Britain’s Queen Elizabeth made cabinet members laugh just as their picture was being taken.
The monarch visited parliament on Tuesday (18.12.12) and afterwards posed for photographs with senior politicians, with one photo of the session showing the MPs turning to one another in amusement while the queen remained in her formal pose.
It has now been explained that, just as photographer Jeremy Selwyn pressed his shutter, the queen made a joke, prompting the laughter.
A source told the Evening Standard newspaper: ”We had been posing very formally for several shots, keeping absolutely rigid. Just as it was coming to the end the queen suddenly broke the silence by saying, ‘you can all smile, you know!’.
”Of course, everyone laughed and looked at each other. But the queen realized that the session was not over and she maintained her decorum.”
Though the photographer refused to disclose what happened during the portrait session, he revealed the monarch was ”amazingly easy” to work with.
He said: ”The queen was really, really nice to me and she made it amazingly easy.
”She is much easier than politicians, who are extremely difficult to photograph because they are more concerned with their image than with the truth.”