How Boris broke news to Queen
CHRISTMAS Eve is the most sacred day in the royal calendar, with the Queen usually gathering her family together at her Norfolk retreat, Sandringham, to exhange presents before they celebrate with a festive feast.
This year, however, Her Majesty was at Windsor Castle holding a meeting with Boris Johnson.
I hear the Prime Minister took the unprecedented step of ringing the Queen on December 24 to hold a telephone meeting with her immediately after he had sealed the historic Brexit agreement.
‘I think it’s the first time a monarch has spoken to a prime minister on Christmas Eve since the war,’ a courtier tells me. ‘To say it’s unusual would be putting it mildly.’
Boris usually meets the Queen on Wednesdays and has been doing so on the phone since social-distancing rules were introduced.
He is understood to have postponed last week’s meeting because he was in the middle of fraught Brexit negotiations with European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen.
A Buckingham Palace spokesman confirms that the PM had his ‘regular weekly audience with the Queen via telephone on Thursday, December 24’ but declines to comment on what they discussed. The Queen will, however, have been keen to hear the news that Boris had concluded his Government’s tortuous, four-year negotiations with the EU.
During the referendum, the Palace complained after a tabloid newspaper ran a story with the headline: ‘Queen Backs Brexit’. The report quoted an anonymous source as saying the monarch had ‘let rip’ at then deputy prime minister Nick Clegg about Europe at Windsor Castle.
However, Clegg later said: ‘I mean, the idea that the Queen of all people would even bother to give someone as insignificant as a “here today, gone tomorrow” deputy prime minister a tongue lashing about Europe I just think is... so preposterous.’
I wonder if Boris will manage to keep their conversation under wraps? David Cameron admitted making a ‘terrible mistake’ after he let slip that the Queen had ‘purred down the line’ when he told her that Scotland had voted No to independence.
THIS could be a plot from his festive film Love Actually: screenwriter Richard Curtis has appealed for help after a 5ft Santa Claus figure went missing from outside his front door in London’s Notting Hill. ‘Whoever stole our Father Christmas, do let him know we will miss him,’ says Curtis’s long-time partner, broadcaster Emma Freud. ‘He has been in our family for a long time, so please look after him well.’