Tina Brown on 'Why Michelle Wows the Brits'

The Daily Beast's Tina Brown (no relation to POTUS's limo The Beast) wrote an insightful essay on why Michelle has star power in England, including with the Queen Mum. Brown also speculates on why Carla Bruni wisely stayed home on this trip.

Written yesterday, before tea at Buckingham Palace, Tina Brown predicted the unusually warm reception that the Queen shared with Michelle.

Those images of Michelle digging in the White House vegetable garden will have resonated with Her Maj, a country woman down to her sensible shoes. The Queen was never all that enamored of either Hillary Clinton (too strident) or Nancy Reagan (too California); as for the Bush Juniors, the less said the better. Nor could Elizabeth abide Cherie Blair, whose loathing of trips to Balmoral—where Mrs. Blair’s allergies to the fur and feathers of the stuffed animals and hunting trophies adorning the castle’s walls kept the PM’s wife preoccupied with trying not to sneeze in the sovereign’s face—was a legend in Downing Street. The Queen will see immediately that Michelle has the qualities she most values in a working woman: Dedication. Authenticity. A sensible attitude toward rearing her children.

Brown stresses that Queen Elizabeth II was looking forward to meeting the Obamas, in spite of POTUS's lack of appetite for Masterpiece Theatre. The monarch is a modern woman who wants to confront the future head-on.

When she looks into Michelle’s wide, warm eyes, she will see someone whose strength she will recognize at once as a new kind of Queen.

I doubt that even Tina Brown would have predicted the hug, but she certainly nailed the essentially correctly. Also, Tina Brown calling Michelle 'a new kind of Queen.' Tina's going soft on us these days. Anne