He once expounded his vision for The Goring as “quintessentially English: a little bit eccentric, surprising, theatrical” and if he wasn’t describing himself he might as well have been.

For the Royal Family’s favourite hotel is very much built on the cult of the striking personality of the Queen’s favourite hotelier.

The immaculately tailored 55-year-old bon viveur is said to enjoy surprising staff in the hotel restaurant with his rousing falsetto and on Tuesday this week his talent for attracting attention was once again to the fore as “Big Dave” waved-off the Queen following her lunch date there.

His eye-catching countenance – including pink tie and flamboyant silk handkerchief – offered almost as much interest to the assembled crowds as the monarch herself.

It is a year to the week that the flamboyant Morgan-Hewitt, known as “Camp David”, was last photographed escorting the Queen down the stone front steps of his five-star establishment shortly after a scruffy interloper sprinted through the front door and interrupted her Christmas lunch with her senior staff.

Emerging a few minutes after the inebriated Irishman had been wrestled outside by a man thought to be a royal protection officer, the unflappable Morgan- Hewitt decanted the Queen into her waiting Jaguar without fuss or fanfare.

His ample girth – the legacy of decades of quaffing fine wines and sampling equally fine dining – certainly provided adequate cover.

He was believed to weigh 20 stones 10 years ago but has ballooned since and once required three chairs at a banquet. “They have allowed me to have a personality, which is a good thing,” he says of his bosses. “I don’t believe my personality overpowers; if it does then it is a mistake.”

The truth is that it would be almost impossible for Morgan-Hewitt to blot his copybook. There can be no hotel owners in the world more delighted with their MD than George and Jeremy Goring, whose great- grandfather Otto built the hotel in 1910.

In his 26 years there, including the last 11 as managing director, Morgan-Hewitt has overseen its rise from a dated four-star establishment with an antiquated dining room into the first hotel ever to be granted a Royal Warrant by the Queen.

That accolade came a year after The Goring played a starring role in the 2011 wedding of Prince William to Kate Middleton.

The future Duchess of Cambridge chose to spend her last night as a single woman there after Morgan-Hewitt asked the Royal Family whether there was “anything we could do to help”.

“I was thinking of perhaps putting up a few royal guests for the night,” he once explained whimsically, “but in the end the entire hotel was taken over from the morning of the Thursday to the Saturday.”

The Middletons even held their reception there for those not invited to the Buckingham Palace bash a stone’s throw north across the palace gardens.

The announcement of the high-profile block booking crashed The Goring’s website, which received five million hits in a fortnight.

The upshot of this was that an estimated 2.2 billion pairs of eyes were trained on the Edwardian façade of the last family-run five-star hotel in London on the day of the royal wedding thanks to 300 photographers and television cameras stationed at either end of Belgravia’s Beeston Place.

Never one to miss a PR opportunity, Big Dave, who dropped out from a law degree at Cambridge before studying history and starting his career in public relations, treated the press with infinite courtesy.

Throughout the day he sent out teams of liveried waiters with trays of biscuits and cups of coffee.

Overnight, The Goring was reborn as an international brand.

“I do now say that one of my greatest achievements is putting The Goring on the tourist bus tour,” says Morgan-Hewitt.

“I’m never happier than when I’m in [a] lobby. I love watching the staff, I love watching the guests and getting the feel of the place,” says the honorary catering adviser to the British Army.

His most recent refurbishment saw £100,000 lavished on each room including playful touches described by him as “a serious streak of fun from an ‘Ooh!’ mood-lighting setting in the bedrooms to fluffy sheep footstools served up with a cheeky grin”.

Indeed. The master shower in the Royal Suite, where Kate’s parents stayed in 2011, features a life-size portrait of Queen Victoria protected by aircraft glass – after a previous guest tried to rip it off the wall.

Most recently, a clutch of dishy footmen have been brought in to add a touch of glamour to the iconic hotel.

“Any household can have a butler but only the very grandest have footmen – they really are an extravagance,” he says.

No wonder his Twitter biography simply states: “I have the best job in the world.”