Simple way the Queen ensures her food isn't poisoned at state banquets

In case you thought palace life was all cushy private jets and lavish banquets in your honour, there are some downsides to being the Queen of England.

A new documentary, which aired on Channel 5 in the UK, shone a light on a pretty major one — apparently Her Majesty needs to adopt a special strategy just to avoid being poisoned at public banquets.

In Secrets of the Royal Kitchen, royal correspondent for The Sun, Emily Andrews, reveals that at state banquets Her Royal Highness is always assigned a plate at random to avoid any sinister plots against her life.

"After everything is plated up, a page chooses at random one of the plates to be served to Her Majesty.

"So if anyone did want to poison the monarch, they'd have to poison the whole lot."

As is the case with most royal protocol, there are a number of rules for state banquet guests in attendance to observe, some of which are also touched upon in the doco.

Among the more obscure ones, is a rule that requires guests to sit and commence eating only after the Queen has. Comically, in the past this also meant finishing when she did — so it was 'cutlery down' after the monarch swallowed her last mouthful, and unsurprisingly resulted in a lot of courtiers shovelling down their meals far too quickly.

A royal pain

If the anti-poisoning protocol seems over the top, you need only to look to the annals of history to see a very real and worrying royal-snuffing trend.

In 1125, Henry I died of poisoning after famously eating "a surfeit of lampreys", while Edward VI also passed from suspected arsenic poisoning in 1553, further highlighting why this toxin is known as "The King of Poisons" (though historians conject syphillis or tuberculosis could've also been to blame).