It is truly remarkable how little we know about the Queen – if only she had transmitted such a quality to her offspring

Wherever you stand on Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, although actually standing on her is obviously treasonous, she is the last silent celebrity. In an age where the drive has been toward ever more extreme and frequent acts of self-disclosure, she has always grasped that silence is the most intriguing statement of all. We know more about someone who has been a contestant on a reality show for one week than we do the woman who has been on the throne for six decades.

Public figures who do not grant interviews make hen’s teeth look like spam emails. Kate Moss was briefly one, staring mutely out from photoshoots and paparazzi shots, and all the more fascinatingly mysterious for it. But I remember stumbling on a documentary in which she was shown arriving at Glastonbury and, for the first time in my experience, opening her mouth. “You’ve no idea what a facking nightmare we’ve had getting here,” she squawked at some backstage greeter. It was akin to the needle being scraped across a record. It wasn’t that Mossy was being unpleasant – she wasn’t – it was just that the spell was broken. Since then she’s given all sorts of interviews, and the compelling unknowability has vanished.

Of course, we’ve heard the Queen speak (if not say the word “facking”). But since she’s never given an interview, the assessment of Where She’s At Right Now is limited to analysing scarcely perceptible eyebrow movements during the so-called Queen’s speech, or decoding her studiedly code-free Christmas messages. You can’t even liken her to stars like Greta Garbo, who withdrew from the public gaze, because she never has. She is an emotional recluse on public parade – perhaps the only emotional recluse in modern public life, where you can’t win an election or even read the news without affecting a full range of sensibilities.

Rather than running the gamut of emotion from A to B, as Dorothy Parker remarked of Katharine Hepburn, Her Majesty declines even to admit to A. She just keeps buggering on, inscrutably. It’s remarkable how much of what we think we know about her is fiction, a composite born of Alan Bennett and Helen Mirren, which people choose to find more convincing than the supposedly real-life sovereign stylings of Paul Burrell. (My favourite “recollection” of Princess Di’s butler, who you’ll recall had half her dresses in his attic for safekeeping, will remain the several hours he spent alone with the Queen shortly after Di’s death. “Be careful, Paul,” she apparently implored the future I’m A Celebrity contestant. “There are powers at work in this country of which we have no knowledge.”)

The only time the emotionless strategy appeared to have failed Her Maj was in the bizarre period after Princess Di‘s death, when she was bombarded by all those mawkishly hectoring tabloid headlines claiming “your people need you, ma’am”. Who knows what the Queen’s private verdict on such naked buckpassing truly was, but perhaps she thought that what her people actually needed was to pull themselves together.

And oddly, that was certainly the opinion to which plenty of those who briefly lost their heads to the emotionalism eventually came, somewhat sheepishly. What an irony that the thing the Queen was judged to have got most wrong was perhaps the thing she was most right about, the ultimate instance of being able to retain perspective when all around are losing theirs. Meanwhile, Tony Blair, amusingly lauded for his general response to Diana’s death and his scenery-chewing reading of Corinthians at her funeral, is now the name most frequently cited by those warning republicans to be careful what they wish for. President Blair, they screech (annoyingly missing the obvious point that presidents are only presidents for the period of time the people elect them to be so).

It must be said that Her Majesty hasn’t managed to transmit the power of silence to her children, though that famous picture of her merely shaking the hand of the three or four year-old Prince Charles after months away might suggest she has tried. For a couple of decades back there, the clan became our version of The Simpsons, the most high profile dysfunctional family in the land. The Windsors lacked the warmth and charm of their Springfield counterparts, of course, but were a similarly nuclear family, in a Chernobyl kinda way. They certainly never let you down with an episode, lurching from The Grand Knockout Tournament through Charles’s tampon fantasy to a few soap operatic divorces. Since the Burrell trial and its hilarious fallout, though, they’ve been disappointingly quiet on the unplanned entertainment front.

That may well change, given that those upon whom it will fall to be operational – Prince William but most pressingly Charles – appear not to have identified that inscrutability has been the keystone of the Queen’s mythmaking. Pettish, peremptory, idiotically conservative, lacking in self-awareness, and perhaps a hundredth as clever as he thinks he is – if only we didn’t know quite so much about Charles and his views on everything. There are less scrutable Big Brother contestants. Après mama le déluge? Well, perhaps it’s not the weekend for issuing flood warnings.

Twitter: @MarinaHyde