Queen Elizabeth II managed to make it to the final evening of the Royal Windsor Horse Show on Sunday, meaning she came out on Friday and Sunday, and made a point of walking to her seat with the aid of a cane. On Sunday, the Queen watched “The Gallop Through History” show, and she saw her granddaughter Lady Louise Windsor do her carriage driving thing. Tom Cruise was there, so was Helen Mirren. Cruise in particular has been cozying up a lot to royalty recently and I’m not exactly sure why. He was selected to introduce a horsey collection which celebrated the four nations of the United Kingdom. One of the more bizarre moments came from Alan Titchmarsh, who was acting as sort of an MC for the event. This is what he said:

Television presenter Alan Titchmarsh said “our identity, heart and soul is embodied by Her Majesty the Queen”.

The gardening guru and writer told presenters Phillip Schofield and Julie Etchingham: “This is a remarkable year, 70 years for a remarkable woman whom I’ve met quite a lot and been bowled over by because she’s such ferociously good company.”

“She has enormous quiet charisma, like Nelson Mandela did. He had a kind of grace and the Queen’s the same.It’s important in our lives, particularly this past couple of years, that we have special. If we don’t know our own family history, we know hers, and she in a way shares her lineage with us and her history is our history, and that matters to us. Whether we’re conscious of it or not.”

[From The Telegraph]

I understand that a lot of people are embiggening the Queen during her Jubbly year and I realize that she’s a big part of the British national consciousness, but… can we not compare her to Nelson Mandela? My goodness. Shocked no one has said “the Queen is just like Mahatma Gandhi too.”

Seriously, what is Tom Cruise doing? Which member of the Royal Family is about to become a Scientologist?

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