President Gerald Ford was “incandescent” after a White House band committed a musical gaffe during the 1976 state visit of Queen Elizabeth II, but the monarch thought it was “hilarious,” her biographer has said.
The monarch met 13 U.S. presidents during her 70-year reign, and her varied meetings with the heads of states were pulled into focus last month after a new book said she told a friend Donald Trump had been “very rude” during his 2019 state visit to the U.K.
Trump issued a swift rebuttal to the anecdote retold by author Craig Brown, telling the Daily Mail: “It was totally false. I have no idea who the writer is, but it was really just the opposite.” He added, “She said it to friends of mine that ‘President Trump was my favorite president.'”
Now, Robert Hardman, the late queen’s biographer, has said that while he doubts the monarch expressed that she had a “favorite” anything, there were presidents beyond Trump who could be accused of having been “rude” to the monarch.
One example, he said in an article written for the Daily Mail, was Ford’s state dinner gaffe, in which the band played “The Lady Is a Tramp.”
Queen Elizabeth II and President Gerald Ford dancing during a White House state dinner on July 1976. There was a musical gaffe during the event, which left the president “incandescent” a biographer has said.
CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images
“He invited the Queen on her 1976 state visit to the USA in honor of the bicentenary of American independence,” Hardman wrote.
He continued: “After the White House banquet, he led the Queen on to the floor for the first dance, at which point the band struck up: ‘That’s Why the Lady Is a Tramp.’
“Ford was incandescent afterwards. And the Queen? She thought it was hilarious.”
According to Hardman, Barack Obama is another president who could be accused of having shown rudeness to the queen. The 44th president famously kept her up late after his own state dinner at Buckingham Palace in 2011.
“The queen had been keen to go to bed but Obama was busy talking to other people (not to her),” he said. “So she asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, to nudge things along.”
“‘I just said: “Yes, Ma’am,”‘ Osborne told me later. ‘I could see Obama with a drink in hand, and I was thinking: What do I do? I couldn’t just interrupt and say: “Oh, the Queen wants you to go to bed.”‘ Step forward the Queen’s then-private secretary, Sir Christopher Geidt, who had a discreet word with his White House counterpart,” the biographer continued.
Hardman added that the queen did not express that she thought Obama was “rude” and that she “retained a long-standing affection for his wife Michelle Obama.”
James Crawford-Smith is Newsweek‘s royal reporter, based in London. You can find him on X (formerly Twitter) at @jrcrawfordsmith and read his stories on Newsweek‘s The Royals Facebook page.
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