John Penrose

Conservative Party | Weston-super-Mare

Royal Visit

The Queen is smaller than you think. The TV makes her look several inches taller than she really is, as I discovered when she visited Blagdon and Weston last Friday.

But size isn’t the same thing as presence. She’s got bags of it. She’s the centre of attention as soon as she enters a room. It’s effortless. I watched her meet local residents at the Healthy Living Centre on the Bourneville estate, and everyone was fascinated. From the crowds outside who’d waited for ages in the pouring rain, to the school children on the exhibition stands inside, everyone strained to catch a glimpse of Weston’s most famous holiday visitor.

Other people can do it too, of course. Tony Blair is shorter and slighter than you’d expect, but he’s got enormous charisma. Margaret Thatcher and Ann Widdecombe are both physically tiny, but their personalities are huge. But the Queen is different. She isn’t trying to attract attention, she just does.

The security and protocol add to the sense of occasion, of course. A royal visit takes weeks of preparation. The attention to detail is incredible and the timetable measures every minute. You have to be in place an hour before the Queen arrives, and everyone spends the time practising how to greet her properly – apparently it’s ‘Your Majesty’ the first time you speak to her, and ‘ma’am’ to rhyme with ‘spam’ after that.

But the best thing was her effect on local people. After she’d gone, everyone was asking each other what she’d said to them. And the Bourneville estate had a quiet sense of pride that our Monarch had chosen them for part of her visit. As several of them said to me, ‘if the Bourneville’s good enough for Her Majesty, it’s good enough for anyone’. Amen to that.