LONDON (Reuters) — As the Queen marks her Golden Jubilee, a tantalising new profile casts the British monarch in an often unflattering light sharply at odds with the image being peddled for her 50th year on the throne. The 75-year-old Queen is described as caring more about dogs and horses than her subjects and damned as a failed mother whose negligence towards her dysfunctional family has damaged Britain’s 1,000-year-old monarchy.

But she is also shown as a woman who, despite public hauteur, brims with sexuality and is ready to do the washing up after an informal meal and was even presented with a pair of rubber gloves for the job by former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Interesting tales — and all far removed from the extensive and official Jubilee programme, which includes a tour of the realm by the Queen herself, concerts and an equestrian spectacular at Windsor to mark her 50-year reign. The Queen will have little reason to complain if June’s main ‘Jubilee Weekend’ of the year-long festivities goes as well as her Silver Jubilee celebrations in 1977, when Britons danced in the streets and staged exuberant, bunting-draped parties.

The young Princess Elizabeth was given the news of the death of her father, King George VI, on February 6, 1952 while she was on a tour of Kenya. She hurried home to be proclaimed Queen and was crowned at Westminster Abbey on June 2 the following year.

Royal life looks very different 50 years on. Author Graham Turner, who had access to 80 royal friends, relatives and courtiers for his profile, said the Queen seemed ready at one point to let 18-year-old Prince William succeed in place of her son Prince Charles, who had just divorced Diana.

“When this suggestion by an adviser was put to the Queen, she did not react violently against it and, indeed, appeared to wonder if it might not offer a possible solution,” Turner said.

The Queen dismissed Charles’s late wife, Princess Diana, as “quite mad” and maintained an uncompromisingly hostile attitude towards her son’s long-time lover, Camilla Parker Bowles, once describing the 54-year-old as looking “rather used”. “I think I could say that like myself, Her Majesty prefers animals to human beings. For one thing, they don’t talk so much,” Sir John Miller, for many years the Crown Equerry in charge of the Royal Mews, was quoted as saying. Buckingham Palace declined to respond to Turner’s assertions, carried at length this month in the Daily Telegraph.

“A lot of articles have been written, particularly this year,” said a Palace spokeswoman. “It is not our custom to comment on such articles.”

A pity, perhaps, because it would be interesting to hear the royal response to Turner’s 1973 story about the Queen, former Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam and a sheepskin rug. According to Turner, Whitlam arrived at Windsor Castle with a large sheepskin rug as a gift. After a fair amount of alcohol over dinner, the rug was laid on the floor and the Queen, in the words of her former private secretary Lord Charteris, lay down and wrapped herself in it.

Charteris was quoted as saying: “A lot of her sexuality has been suppressed but, that night, she used it like a weapon. She wrapped Gough Whitlam around her little finger, knocked him sideways. She lay on that rug in front of him, stroked it... It was an arrant use of sexuality.”

Private life aside, only the most rabid republican would quarrel with assertions that the Queen has hardly put a foot wrong in the performance of her official duties. Opinion polls show that seven out of ten Britons support keeping the Royal Family, even though backing for the minor members of the House of Windsor is much less enthusiastic.

While the Queen has devoted herself unwaveringly to the public job, it is her own family which still gives cause for concern. After the trauma that surrounded the collapse of Prince Charles’s marriage to Diana and the princess’s tragic death in a Paris car crash in 1997, the Prince’s relationship with fellow divorcee Camilla is still a cause for concern. Once Charles succeeds his mother, he will become the nominal head of the Church of England — an organisation that frowns on the remarriage of divorcees. Although Britons’ acceptance of Charles and Camilla is increasing as a result of astute media management by his aides, royal insiders say the couple’s public profile will not be pushed too hard during the Queen’s Jubilee year.

Other royals go into Jubilee year in less sparkling form. Prince Harry, Charles’s younger son, hit the headlines this week when it was revealed he had smoked cannabis and got drunk at parties.

The incident earned the 17-year-old the nickname “Harry Pothead” from a caller to a radio show. Sympathy for Charles’s youngest brother Edward and his wife Sophie rose when she lost her baby as a result of an ectopic pregnancy that required emergency surgery in December. But Edward went on to remind Britons why he became a figure of fun as he pursues an erratic career as a television producer.

Last year he prompted widespread mirth when it emerged that one of Edward’s television teams was the only crew to ignore an agreement to leave his nephew Prince William alone when he began his studies at Scotland’s St Andrews University. Edward then infuriated Charles by suggesting that his brother take part in a programme about the breakdown of his marriage to Diana and his affair with Camilla.

Princess Margaret, the Queen’s 71-year-old sister, is in failing health, having only recently suffered the latest in a series of strokes. At the age of 101, however, the Queen Mother is looking forward with trademark anticipation to the Jubilee, a landmark the royal matriarch has been eagerly awaiting for years.

During her Jubilee year, the Queen can expect to become Britain’s fourth longest reigning monarch. And if she lives as long as her mother, the unfortunate Charles, now 53, will be old enough to draw his pension before he becomes king.