Tina Brown loves Michelle Obama

Tina Brown, former editor of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, and now the online Daily Beast, has fancied herself as an interpreter of British Royal ways for American readers ever since she set out to write The Diana Chronicles (2007) in a lull between editorships.

This week she has given readers the benefit of her wisdom on the meeting of Michelle Obama and The Queen. And while her thoughts on the stuffy English establishment perhaps explain why she prefers to live in New York, her glowing tributes to the First Lady suggest she's not getting the White House party invites she was hoping for.

Tina professes to have contacts deep in the heart of the Palace. "I am told by her closest courtiers that she [the Queen - or Her Maj, as she later refers to her] - and all the royals - are very excited about meeting the President and Mrs Obama.

"Deeply worried about the financial crisis now sweeping Europe," Tina goes on, "the woman who has reigned longer than almost any other British monarch is as eager as all her countrywomen to come face to face with the future. When she looks into Michelle's wide, warm eyes, she will see someone whose strength she will recognise at once as a new kind of Queen."

Now Tina lets rip: "In a country where most political wives and female members of Parliament are the stylistic equivalent of a tufted ottoman, Michelle's kind of striding self-assurance, glamour, and broad demographic appeal feels thrillingly 21st-century. The fact that she's African American adds an inspirational magic."

Tina then gets sidetracked by her observations on the last First Lady to visit Downing Street - Carla Bruni-Sarkozy. "It was smart of France's ravishing first lady, Carla Bruni, to let her husband go to the conference without her. The second Madame Sarkozy was a big wow when she visited London last March, but she's a shrewd enough PR hand to know she would suffer in comparison to the first and only Mrs. Obama."

She concludes: "The Brits went off Carla almost as soon as she was back in Paris. That fake-demure little Dior suit she wore to lunch with Queen Elizabeth seemed in retrospect like the kind of get-up a reformed hooker might wear to meet her latest CEO for lunch at the Savoy."

Enough! ·