The Queen and Twitter: for once, Her Majesty has to do some following This is a process to which the Queen is not much accustomed, having spent the best part of her life moving along at a brisk clip at the head of a conga-line of anxious flunkeys. Even so, she is now following 217 people, which means that she's already doing better than the Dalai Lama, who apparently follows no one at all, or the Pope, who follows 8 people - but they all turn out to be himself in a variety of different languages. It is a fair bet that Queen Victoria would have got the hang of Twitter in no time, avidly following her faithful servants, John Brown and the Munshi, and her grandson, the Kaiser, and brightly retweeting their amusing aperçus, to the utter mortification of Mr Gladstone and her more serious-minded offspring. Our own Queen (or rather, the team who have presumably been entrusted with the management of her Twitter account) is clearly making a valiant effort. Among the inevitable collection of charities and worthy causes (lots of horsey organisations, the Girl Guides) followed by @BritishMonarchy is a scattering of the great and the good whom Her Majesty can expect to encounter in her line of work - the Prime Minister, the Archbishop of Canterbury - and a sprinkling of oddities, including the Crumlin Road Gaol, formerly a hard nick in Belfast. But when it comes to individuals, the list of people followed by the monarch is on the thin side. Claire Balding is there, which makes perfect sense - horsey, doggy, all-round good egg. But what to make of the inclusion of Philip Schofield - whose recent Twitter feed includes a striking image of someone wearing big pants with a reinforced gusset - not to mention Joan Rivers, the foul-mouthed, cosmetically enhanced American comedienne who is also recently dead? Is her spectral presence a teasing insight into the Royal psyche? A slip of the finger for - I dunno - Joan Collins? Joanna Lumley? Or could it be that in an idle moment, Prince Harry has hacked his grandmother's Twitter account? If so, the Queen's 858,000 followers can stand by for something a good deal more lively than the current worthy but painfully staid Royal Twitterfare of menus from the Columbia State Dinner and pictures of Princess Alexandra opening Bromsgrove Police and Fire Station. I'm sure the tech-savvy side of Queen Victoria would be very much amused.