UTTER TOSH!

A new book that claims to provide intimate insights into the Queen’s marriage is no more than recycled half-truths and grubby backstairs gossip, says disgusted royal biographer MICHAEL THORNTON

September 1946, and it was during that visit that the engagement was decided upon. If she was so opposed to Philip as her son-in-law, she would never have done this.

All those who feel love and concern for the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh in their 90s, will feel particularly uncomfortable about Lady Colin’s intrusive details of their honeymoon at Broadlands, the Mountbatten residence in Hampshire, ‘their torrid time between the sheets’ and ‘how patently Lilibet had enjoyed her introduction to the pleasures of the flesh’ — while being interrupted at intervals by Elizabeth’s ever-present old nanny, Bobo MacDonald.

For this couple to be confronted in old age by a sniggering catalogue of servants’ gossip, and by comparisons between the Queen and the lusty Hanoverian sexual appetite of Queen Victoria, seems completely unacceptable.

The death of George VI at the age of only 56 brought Elizabeth and Philip into the roles of Queen and consort 20 years earlier than expected. And I would argue that Lady Colin is grievously in error to suggest that the Queen Mother insisted on remaining centre stage.

The truth is the opposite. She bought the Castle of Mey with every intention of retiring from public life to Scotland, an idea that so horrified the new Queen that she prevailed upon her Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill, to call upon her mother unannounced to talk her out of retirement.

It was our Queen’s personal wish that her mother be reappointed as Senior Counsellor of State and should receive from the Lord Mayor of London the same honours accorded to a Head of State.

Within a month of the King’s death, the new Queen sent a red leather dispatch box to her mother engraved in gold with the words, H.M. Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother. I also know of no existing evidence that, as claimed in the new book, George VI was having an affair with the mother of his equerry, Group Captain Peter Townsend, with whom Princess Margaret fell in love. And I regard it as unlikely that the King would have allowed his daughter to marry a divorced man.

And contrary to Lady Colin’s allegation, the Queen Mother did not behave ‘ appallingly’ over the Townsend crisis. Instead there is clear evidence that the Queen Mother was devastated by her daughter’s involvement with Townsend, and broke down in tears in front of her staff. BUT it is in her serious but unproven allegations about the Queen’s psychological health at the time of the Townsend crisis and a claim that Prince Philip has been suffering from a serious illness for the past two years, that Lady Colin Campbell exceeds all bounds of propriety.

In comparison, her dragging out of Philip’s rumoured involvement with, among many, the actresses Pat Kirkwood and Anna Massey (who met him only once) and most ludicrous of all, the Queen’s own cousin, Princess Alexandra, strikes one only as sickeningly predictable.

Not one iota of proof has ever been established that Prince Philip was unfaithful to the Queen.

He certainly shared a friendship with Pat Kirkwood as indeed did I. In one of his letters to her — letters that now are in my possession — Philip wrote: ‘Invasion of privacy, invention, and false quotations are the bane of our existence.’

For me, Lady Colin Campbell’s book is disgusting proof of that.