Thirty years ago, the Austin Mini Metro had reached the closest that it would ever be to becoming vaguely fashionable, largely due to a Metro L owned by one Lady Diana Spencer.
Lamentably for some enthusiasts, her car did not actually play a part in the royal wedding in 1981, but it would become part of a long tradition of vehicles ranging from the mundane to the absolutely insane being used off-duty by members of various royal families.
For her first engagement as monarch, the Queen may have used a Rolls Royce Phantom IV, the only car to make Bristol look decidedly common in that it was made for the exclusive use of heads of state, but for many years, one of the Queen's favourite cars was said to be the 3-litre Rover P5 saloon
The car currently associated with the Duke of Edinburgh is a London taxi powered by liquefied petroleum gas, but at the time of his marriage in 1947 Prince Philip drove a black MG Midget that apparently used up most of his naval pay. Eight years later, he drove a coachbuilt, high-roofed Ford Zephyr Mk II Estate, with little of the controversy of 20 years earlier when the Prince of Wales favoured an ‘American’ vehicle - a Canadian-built Buick Series 90 Eight Limousine car.
By the early Sixties, even the faintly déclassé Vauxhall PA Cresta Friary Estate - the car that all Billy Fury clone rockers then aspired to own - found a place on the royal fleet. While by the end of the decade, Prince Philip could be seen emulating Mike Pratt, of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) fame, when he took the wheel of an FD Series Vauxhall VX4/90.
But possibly the most entertaining royal car, albeit one that was never used on official duties, was the Dauphine presented by the president of Renault to the Queen during her 1957 visit to France. For a monarch to be presented with a “princess” was a magnificent publicity coup for the company, even though - not entirely unsurprisingly - the vehicle was later rolled over by a member of the Royal Mews.
And then there are those cars in the fleets of certain world leaders that can only have been presented by a foreign dignitary as a shortcut to starting the Third World War.
One of the most minor of the many and various crimes of Nicolae Ceausescu was that of rank automotive snobbery - he described the locally built Renault 8 as “just right for idiots” - so when the Shah of Iran presented the Romanian president with a prime example of the Paykan, based on the 1967 Hillman Hunter, rather than one of his spare Maserati 5000GTs, it could have caused an international incident at the very least.
Fortunately for world peace, Ceausescu was rather delighted with the Paykan's sporty steering wheel, thrilling hub caps and vacant space where the optional clock would have been.
However, even a Paykan equipped with a black vinyl roof pales into insignificance compared with the Matra Simca Rancho presented to Leonid Brezhnev during his visit to France. The politburo ingrate apparently reacted with Gordon Brown-like ill humour at the Rancho's vibrantly tan seats and green coachwork, which compared unfavourably in his opinion with the tasteful interior of the average Moskvich.
Evidently, Brezhnev much preferred his 1959 BMW Isetta bubble car, with which he would display driving skills rumoured to be the very worst in the Soviet Union.
Not to be outdone in terms of sheer automotive ghastliness, the clever designers of FSO converted their 1500 saloon into a four-door, six-seat “state car” fit for the Polish General Wojciech Jaruzelski, despite (or because of) the fact that it resembled the fruit of an unfortunate liaison between a 1967 Fiat 125 and a builder's skip
Meanwhile, in the run-up to the royal wedding tomorrow, one cannot help but feel that Britain's die-cast model manufacturers have missed a golden opportunity. In 1981, one of the best selling Corgi models was their replica of Diana's Austin Mini Metro, yet no-one has seen fit to issue a 1/43 scale model of Catherine Middleton's Audi A3, finished in a vibrant metallic purple and decorated with decidedly classy decals on the doors. Or better still, a full-sized special edition vehicle. -The Independent