If you want an answer to the tricky question of whether it is right for the Queen to boycott her son’s wedding, turn to that leading constitutional expert, Max Clifford: ‘Of course she should go. She’s his mum.’
Once the legality of the wedding is established, the love of a mother for her son is all that matters. Constitutional experts can say all they want about how unseemly it is that the Queen should have to visit a register office, even if she has been photographed beaming from the arcade of that same register office in Christopher Wren’s fine Guildhall at Windsor, presiding over a procession of flower-pot men in 2002.
Historians can say that monarchs have boycotted weddings before. Queen Victoria refused to go to the marriage of her son Prince Edward and Princess Alexandra in 1863. But then the Widow of Windsor was still deep in mourning for the death of Prince Albert two years before.
The Queen is in good health, happily married and, quite literally, the monarch of all she surveys.
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