The Queen’s sole mistake

It’s often been said that the late Queen Elizabeth II rarely if ever put a foot wrong during her 70-year reign. Trained from a young age to betray no sign of partiality, or even of individuality, she lived long enough to become the matriarchal figure at the centre of everyone’s favorite soap opera. In a world of change, she never wavered. Her death last year may have drawn a final line under the era we knew as ‘postwar’, where qualities like stoicism and self-effacement still just about prevailed in British life, and where nobody blamed, whined or emoted.

But as the curious events of exactly 60 years ago prove, the Queen, like most of us, was also capable of the occasional faux pas.

The story began on the morning of 8 October 1963, when the famously unflappable Harold Macmillan, Britain’s Conservative prime minister since January 1957, politely excused himself during the course of a cabinet meeting, admitting he felt a ‘trifle indisposed’.