Always on the phone to her ‘extravagant’ mum

WAS the Queen Mother jealous of her elder daughter? The Queen’s former private secretary, Martin Charteris, believed she was.

‘Queen Elizabeth was not yet 52 when the King died,’ he reminded me. ‘She was accustomed to being centre stage, the focus of attention, universally loved. She was still loved, of course, and admired, but she was no longer the star of the show and I don’t think she found that easy.

‘In the early days of the new Queen’s reign, there was an awkwardness about precedence, with the Queen not wanting to go in front of her mother and Queen Elizabeth, of course, accustomed to going first.’

Even so, Elizabeth II had a good relationship with her mother — ‘loving and normal’ is how the Queen’s cousin Margaret Rhodes described it to me.

The Queen did occasionally shake her head when contemplating her mother’s insouciant extravagance. At the time of her death, Queen Elizabeth’s overdraft at Coutts was reported to be in the region of £4 million.

She was supposed to have once said at a dinner party: ‘Golly, I could do with £100,000, couldn’t you? Had such an awful afternoon today with my bank manager scolding me about my overdraft.’

And yes, the Queen might, now and again, express envy of her mother’s extraordinary capacity for avoiding all unpleasantness. But mother and daughter were good friends, on the same wavelength, with mutual interests (especially horses) and comfortable in each other’s company, each looking forward to their regular, easy, uncomplicated chats on the telephone.

Prince Philip said to me once, eyebrows raised in amazement: ‘They’re always on the phone!