News of a film which claims that Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen was not actually a virgin, has dismayed members of a committee on which I serve. We are known as the Way Back Group. I suppose you could say we are complementary to the Way Ahead Group, that committee of senior members of the Royal Family and courtiers who are thinking up ways to modernise the monarchy.

On the Way Back Group we believe that some of the present uncertainties about the monarchy are due to the fact that a number of previous kings and queens of England may have put royalty in a negative light. This was not their fault. It was basically because they did not possess the necessary communication skills to get their message across to the history books. They did not have the benefit of a committee.

On the Way Back Group we go way back through the lives of earlier kings and queens and try to encourage people to see them in a more positive light. Some kings had useful labels- like Edward the Confessor and Richard the Lionheart and we have used this device to relaunch other monarchs. It means we now go back to Ethelred the User-Friendly, taking in Richard the Informal, Edward the Econmiser, James the Caring, Anne the Cost Effective Queen, the People’s Georges, William the Reluctant, and Victoria the Warm but Shy.

Obviously speculation about the love life of Elizabeth I is a distraction from her real contribution to history. Too much attention is paid to her connection with extravagant naval operations such as the defeat of the Armada. We should celebrate instead Queen Elizabeth as the Mother of the Potato Peeler. After Sir Walter Raleigh introduced the potato into this country, the Queen immediately had the Hampton Court lawns dug up to make her vegetable patch and fd her whole court on potatoes as an economy measure. One day, as was her custom, she went into the kitchen to supervise the portion control for a banquet and she noticed a maid peeling the potatoes and spotted at once an example of wastefulness. Turning to one of her courtiers, she then made her famous remark – "Me thinks the peele is too thick, my Lord".

This sparked off a huge surge of creativity among inventors striving to find ways of removing only a slither of peel from the potato. And thus the Elizabethan era came to be known as the hey day of the kitchen gadget. Time and motion studies flourished in the reign of Henry VIII, but nowadays this fact is largely overlooked because people are too interested in the six wives. People harp on about how he dissolved the monasteries, but never mention that he introduced the idea of recycling, ordering that his discarded doublets should be cut up and used as dusters. Nowadays, few school-children are told about the last words of Charles I just before he was taken to the scafold. Turning to one of his guards he said: "Don’t forget to blow out all the candles when you leave the room." In many ways Charles was more puritanical than Oliver Cromwell and the Roundheads.

George III saved odd balls of string and William and Mary shared a toothbrush. Henry V tried to cancel his coronation because he hated a fuss and always had his portrait painted over portraits of Henry IV to save on canvas. King John is a typical example of a monarch who has been unfairly treated by history. Our Way Back Group has now established that John was well aware of the danger of getting "out of touch". To deal with this problem, he became the first English king to make use of the focus group. He gathered together a cross-section of barons and asked their opinion on what he should do. "We think the people would appreciate a gesture" the Focus Group told him.

So King John said "I know just the thing. I’ll get them to draw up some document and then I’ll put my seal on it. This will be terrific PR." Richard III has been sadly misrepresented over the years. Yes, maybe he did kill the Princes in the Tower, but he also did very useful work. He recognised the value of a Logo – the white rose of York – and we believe that if circumstances had been different he would have leapt at the chance to establish his own Web site on the Internet.