Trousers? Of course she wears trousers; she’s a countrywoman, for heaven’s sake, and she’s not going to saddle up for a day riding the Balmoral heather encumbered by one of Hartnell’s elaborate hide-your-bottom gowns.

She would not dream of opening Parliament or investing a knight in a pair of strides, but even the head of state of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and a dozen dots on the Caribbean map is allowed the odd day off when she can dress as she pleases.

And, to be fair, flares did have their day in that far epoch of the Seventies. She looks good in them, worn with an exotic oriental jacket and a grin wide enough to make Cherie Blair look puckered. Elizabeth II is an excellently built woman, who wears exceeding well.

She is mindful of her clothes, and has hundreds of outfits carefully stored and catalogued at Buckingham Palace. What she wears on official engagements nowadays is as much the work of her devoted personal dresser, Angela Kelly, as the work of big-name couturiers. She has been called frumpy by the bitchy fashionistas of Milan — who developed an obsessive fascination with her handbag during a state visit to Italy — and a well-upholstered sofa by others jealous of her style.

Strip away the formality, and you have a woman of fashion-plate looks at the time of her Coronation when she had just turned 26, and who has aged gracefully ever since she gave up rinsing her hair in henna and allowing its natural silver to shine through.

She looks her best when she is informal, as that picture on a South Seas beach shows. With the Royal Yacht Britannia anchored offshore she is clearly on official business in some far-flung Commonwealth outpost, but she is having a spot of well-earned downtime, and loving it.

Wherever it is, it is still not her favourite beach. That honour belongs to a remote spot on the western coast of the little isle of Colonsay, in the Inner Hebrides, where the yacht always called for an informal picnic on her annual journey to Aberdeen for the start of the summer holiday. She would not have worn an Oriental jacket there, of course; Colonsay is a place for the Barbour and the woolly pully.

The Queen married a man who once described himself as a nobody, a discredited Balkan prince of no particular merit or distinction. But another photograph up for auction shows him as a man of breeding and Hollywood good looks, as he indulges in some aristo tomfoolery with his Mountbatten clan.

Monarchy can be appealing when it is seen off-duty. There are, however, limits; for all her cautious and decorous flirting with passing fashion, we never saw the Queen in hot pants.

Phew!

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