Well, the newborn might as well get used to living in a media firestorm.
Hard as it is to believe, there has been a fury among the Brit press about the name given to the new child of Harry and Meghan — do we call them the Sussexes? — because they decided their little girl would be named Lilibet Diana. And not because of the second name coming from Harry’s mom, but the first, coming from Harry’s grandmother.
Queen Elizabeth was known as Lilibet as a child. And even into adulthood her husband stuck with the nickname. Some of the tabloids in London are in a tizzy about the queen having to share the name. And moreso about the process, or lack of one, on getting the queen’s permission.
The queen has been our favorite worldwide leader since, oh, about the time she put on the crown. Even before that, she was a mechanic during World War II. Everything we’ve read and heard points to her career in service, and her ability to try — oh, to try — to see things from other points of view. That is, from a non-royal point of view.
But royalty, she is. And she cannot help it. We are immediately reminded of the time that a president named Ronald Reagan invited the queen and Prince Philip to his California ranch for a getaway. One night the kitchen served Tex-Mex, a series of dishes that the queen had never before experienced. She asked the president what all this consisted of.
Mr. Reagan explained tortillas, the cheese dips, the chips, and refried beans. At the end of the evening, the queen, trying to compliment her host, told the president that she was pleasantly surprised by the “used beans.”
We’ve lost count of the number of biographies we’ve read about this particular monarch. She’s never granted an interview to the press before (!) but something tells us that she’ll share her name with a great-grandchild with a stiff upper lip, and what. To do otherwise would be poor form. Unladylike. Ill mannered. And the original Lilibet is above — well above — all of that.