An 800-mile headache for Queen and her new PM
WHILE Tory MPs have made sure they can set off on their long summer break by arranging to whittle down the field of leadership candidates to two in time for the start of the Parliamentary recess, I hear they have given the Queen a holiday headache.
Conservative grandee Sir Graham Brady said the new party leader would be announced on Monday, September 5. However, the Queen is due to be at her Scottish retreat, Balmoral, then.
It means the Tory leader would have to travel to the Aberdeenshire castle to meet the monarch for the first time and be asked formally to form a government. This meeting, or ‘audience’, is known as ‘ kissing hands’. After their appointment, the new Prime Minister heads straight to 10 Downing Street.
But it’s more likely that the Queen would be expected to return from Balmoral to Buckingham Palace or Windsor, so the process of entering Downing Street was not delayed.
‘There seems to have been no thought given to the Queen’s circumstances,’ a royal source tells me. ‘Do the politicians seriously expect a 96-year-old woman to make an 800- mile round- trip for a ten-minute audience?’
According to one reporter, the monarch told Boris Johnson, ‘I don’t know why anyone would want the job’ when they met for the first time in July 2019. The idea of the Queen asking the new PM to form a government via a phone call or video conference would be unprecedented. However, the vast majority of her weekly audiences with Boris have been on the phone since the pandemic struck.
Perhaps, she could ask Prince Charles to do the honours? After all, he did step in at the State opening of Parliament.
To complicate matters further, Boris and his wife, Carrie, are expected to be invited to Balmoral to stay with the Queen on the weekend of September 3 and 4, as she likes to take PMs to the Braemar Gathering, of which she’s Chieftain. Her Majesty and Prince Philip liked nothing more than watching contestants at the Highland Games toss the caber and throw the hammer.
A Buckingham Palace spokesman declines to comment.