Michelle Obama was full of praise when she opened up about meeting the Queen. During the London stop of her Becoming book tour on Sunday evening, the former US first lady revealed she was touched by the Monarch's sweet gesture after gifting her with a lovely jewel-encrusted pin. "She's wonderfully warm. And funny. And she's elegant and kind and considerate in really interesting ways," Michelle said of the Queen. "I remember, I don't know if it was the first visit or the second visit, we gave her this little pin. You know, 'what do you give her Majesty the Queen?'
Michelle and Barack Obama gifted this brooch to the Queen
"It's like, ok, we gave her a little pin and I remember the evening of the dinner after we exchanged gifts, we were standing in line and she had on a beautiful – I'm sure it was covered in diamonds and a crown, and you sort of look and go 'all of that is real', you know," she added. "You go 'that's nice'. But it's all real. And in the gloriousness of that outfit that she had on she put on the little bitty pin we gave her."
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Elaborating further, she recalled: "And I did the same thing, I was like, 'You wore the pin', and she just said 'hmm, yes'. That was my experience. That has been my experience. That kind of warmth and graciousness, and intelligence and wit. I like her." Michelle, 55, also touched upon the time she broke protocol during her visit to Windsor Castle with husband Barack Obama. She made headlines after touching the Queen on the back. She previously made a protocol faux-pas by hugging the British royal when they first met at Buckingham Palace in 2009.
"What is true among world leaders is that there are people who handle protocol, and usually the people they're representing don't want all that protocol," she explained. "So you wonder, 'Well who are you doing this for?' Because they don't want it, we don't want it. But it's just the way things are. So I don’t know that I could have done anything differently because it was a natural human reaction."
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"I learnt over the course of my time on the International stage to either hold my hands together tightly or behind my back to sort of kind of make sure I was thinking before I reacted naturally," she continued. "But in that moment - no that was absolutely the right thing to do, because that was the human thing to do."
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