The Queen offered a rare, public display of displeasure when she sat for Leibovitz, who is famed for her Vanity Fair photographs of stars such as a pregnant Demi Moore in the nude. A camera crew was invited to film the encounter for a fly-on-the-wall BBC One series, A Year with the Queen, made by the production company behind Wife Swap. The portrait was to commemorate the Queen’s spring visit to the United States.

Leibovitz selected the white drawing room at Buckingham Palace. The Queen arrived in white fur stole, gold-embroidered evening dress, Order of the Garter robes and diamond tiara, as requested. But Leibovitz, a perfectionist who once persuaded Whoopi Goldberg to pose in a bath of milk, had a change of heart. ‘I think it will look better without the crown,’ the film shows her informing the Queen. ‘Less dressy. The garter robe is so…extraordinary.’ ‘Less dressy?’ the Queen says in response to this display of lese-majeste. ‘What do you think this is?’ The Queen is then shown walking angrily from the drawing room. ‘I’m not changing anything,’ she fumes at a flunky. ‘I’ve had enough of dressing like this, thank you very much.’

In the context of royal etiquette and the character of the Queen herself, this was quite sensational. The Queen has never been known to storm out of any engagement. Ever. But now we learn that that this did not happen. She did not storm out of the photoshoot at all. The footage was actually filmed as the Queen made her way into the sitting - and she made her irritated comments to her lady-in-waiting before the shoot had even started. The BBC had falsified the sequence of events — at least in the video trailer it made available to the press— to make a better story.

If it transposes a picture sequence like this to sex up a story about the Queen by transmitting an outright falsehood, just think what it is doing in the Middle East.