2
Her Majesty’s Warning
WHEN THE OFFICE WAS FIRST ALLOCATED TO HIM, Bob had been pleased to notice that a copy of Annigoni’s painting of the Queen hung on the wall. The artist had made this likeness during the first years of her reign. It showed Her Majesty, dressed in the robes of the Order of the Garter, standing against a Renaissance background.
Bob had felt an immediate sense of identity with the Queen as both he and Her Majesty faced overwhelming difficulties in their respective positions. The young Queen was to take on the leadership of a country still recovering from the ravages of the Second World War, together with the responsibility of steering a disintegrating empire into a new commonwealth of nations. Bob had recently assumed the role of single parent to his three children,
