen Mother was, brimful of liveliness and irreverence, steeliness and sweetness, and the extensive excerpts from dozens of her letters here do vivify what would otherwise be an extremely stodgy tome. Shawcross’s other good source is the series of recorded conversations she had with Eric Anderson, retired headmaster of Eton, in 1994-95. But for long sections he comes close to doing the Queen Mother a ­disservice: making one of the most mischievous and ­amusing of recent royals seem dull.

Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon was born in 1900 in the last months of Queen Victoria’s reign, the ninth child of the Earl and Countess of Strathmore, and a direct descendant of Robert the Bruce. An Edwardian childhood involved “essays, music, Geografy and sums” (her spelling was never perfect), in between hiding out in a den called the Flea House, with a secret stash of “apples, oranges, sugar, sweets, slabs of Chocolat Menier, matches and packets of Woodbines”. She was writing hilarious letters from a very young age, and at 13 wrote to her older brother Michael, “I hope you are having plenty of champenge, clarit, ’oc, mosel, and baeer, Baeer, Baeer, wonderful baeer, fill ­yourself right up to here (neck). That was by ­Shakespeare.”

Very much a bright young thing, in 1921 she stayed in Paris, and went to a “low place, full of the most astounding people! At two we staggered out — me exchanging a rapid fire of little pink balls with a sinister gentleman in a black beard! It was such fun, and so indescribably Parisien”.

Such a girl was bound to be wary of ­marrying into the painfully formal and starchy royal family, and Albert (or “Bertie”, the future George VI) had to ­propose to her more than once. Rejecting him a second time, she wrote, “I am so ­terribly sorry… You are one of my best & most faithful friends.” Such behaviour left King George V and Queen Mary feeling “ruffled at E’s ­behaviour”, according to the redoubtable Queen Mary, although when Elizabeth finally agreed to marriage, her future mother-in-law wrote that she and the king were “delighted”.

Wills and Harry will probably spend their honeymoons in an eco-lodge in ­Swaziland, but Elizabeth and Bertie spent their time blasting away at big game in Uganda. Walking among African elephants was “so amusing, and frightfully dangerous”, and they shot “a very big elephant”, “raked a lion but it got away”, and Bertie even bagged a northern white rhino, while admitting that “they are becoming scarce”. They are now extinct in the wild.

We already know she didn’t like Wallis Simpson, “that woman”, and was bitterly upset by the 1936 abdication crisis, not least because it meant that her shy, ­stammering husband was thrust onto the throne, “and I am terrified for him”. Talking to Anderson in 1994, she still spoke of the “terrible surprise…terrible tragedy … The most ghastly shock”.

Yet they survived as a couple, and became a powerful symbol of defiance ­during the war. Already published last weekend, the long letter she wrote about the bombing of Buckingham Palace in 1940 is fascinating, her statement afterwards blunt and magnificent. “The children will not leave unless I do. I shall not leave unless their father does, and the king will not leave the country in any circumstances, whatever.”

Shawcross tries hard to make her sound cultured — the middle-class way of demonstrating you’re a higher type — but she held pretty firmly to the aristocratic way, which means knowing how to ride a horse and shoot a gun. In 1939 she wrote to her mother, “I am starting to read the unexpurgated edition of Mein Kampf. Have you read it, Mama?” Otherwise Shawcross threshes around with some desperation. She enjoyed ballet, and a good lunch at the National ­Gallery. Osbert Sitwell and Thornton Wilder both gave her copies of their books. Um…

There are huge amounts of social history and background, endless accounts of engagements, travels, dinner parties with lists of guests in all their dry neutrality, but this only highlights what isn’t in the book. AN Wilson famously blabbed about her conversation at a dinner party and her ­reminiscence of a poetry reading at Windsor Castle; she recalled “this rather lugubrious man in a suit, and he read a poem… I think it was called The Desert. At first the girls got the giggles and then I did and then even the king… Such a gloomy man, looked as though he worked in a bank”.

The lugubrious man was, in fact, TS Eliot, devoted Anglican and monarchist, and The Desert was The Waste Land, the greatest poem of the 20th century. Was the Queen Mother feigning ignorance for comic effect? Possibly. Either way, it’s a hilarious snippet and, the way Shawcross tells it, not funny at all. There is no mention of a “lugubrious man in a suit”, or a poem called The Desert, and instead he gets all the facts right. It wasn’t at Windsor Castle, it was at the Aeolian Hall in New Bond Street. He even dates it to early 1943, with admirable diligence and undoubted accuracy. But unfortunately this is a prize example of how, in the words of that great idiot savant, Ronald Reagan, “facts are stupid things”, while fragmentary, half-remembered gossip can be richly illuminating as well as amusing. It’s no good pretending the Queen Mum was enormously cultured, but she could clearly be very funny.

As we approach the present, the tone of the book becomes ever more cautious and official. Of the Diana crisis, anyone who read newspapers through the 1990s will learn nothing new. The Queen Mother was upset by all her grandchildren’s divorces, she deeply disapproved of Andrew ­Morton’s Diana biography, and “regretted” the Prince of Wales talking to Jonathan Dimbleby, but she always refused to take sides. You could guess all that without being Derren Brown, though. You might also have guessed by now something else that emerges strongly: the Queen herself is, if I may make so bold, an absolute brick.

Official biographies are like uxorious husbands, dependable but dull, and ­Shawcross’s near-1,100-page whopper is, with momentary exceptions, a typical example. In a rare moment of analysis rather than mere facts, he shrewdly ­identifies the Queen Mother as one “of the last generation of aristocrats who felt able to accept their superior social position with no ­feeling of guilt but rather a sense of duty and obligation”.

She may not always have expressed ­opinions approved of by 21st-­century Islington, and Shawcross’s ­description of the Duke of Edinburgh’s politics being “a ­considerable way to the left” of his mother-in-law’s ­certainly raises an eyebrow; but it seems unlikely that she was “a ghastly old bigot”, as Stourton claimed. Maybe it was her ­obviously sunny, guilt-free enjoyment of life itself, from horse racing to dry martinis and champagne, that endeared her to the British public, as it did to George V. A ­stickler for punctuality, he allowed only his ­daughter-in-law to be late for dinner. “If she weren’t late, she would be perfect,” he remarked, “and how horrible that would be.”

Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother by William Shawcross
Macmillan £25 pp1,096

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