OPINION:
For about an hour on late Tuesday morning, Britain did not have a Prime Minister.
With outgoing Tory leader Boris Johnson having bowed out and with the incoming Liz Truss en route from Aberdeen airport for "the kissing of the hands", executive authority in the UK rested with one person and one person only: The world's most famous fan of jammy dodgers, the Queen.
The poor thing- just what she needs at the age of 96: more responsibility.
But Tuesday's handing over the reins will still go down in the history books and for all the wrong reasons.
While Her Majesty appears to be in the most chipper of spirits in the shots of the changeover, her trademark Launer handbag and lippy on show, there is one detail that cannot be overlooked.
Much of the initial reporting has focused on the Queen's hands. Dressed in a tartan skirt and cardigan combo, what has been called her "traditional Balmoral attire," when Truss went to formally greet the 96-year-old, a large purple mark was clearly visible on the monarch's right hand.
This is not the first time this sort of situation has arisen, with a similar large blotch clearly visible on her left hand in photos of her meeting Queen Rania and King Abdullah of Jordan at Buckingham Palace back in 2019. (That she could easily have opted to wear her favourite Cornelia James gloves for that engagement suggested a certain nonchalance about the world seeing the bruise-like mark.)
While one potential cause could be that it was a bruise from cannula, another possibility was raised by The Times which has reported that she might be suffering from a benign condition called "senile purpura," which means skin bruises easily and which is not uncommon in the elderly.
However, what should really have royal watchers, devoted monarchists and anyone with even a smidge of respect for the indefatigable monarch concerned is that not only was she using a walking stick indoors, which is highly unusual, but she appeared to be obviously leaning on it as she cheerfully waited for the new Prime Minister.
I know that Her Majesty has been trotting about in public with a walking stick since October last year but generally she has carried it only when she was outdoors or during engagements which required her to stand up for longer periods of time.
For the last 12 months, by and large, every time Her Majesty has met with a dignitary or held an official audience at Windsor Castle it has been sans stick.
In the last six months, she has not needed any sort of mobility aid while awarding the George Cross to the National Health Service in July or holding audiences in Scotland; while receiving the Archbishop of Canterbury in June, the Emir of Qatar in May, or the President of Switzerland in April; nor when she presented the Gold Medal for Poetry or met Canadian dreamboat Justin Trudeau, both in March.
It was a great honour to present HM The Queen with the Canterbury Cross today as a sign of our gratitude for Her Majesty's 70 years of unstinting service to the @churchofengland - and our love, loyalty and affection.
— Archbishop of Canterbury (@JustinWelby) June 21, 2022
Read more: https://t.co/wlbx8uXJ7k
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🇨🇭This afternoon The Queen received the President of Switzerland, Mr Ignazio Cassis, for an Audience at Windsor Castle.
— The Royal Family (@RoyalFamily) April 28, 2022
Find out more about Audiences - https://t.co/jsAyH3qQ3t pic.twitter.com/OKAECTiQQv
You have to go back to February when the nonagenarian met with incoming and outgoing Defence Service Secretaries, Rear Admiral James Macleod and Major General Eldon Millar, and when she forthrightly told the top brass, "Well, as you can see, I can't move," to find a similar moment.
What the Truss photos bring into focus is that this is the new normal: An increasingly frail Queen whose each new public appearance is likely to carry with it some fresh sign of her increasing infirmity.
What now seems likely is that Her Majesty will not make way for her son Prince Charles (either by abdicating or installing a regency) but will continue to reign and will continue to, sadly, decline in front of our very eyes.
There is only so much the Palace can do to mask or to obscure just how significantly diminished her mobility has become if she wants to continue to appear in public.
In the last month there have been a series of concerning developments, including reports that there has been "a change" in her mobility and that she has not once been seen at Crathie Kirk, her local church, since arriving in Scotland in July, a grim first. (She is normally there every Sunday morning like clockwork.) So too did she skip last weekend's Braemar Gathering aka the Highland Games, one of favourite annual outings.
Most notably of all was the confirmation that came in late August that the anointing of the new Prime Minister would not happen in London but that, for the first time in her 70-year reign, they would travel to her in Scotland.
Her Majesty seems to have, at some stage, made a choice, to make some concessions to the indignities of older age – such as in May when she used her luxury golf cart to tour the Chelsea Flower Show – rather than hiding herself away and refusing to let the public witness the deterioration in her ability to get around.
While other monarchs in history have chosen to hide themselves away and to mask the true state of their health, the Queen would seem to have decided to go the other direction.
Sure, we are never going to get any sort of detailed statement about exactly what might be ailing her beyond the Palace wheeling out their line about "episodic mobility problems" but nor is Her Majesty trying to pretend that things are tickety boo.
I can't help but think there is a certain dignity in choosing this route and a bravery in allowing the world to see her vulnerability.
That said, there are clearly limits to how far she is willing to go.
In March this year, reports first surfaced suggesting she is now using a wheelchair behind closed doors.
"She is not wheelchair-bound but she has got a wheelchair," a source has told the Daily Beast's Tom Sykes. "By her own admission her feet don't work very well.
"There is a footman with a wheelchair."
This is not something we will likely ever see, with the Mail on Sunday having reported that the Queen is fearful of recreating the "haunting" photo of wheelchair-bound Princess Margaret that was taken only months before her 2002 death.
Still, as is advisable in times of uncertainty, let's look to the Queen Mother who lived to 101 and who, in 2001, the year before her death, undertook an official engagement to recommission an aircraft carrier while using not one but two walking sticks. Who needs an elixir of youth when there's gin, right?
- Daniela Elser is a royal expert and a writer working with a number of Australia's leading media titles.
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