Queen’s plans for royal Christmas bubble revealed
SELF-ISOLATING since t he s t art of t his crisis, the Queen will have been eagerly l ooking forward to being reunited with her family at Christmas.
The festive season is, after all, the only time of the year that the royals stay together, when they gather at Sandringham in Norfolk to exchange presents on Christmas Eve before going to church together the next day and greeting well-wishers.
But Boris Johnson’s rule that no more than three households can celebrate together has put a spanner in the royal works.
The Queen will set a good example and abide by the rules, so who will be in the ‘royal bubble’? I hear there may be a surprise in store.
‘Prince Edward and his family will be one of the two in her bubble,’ a source tells me. The Earl of Wessex is, of course, the youngest of the Queen and Prince Philip’s four children. The Queen is particularly close to Edward’s wife, Sophie.
As heir to the throne, Prince Charles was seen as the most likely to be in the Queen’s bubble, along with Prince William, the next in line.
However, courtiers think they may have come up with an ingenious plan to keep everyone happy.
‘If they go to Sandringham, their traditional Boxing Day shoot could still take place, enabling them to see members of the family unable to join them on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day,’ the source tells me. Shoots can legally take place as they are classified as organised outdoor sports, so up to 30 royals could blast pheasants and partridges.
It would appeal hugely to Charles and Camilla, who usually leaves after the shoot to spend the rest of Christmas with her two children and five grandchildren. She would be prohibited from seeing them if she was in the Queen’s bubble.
The same applies to Prince William and Kate, who usually spend much of the festive season with her parents, Michael and Carole Middleton, and her siblings, Pippa and James.