Fourteen prime ministers have served the Queen during her reign
Her first premier was Sir Winston Churchill and the latest is Boris Johnson.
The Queen has seen 14 premiers come and go during her long reign, which reaches its 70th anniversary on February 6.
The relationship between the sovereign and the prime minister of the day is supposed to be a private affair but inevitably snippets have leaked out.
Sir Winston Churchill, her first prime minister, is thought to be her favourite. He greeted the young, grieving monarch back on British soil after her sudden return from Kenya on the death of her father, King George VI.
Sir Winston Churchill welcomes the Queen as she arrives for dinner at Downing Street in 1955
When Sir Winston retired in 1955, the Queen sent him a hand-written letter telling him how much she missed him and how no successor “will ever for me be able to hold the place of my first Prime Minister, to whom both my husband and I owe so much and for whose wise guidance during the early years of my reign I shall always be so profoundly grateful”.
Like a kindly uncle, Sir Winston had nurtured her through the early years, giving her the sort of advice no-one else could have done.
The Queen’s relationship with the starchy Sir Anthony Eden was certainly more formal, while Harold Macmillan was an urbane figure in contrast to the monarch who is a countrywoman at heart.
However, on one occasion, rather than discussing affairs of state at one of their audiences, the Queen and Mr Macmillan could be seen huddled over a transistor radio as US astronaut John Glenn was hurtling through space.
Sir Alec Douglas-Home reportedly met with royal approval.
The Queen joined prime minister Margaret Thatcher and former premiers at Downing Street in 1985 to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the residence becoming the London home of PMs
An aide said: “He was an old friend. They talked about dogs and shooting together. They were both Scottish landowners, the same sort of people, like old schoolfriends.”
Harold Wilson endeared himself to the Queen. “They got on like a house on fire,” one long-standing member of the Labour Party said.
He used to join members of the royal family for riverside picnics at Balmoral.
However, Sir Edward Heath is said to have struggled with small talk and their weekly audiences have been described as “frosty”.
James Callaghan managed to establish a warm rapport. He said about the Queen: “One of the great things about her is that she always seems able to see the funny side of life. All the conversations were very enjoyable.”
The Queen with Baroness Thatcher at the opening of a new wing of the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2000
But things were very different with Margaret Thatcher, who reportedly found the traditional September weekend at Balmoral painful.
One observer wrote: “A weekend in the country with aristocrats who enjoy riding, shooting, sports and games is Thatcher’s idea of torture.
“But her dread of the weekend receded as the two women became somewhat more comfortable with one another.”
Baroness Thatcher also could not abide the charades that she was expected to play after dinner at Balmoral and once the Queen, at a gathering of six of her premiers, joked about “the party games which some of you have so nobly endured at Balmoral”.
When Baroness Thatcher died in April 2013, the Queen took the unusual step of attending her ceremonial funeral – a personal decision and an indication of the Queen’s respect for her first – and at the time her only – female prime minister.
Then PM Tony Blair with the Queen before a Golden Jubilee dinner in her honour at Downing Street in 2002
Sir John Major was popular with the royal family, and the Queen in particular, largely because of the genuine concern he expressed for the welfare of the two young princes William and Harry, first on the divorce of their parents and then on the death of their mother, Diana, Princess of Wales.
Sir Tony Blair was described in some palace quarters as a “head of state-in-waiting”, and there were courtiers who were not enamoured by what they saw as his encouragement of a “people’s monarchy”.
Neither Sir Tony, who later revealed details of his private conversations with the Queen in his memoirs, nor Gordon Brown, who was reported to have a good but formal relationship with the royals, were invited to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s wedding in 2011.
A red-faced David Cameron was forced to make a grovelling apology to the Queen in 2014 after his “purr-gate” blunder.
Mr Cameron was caught on camera telling then New York mayor Michael Bloomberg that the monarch had “purred down the line” when he telephoned and told her the result of the Scottish independence referendum.
The Queen’s audiences with Boris Johnson were often by phone during the pandemic
Theresa May was the second female prime minister of the Queen’s reign – taking up her post in July 2016 in the wake of the Brexit vote, more than a quarter of a century after Mrs Thatcher stood down.
Her premiership ended in 2019 after she endured a torrid time dogged by the issue of Brexit, and eventually stood down with Boris Johnson succeeding in July that year.
A few months into his premiership, Mr Johnson apologised to the head of state after the Supreme Court ruled his advice to the Queen – imparted by Commons Leader Jacob Rees-Mogg at Balmoral – to prorogue Parliament for five weeks had been “unlawful”.
Opposition leaders had written to the Queen in protest and John Bercow, then the Commons speaker, said the move was a “constitutional outrage” designed to stop Parliament debating Brexit.
Another apology to Buckingham Palace came from Downing Street recently when it emerged two staff leaving events were held at Number 10 on April 16 last year, the eve of the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral.
The Press Association
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