LEADERS IN WEARY EXILE

From the Mail’s peerless RICHARD KAY, a compelling insight into life for our...

LL her life she has been surrounded by people, from the moment she awakes till last thing at night.

AThere’s the dresser who brings her morning cup of tea and the housemaid who each evening turns down her bedclothes, placing a hot water bottle snugly between the sheets.

For the Queen, 94 this month, her domestic staff are not just a reassuring presence, but a vital contact with the outside world.

They bring her news from beyond palace walls, as well as the latest below-stairs gossip.

With some she has formed a uniquely close attachment, and never have those bonds been more needed than now as she, like the rest of us, observes government rules on social distancing.

But the Queen’s two weeks of virtual self-isolation at Windsor Castle have been far from straightforward after one of her key staff was diagnosed with Covid-19.

For the young woman involved, one of only a handful of female footmen in the Royal Household, is the Queen’s dog walker, whose duties revolve around exercising Her Majesty’s dorgis — corgi-dachshund crosses — Candy and Vulcan.

And it has meant she has been deprived for part of this period by some of her most trusted personal aides, who have had to self-isolate because they had been in contact with the footman.

One figure rarely far from her side, though, is Paul Whybrew, 61, who is the Queen’s Page of the Backstairs and serjeant-at-arms.

DEPENDABLE Whybrew is also one of the Queen’s longest serving employees — he manhandled Palace intruder Michael Fagan when he broke into her bedroom in 1982.

But with other familiar faces forced to self-isolate, the Queen has been looked after by two of Prince Philip’s most senior domestic aides, pages William Henderson and Stephen Niedojadlo.

She knows them both, of course, because they usually take care of the Duke of Edinburgh at Wood Farm, his retirement bolthole on the Sandringham estate.

Royal aides were planning for the