Changes

Only then do we start at the beginning, with the courtship and marriage in 1923 of her parents, neither of whom expected to become King and Queen. The character of the future Queen Elizabeth (the present sovereign, not the Queen Mother) is soon self-evident, a very serious individual in stark contrast to her fun-loving younger sister Margaret, clearly conscious of her destiny once her father became King. Once she ascended the throne, the emphasis is still very much on her as a traditionalist, in contrast to the man she would marry, the more modern-minded Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.

A major change in general attitudes came during the 1960s and a general lessening of deference to and enthusiasm for the monarchy, and the retirement in 1968 of Commander Colville as Press Secretary, a man who had always been careful to issue as little information to the press as possible. Under his guidance, aided by the Duke of Edinburgh and his uncle Earl Mountbatten, came something of a major relaunch, designed to show the monarchy as more outgoing and accessible, beginning with the investiture of the Prince of Wales and the Royal Family film. Bradford shows how hindsight would reveal the latter in particular to be a mixed blessing, inadvertently whetting the public’s interest in ''the royal soap opera''. Of course, nobody could have anticipated the family crises when the marriages of the three elder children disintegrated in the 1990s and the tabloids fed the frenzied appetites of their readers, determined to know everything. From 1991, with criticism of the younger royal family’s lifestyle during the Gulf war and the economic crisis of the time, to the acrimonious breakdown of the Prince and Princess of Wales’s marriage and death of Diana six years later, times were indeed lean for the monarchy. After the new millennium, the death of the ever-popular Queen Mother and the Golden Jubilee, and the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, the pendulum appears to have swung the other way.