The day Her Majesty gave Lewis Hamilton a lesson in table manners during royal lunch :)

His  ability to get off to a flying start on the race track helped him become a Formula One world champion.

But Lewis Hamilton would have been wise to be a little less hasty when he found himself sitting next to the Queen at a lunch event.

The 30-year-old driver jumped straight in and began chatting to Her Majesty – prompting her to give him a lesson in table manners.

Appearing on an episode of Graham Norton’s TV chat show, which aired last night, Hamilton explained: ‘I was excited and started to talk to her but she said, pointing to my left, “no, you speak that way first and I’ll speak this way and then I’ll come back to you”.

‘She is a sweet woman and we talked about how she spends her weekends, houses and music. She is really cool.’

Yesterday etiquette expert Diana Mather explained that the protocol for speaking to the person on your left first, known as Turning The Table, dates at least as far back as the Victorian times.

 ‘She is a sweet woman... She is really cool.

Miss Mather, who is director of training at etiquette tutoring firm The English Manner, said: ‘Lewis’s first mistake was actually communicating with the Queen before she spoke to him. He should have waited until she spoke to him.

‘Turning The Table goes back to Victorian times if not before and the idea is that you would talk to the person on your left for the first course and the person on your right for the main course. The rule is that you keep changing for each course.

‘I also think that the Queen was quite possibly helping Lewis because the person on his left was probably not speaking to anyone and so she would not want them to feel left out.

‘I imagine it was a woman as the table setting for a formal lunch would be man, woman, man, woman and you would not want to leave a lady with no one to talk to!’

Miss Mather added that Princess Margaret was believed to have a bell she would ring to signal when it was time to Turn The Table.