Whenever a royal figure appears on the cover of People Magazine, seemingly out of nowhere, I wonder what’s going on behind-the-scenes and why that royal needed a hit of sugary People Mag PR. It happens all the time with the Duchess of Cambridge, who in recent years has gone to People Mag to take a “mulligan” on whatever negative story is out there at the time. So it’s very strange to see Queen Elizabeth doing the same. QEII had a horrendous 2020 – she went into lockdown too late, then she refused to say much in the way of public support during the pandemic. She wandered around maskless, she made people give her a birthday parade and she also forced her 99-year-old husband to travel to Scotland and change his living situation several times for no good reason. It was a mess and it was all so bloody unnecessary. So, it’s time for a soft-focus piece on how the Queen loves to… laugh?

Queen Elizabeth is known for her stoic nature, but there is an unexpected side to the monarch. The Queen “is much livelier in private than what the public sees,” royal biographer Sally Bedell Smith, author of Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch, tells PEOPLE in one of this week’s cover stories.

The author quotes a source at the Queen’s country estate in Norfolk, Sandringham, once saying, “‘You can hear her laugh throughout that big house.’ She has a big laugh!”

The Queen, 94, can also be surprisingly self-deprecating. Not long after Prince Charles’ 1981 wedding to Princess Diana, a rerun of the ceremony was playing on TV during a party in London that the monarch was attending. Spotting herself on the screen, “The Queen said, ‘Oh, there’s my Miss Piggy face,’?” Bedell Smith recalls. “She has the ability to laugh at herself.”

And while Queen Elizabeth’s portraits are often serious and unemotional, she knows how to have some fun too. During a shoot celebrating her Diamond Jubilee in 2012, the Queen told photographer Barry Jeffrey to “just keep the camera rolling!” as she broke from the norm. The Queen proceeded to strike a “series of poses, slipping her hands in and out of her pockets and placing them onto her hips, mimicking the stances of a professional model,” recalled her dress maker and close confidante Angela Kelly.

They stood “in disbelief. The Queen was a natural,” Kelly marveled. “Barry and I felt we were experiencing something really special: a moment never to be repeated.”

When the Queen wants to relax, she turns to her beloved animals: her last living dorgi (a crossbred corgi and dachshund), Candy, and her stable of Fell ponies, a distinct English breed.

“She goes into a peaceful mode when she is with horses,” says her close friend and equine adviser Monty Roberts.

[From People]

Interesting that Angela Kelly is quoted. Kelly ran around last year, claiming that Meghan and Harry had cursed her out after she pulled some tiara shenanigans. She was the central source for the entire “Meghan’s tiara drama” story. Then, to get the final word, Angela ran to Richard Kay at the Mail, pushed stories about how close she is with QEII and basically made them sound like late-in-life lovers, like she’s the sole gatekeeper to the Queen. It was unhinged. As for this People cover and the effort to make the Queen sound like a normal person… please. This is the same petty, grumpy a–hole who denied a veteran of war the opportunity to have a wreath laid at the Cenotaph. Liz of House Petty is reprehensible.

Oh, and in another cover story excerpt, “sources” claim that the pandemic is “the only slight rest she’s ever had in her whole life.” Are you f–king kidding me? The woman goes to Balmoral EVERY YEAR for two (sometimes three) months so she can “have a vacation.” She did that in 2020 again, and forced all of her workers to quarantine for weeks away from their families, just so she could have a few months sitting on her royal arse at a different palatial estate.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid.