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The newspapers are full of straight reporting (the Queen, asked if she would have a cup of tea, said: "Yes, thank you, it is rather cold") but this does not suffice to meet the demand for "news" about the royal family. Periodically the Sunday newspapers publish reminiscences of life in the royal household. Former governesses, valets, and even the man who did the shopping for the Palace write their "inside stories." These are as uninformative as the special campaign biographies that appear every four years in the United States, but the public loves them. I have been told that a "royal" feature in a popular magazine adds 25,000 or 30,000 in circulation for that issue. The Sunday Express is said to have picked up 300,000 circulation on the Duchess of Windsor's memoirs. Like sex and crime, the royal family is always news—and the news is not invariably favorable.

The interest in royal doings is all the more baffling because the Queen is generally held to be powerless politically. This view is accepted in Britain and also in the United States, save among those surviving primitives of Chicagoland who regard all British monarchs as reincarnations of George III ready to order the Lobsterbacks to Boston at an insult's notice. The accepted picture is of a monarch who is a symbol with little or no influence on politics.