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| Diamond jubilee: just room for one's nearest and dearest | Diamond jubilee: just room for one's nearest and dearest |
| (10 months later) | |
| It was not an assemblage widely recognised for its collective devotion to popular music – major royals, minor royals, Norma Major, celebrity chefs (one, at least, in Heston Blumenthal), influential political figures and Nick Clegg. But here they are, nonetheless, gathered together for an evening of middle-of-the-road and occasionally haphazard jubilee entertainment outside Buckingham Palace. | It was not an assemblage widely recognised for its collective devotion to popular music – major royals, minor royals, Norma Major, celebrity chefs (one, at least, in Heston Blumenthal), influential political figures and Nick Clegg. But here they are, nonetheless, gathered together for an evening of middle-of-the-road and occasionally haphazard jubilee entertainment outside Buckingham Palace. |
| For such a historic gathering it was strange to find so many hard-to-identify faces among the high-profile guests. Who are these people, and how were their seats allocated? What earned Waitrose boss Mark Price, for example, a seat right behind John Major? In fact, why is Major there and not Tony Blair? And why have most of the black people been seated together? Is nearness to the Queen a simple function of rank, or are people also grouped by type, like elements in the periodic table? | For such a historic gathering it was strange to find so many hard-to-identify faces among the high-profile guests. Who are these people, and how were their seats allocated? What earned Waitrose boss Mark Price, for example, a seat right behind John Major? In fact, why is Major there and not Tony Blair? And why have most of the black people been seated together? Is nearness to the Queen a simple function of rank, or are people also grouped by type, like elements in the periodic table? |
| Whoever they all are – and the Buckingham Palace press office is not telling – the Queen's well-wishers appear to be reacting to events onstage with a mixture of elation, bemusement, detachment and, in the case of Princess Anne, quiet fury. | Whoever they all are – and the Buckingham Palace press office is not telling – the Queen's well-wishers appear to be reacting to events onstage with a mixture of elation, bemusement, detachment and, in the case of Princess Anne, quiet fury. |
| It was difficult, as it almost always is, to imagine what went through the Queen's mind as she watched performances by Tom Jones, Cliff Richards and Paul McCartney, but one would like to think it was something along the lines of: "Don't any of these people ever retire?" | It was difficult, as it almost always is, to imagine what went through the Queen's mind as she watched performances by Tom Jones, Cliff Richards and Paul McCartney, but one would like to think it was something along the lines of: "Don't any of these people ever retire?" |
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