Who's running England?

The Wearing of the Green

By MAUREEN DOWD, NYT

GALWAY, Ireland

MAYBE Sarah Palin was right.

In the HBO movie “Game Change,” about the 2008 campaign, John McCain’s strategist Steve Schmidt was appalled when he realized that their vice presidential pick thought Queen Elizabeth, rather than the prime minister, was actually running the show in Britain.

But with David Cameron growing smaller and the queen growing larger, Palin seems prescient.

In leading a reconciliation with Ireland, reaching a white-gloved hand across the bloodstained tide, the queen has restored a luster dimmed by her 1992 “annus horribilis” and her insensitivity after the death of Princess Diana.

Her elevation to Ireland’s Prodigal Mother began last year when Liz, as The Irish Daily Star calls her, arrived for a four-day visit to the Irish Republic — the first by a British monarch in a century — wearing an emerald green suit, surrounded by ladies-in-waiting not reading “Fifty Shades of Grey” but wearing 40 shades of green.

(More here.)