|  | Jeannette Charles as Queen Elizabeth in The Naked Gun (1988) |
| The Queen's loyal doppelganger | Perusing the Essex Chronicle in 1972, Jeannette Charles spotted an advert that would change her life, says The New York Times. It was for a portrait-painting service, which Charles decided would make the perfect birthday gift for her husband. The picture of her turned out well – so well, in fact, that the artist submitted it for the Royal Academy's summer exhibition. But Charles, who died last week aged 96, had such a striking resemblance to Queen Elizabeth II that when the RA received the picture, they immediately rang Buckingham Palace assuming the monarch must have given a sitting. Once the confusion had been cleared up, the picture went on display – and the ensuing publicity enabled Charles to become the world's foremost royal look-alike. | Over the next four decades, she played the Queen in everything from village fêtes to Hollywood movies such as The Naked Gun and Austin Powers in Goldmember. Joan Rivers employed her to rattle her jewellery from the royal box during shows; Muhammad Ali once asked for a photo of her giving him a "royal right hook". She was even invited by foreign governments to "rehearse proper greetings before state visits by the real Queen". But Charles turned down roles that she considered disrespectful to her doppelganger, most notably a £10,000 offer to pose naked for Playboy. In fact, she was a fervent monarchist, and upbraided anyone who criticised the royal family, declaring "off with their head". When asked to play the Queen at an event for a charity of which the Queen Mother was a patron, she sought approval from Clarence House. "Mrs Charles is a delightful lady and we have never had cause to pass judgment on the way she conducts herself," an equerry replied. "To me," she recalled, "it felt like a royal accolade." |
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| | | | THE IDYLL Abbey Orchard is built on the remains of a medieval monastery in St Albans, Hertfordshire. The five-bedroom home unfolds across two wings, with floor-to-ceiling windows and bespoke maple joinery throughout. Features include a wood-burning stove, home cinema and large modern kitchen. Outside, the two acres of gardens contain private woodland and back on to a picturesque river. St Albans station is a 20-minute walk, with trains to London in 18 minutes. £5.9m |
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| | |  | A defaced photo of Marine Le Pen and her protégé Jordan Bardella. Joel Saget/AFP/Getty |
| Stop bandying around the phrase "far-right" | You do not have to be a mystic to have foreseen the results of last week's EU elections, says Douglas Murray in The Spectator. A series of victories for right-of-centre parties was "easily predictable", as was the response from much of the British media. The BBC's Katya Adler went with the inevitable – "the far-right is on the march" – and claimed people across the continent are always saying: "This feels like the Europe of the 1930s." I don't know if the BBC's Europe editor often visits Europe, but having swung through five European countries in the week before the elections, "I did not hear the sound of jackboots anywhere". | Now that the media uses the term "far-right" to describe "everybody to the right of Extinction Rebellion", it has lost all meaning. And that may one day become a problem, because among the parties described as far-right are many that are no such thing – Giorgia Meloni's Brothers of Italy, Nigel Farage's Reform – and a few that "there are serious questions about". Germany's AfD, for example, has members who are "definitely up to no good". The Freedom Party in Austria also has "a certain whiff" around some of its apparatchiks. Vlaams Belang in Belgium and National Rally in France not only have dodgy pasts but "a question hovering over them" about whether they are "harking back to the days of collaboration". Lazy BBC types lumping these genuine wrong 'uns in with those they merely don't like only makes it harder to tell who the real enemy is. | | | | | | Enjoying The Knowledge? Click below to share | | |
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| | |  | Zsa Zsa Gabor in 1990. Paul Harris/Getty |
| The quirky secrets of the perfect obituary | People probably think writing obituaries is a gloomy job, says Nigel Farndale in The Times. They couldn't be more wrong. Death is only briefly mentioned at the bottom of the piece, and the rest is about life, "in all its chaotic, inspiring, quirky glory". Obituaries are not, as some believe, "an extension of the honours system". They work best when they are a balanced account, flaws and all. When we recently described Sir Jeremiah Harman as a "rude, lazy, short-tempered, unpredictable" judge, known in legal circles as "Harman the Horrible", a member of his family got in touch to tell us we'd got him "spot on". | Anecdotes are essential for providing insight into character: the Army officer who took an umbrella into battle in case it rained; the surgeon so competitive he "made his grandchildren cry by sending a Monopoly board flying across the room". And we love our euphemisms: "an uncompromisingly direct way with the opposite sex" (flasher); "not known to toy with his food" (glutton); "remarkably liberated from the tyranny of ambition" (lazy); "comfortable with confrontation" (complete psycho). The aim is to be "sympathetic rather than sycophantic, gently subversive, but alive to human frailty". Perhaps the best example is this opening, from 2016: "Provided that you were not married to Zsa Zsa Gabor – and many people were – she could be a lot of fun." | 🤨😡 Obituaries can occasionally have unfortunate consequences. In 2013, we ran one for a stockbroker who, we later learned, had secretly led a double life. "One of the families only found out about the other when they read his obituary in the Times." | | |  | Someone tell HR: Renée Zellweger and Hugh Grant in Bridget Jones's Diary (2001) |
| No sex please, we're British (Petroleum) | The first Bridget Jones film contains "numerous scenes that I doubt you'd get away with today", says Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph. Not because they're offensive, but because Bridget has a relationship with her boss. "And these days, apparently, this is considered utterly unthinkable." Just ask anyone who works at BP: according to the oil giant's new code of conduct, no manager can get off with anyone they "directly or indirectly manage", and all 90,000 employees must "register" any collegiate hanky panky or risk the sack. | Am I alone in finding this "unnervingly dystopian"? Yes, office romances can end badly and cause awkwardness. But think of all the happy marriages between people who first flirted by the water cooler. Were they really committing some kind of corporate crime? Besides, what counts as a relationship? Say you get sozzled at the Christmas party and snog Gary from accounts. Do you immediately have to report this to the board of directors? Finding a girlfriend or boyfriend must be so much more complicated than it was in the past. Post #MeToo, they daren't risk trying to chat up a stranger in a bar, "in case it's misconstrued as harassment". And now they daren't risk asking out someone from work, in case it costs them their job. Turns out we needn't have fretted about what schools are teaching children about sex. The way the world's going, "they'll never get the chance to do it". | | | | | "A book should serve as an axe for the frozen sea within us."
Franz Kafka |
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