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Was Queen Elizabeth paranoid about being replaced by Tony Blair?

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effect after Harry and Meghan’s Oprah interview: ‘Recollections may vary.’ It was magic.

In 1998, I dined with Hardy Amies, who not only made most of Elizabeth’s formal dresses but had a keen appreciation of the female form. He had dressed A-list film stars of the era like Jean Simmons. His association with Elizabeth had begun in 1950. When I met him he was a frail old man but he became animated when conversation turned to his best known and most illustrious client.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘strictly speaking, she was short, but she literally grew on you.’ I asked him what he meant. He stared as if he was seeing her before him and then replied carefully: ‘Her Majesty had a marvellous waist, lovely arms and a very attractive bosom, particularly when she was young. You don’t see many figures like hers now. We could get her waist down to 21 inches and offset it with a flared skirt.’

She had another great advantage, said Amies: she could wear any colour, from electric blues and yellows to tweeds. She had style, a look unique to her, which he called ‘very English, reassuring. Genius, really’.

And timeless, he said. Wallis Simpson, who was achingly chic, now seems very much of the 1930s and ’40s, like a sepia photograph. Queen Elizabeth’s look, however, never dated. Her appearance was the embodiment of how foreigners imagined the English ought to be.

When I met Elizabeth for the second time, in the 1990s, it dawned on me that, unintentionally, she had become a modern style icon.

It was a wet day at the Badminton Horse Trials and we were near one of the jumps. Her nose was pink from the cold and she wore powder on her face, plus a slash of red lipstick, but that was her only concession to the artificial (by contrast, the maquillage of Imelda Staunton has been more akin to a Watusi getup for a tribal dance).

She was about 70, yet her clothes still showed the English upper class country dressing that designers like Ralph Lauren still cannot resist. In many ways, she was its pioneer.

She also had a way of throwing a silk scarf over her head that was as careless and elegant as anything on the catwalk. (Poor Olivia Colman tried but couldn’t capture that elan, while Ms Staunton’s scarves seemed glued to her head to withstand hurricanes).

A family friend who knew her when she was Princess Elizabeth told me many years ago: ‘She never had overtly seductive looks, but she was lit from within. She always managed to put herself together in a way that made her look statuesque. She had a voluptuous figure and when she was young she made the most of that, but always discreetly. She had natural, scrubbed prettiness.’

It didn’t matter that her prettiness wasn’t of the Hollywood kind. Elizabeth never confused royalty with celebrity, a distinction that illustrates the dangers of having her played by famous actresses.

As Amies said: ‘She wanted people to see her, not her clothes. We had disagreements because she wanted to wear colours all the time. She would say to me, “I need to be seen to be believed”.’

Above all, she dressed for her people and her clothes reflected their mood as only women’s clothes can. Her bridal dress, worn when she married Philip in 1947, and recreated for Ms Foy, was a perfect example of this. It was attuned to the British mood of ration books and a hope of regrowth.

To pay for the gown, she had saved up clothing coupons, like every other British bride. The result was a simple but ethereal off-white silk dress embroidered with the flowers of the Commonwealth. It was as if this was meant to send a message to those countries that had been part of the British Empire.

Canada, Australia, Pakistan, Jamaica, and New Zealand were among those that had joined the Commonwealth as independent nations. There was no longer any place for empires or empresses.

We thought we didn’t know what Elizabeth was thinking, but she expressed herself through dress more deftly than any politician.

With her sense of honour, public service and an extraordinary lack of vanity, Elizabeth II was the ideal of queenship in a post-war Britain. The beauty she possessed was not that of a solar myth, but an organic living thing to which every woman in the country could relate.

I miss her on the balcony of Buckingham Palace; that bright speck of colour that cheered grey days.

Elizabeth had true glamour, besides which the merely fashionable is as evanescent as steam.

And as The Crown’s pretend queens walk off into a televisual sunset, it is the joyful, crystalline Claire Foy who will forever impinge on my gratitude for bringing it back to us.

‘She dressed for her people, and her clothes reflected their mood’