Her Majesty's inner circle offers a unique insight into a shy, funny woman who was superb at accents, loved jokes and was a Line of Duty fan.
Every one of us can instantly summon a mental image of Queen Elizabeth II. It might be in ceremonial robes, with orb and sceptre, or waving from the balcony of Buckingham Palace during her Platinum Jubilee.
She was perhaps the most familiar face in the world, yet the woman behind that wonderful smile was also one of the least known, an enigma who regarded mystique as an essential part of the job.
For Elizabeth II, the role of Queen was one she gladly played, but it was her job rather than her identity. The real Elizabeth Windsor was a mother, a wife, a practical joker, a pianist, a mimic, a grandmother and an animal lover who, just like the rest of us, liked to unwind by watching Countdown and Line of Duty on the television.
Some of those who knew the Queen as a boss or a friend have shared their experiences of the person who remained largely hidden from view for 70 years, providing a fascinating insight into a monarch who, in public at least, never let the mask slip. Those who did catch a glimpse of the real Elizabeth often wished others could see her as they did, as the people of Britain and the Commonwealth would surely have loved her even more.
Samantha Cohen, who served the Queen for 17 years as her press secretary and then assistant private secretary (she stopped working for the Royal household in 2019), says: "She was really normal, the most normal non-normal person I have ever met. It was remarkable how grounded she was, she wasn't fussy, she was so practical, she wasn't interested in material things. She recognised that being Queen was a role and a job so she managed to be ordinary and extraordinary at the same time, and that put people at ease. And she was incredibly humble, she was without ego, quite shy really."
Harold Macmillan, the third of her 15 prime ministers, once told the Queen that it was a pity her mischievous sense of humour was always shielded from view. She replied that as the Sovereign she had to look serious because it was what people expected.
Stories of the Queen's impish side abound from those who knew her best, and she would take particular delight in those rare occasions when people failed to recognise who she was.
Richard Griffin, a former royal protection officer, described an occasion when the Queen was walking her dogs on the Balmoral estate and came across a pair of American tourists at a picnic site. He said: "There were two hikers coming towards us and the Queen would always stop and say hello.
It was clear from the moment they stopped that they hadn't recognised the Queen." After recounting what they had done on their holiday, the tourists asked Her Majesty, "and where do you live?" She replied: "Well, I live in London but I've got a holiday home just over the hills. I've been coming up here ever since I was a little girl, over 80 years." One tourist asked: "Well, if you've been coming up here for 80 years you must have met the Queen?"
Without missing a beat, the Queen replied: "Well, I haven't, but Dick here meets her regularly." When Griffin was asked, "What is she like?" he replied with a twinkle in his eye: "Well she can be very cantankerous at times but she's got a great sense of humour."
The tourists asked if they could have their picture taken with Griffin, and asked his companion if she would do the honours. After the Queen took a picture of Griffin with the tourists, they swapped places and Griffin took a picture of the tourists with the Queen. He said: "We never let on, and we waved goodbye and Her Majesty said: 'I'd love to be a fly on the wall when he shows those pictures to their friends in America and hopefully someone tells him who I am.'"
Behind closed doors, the Queen would sometimes refer to herself and members of her family by the nicknames given to them by Private Eye: Brenda (the Queen), Keith (Prince Philip), Brian (Charles) and Yvonne (Princess Margaret), and she was self-deprecating to a fault. As she watched footage of the wedding of the then Prince of Wales and Princess Diana, she turned to her husband and said: "Oh Philip, do look, I've got my Miss Piggy face on."
She also had a stock answer, used on more than one occasion, if someone's mobile phone rang while they were talking to the Queen. "You'd better answer that," she would say. "It might be someone important!"
The Queen took great pleasure in catching out members of the public, often as a result of her determination to do things for herself rather than have everything done for her by servants.
A member of staff in the household goods department of the London department store Peter Jones took a call from a customer wanting to buy a picnic basket for two.
"Would you send it round on account please?" asked the customer, giving the address as "Buckingham Palace." Inquiring to whom it should be addressed, the shop worker was told: "The Queen, thank you" before the line went dead. Assuming it was a practical joke, the store phoned the Palace and was told: "Oh, she is naughty. We are meant to do things like that for her."
Sir Alan "Tommy" Lascelles, the Queen's first private secretary and a man so memorably brought to life by Pip Torrens in The Crown, noticed her "healthy sense of fun" which came out when she was off-duty. In 1957, when Prince Philip was aboard Britannia for its first voyage to Australia, he grew a beard which had a distinct ginger tinge, much to the Queen's amusement. She flew out to Lisbon to join him and when Philip got on to the aircraft to greet her, he found his wife and all of her staff wearing fake ginger beards.
Very few people outside her immediate family had the pleasure of experiencing one of the Queen's many hidden talents, as a mimic. Not only did she like to take off politicians, including Neil Kinnock and Boris Yeltsin, but she also had a repertoire of regional accents.
The story of Michael Fagan, the intruder who got into her bedroom at Buckingham Palace in 1982 in one of the worst ever breaches of royal security, could not be retold by her without Majestic impressions of the key players. She would copy the Middlesbrough accent of Elizabeth Andrew, the chambermaid who was first to respond, as she quoted her saying: "Ooh bloody 'ell Ma'am, what's 'e doin' 'ere?"
On another occasion, when she realised that one of the crew filming her Christmas broadcast was from Birmingham, she showed the technician a collection of silverware made in the city and "explained what all the pieces were in a broad Brummie accent", according to a courtier who was there at the time.
One of the great ironies of royal visits is that those who arrange them will suffer weeks of sleepless nights fretting over the details, yet members of the Royal family, who attend hundreds of well-drilled engagements each year, enjoy nothing more than when things go wrong. The Queen liked to recall the visit she once made to Trinity College, Oxford, where the Lord-Lieutenant of Oxfordshire fainted, then his wife fainted, thinking he had died. A college servant fell over and dropped a drinks tray in the commotion that followed. The Queen told her hosts: "We've had a wonderful lunch. Bodies all over the place!"
Even such an important ceremonial occasion as the Prince of Wales's investiture in 1969 had its lighter moments for the Queen. She confided in Noël Coward that she had struggled not to giggle when she put the crown on Charles's head at the rehearsal because it was too big and it "extinguished him like a candle-snuffer".
Yet the Queen never fell into the trap of trying to be more interesting to the public or more light-hearted in her interactions with strangers. By keeping a steady, regal demeanour, she maintained a persona that people came to expect, and so the public was never disappointed. She knew that if she had tried to be more energetic or funny, people would notice the days when she was tired or off-form, and there would be endless questions about what was eating her that day.
Far better, even for someone with such an unstuffy personality, to stick to a baseline that could always be attained, even on days when she might have been feeling below par.
Former Telegraph royal correspondent Ann Morrow noted that the Queen had to maintain some distance from the public because "if she warmly cuddled a child it might cry, be sick on her dress or embarrass the parents and ruin an otherwise innocently happy afternoon".
Gavin Ashenden, a former chaplain to the Queen, believes that part of her success lay in the fact that her "official" persona was almost indistinguishable from her private persona.
He says: "She had this artificial personality, as Queen, and she lived in it without any tension because it was not far from who she was. She was able to put people at ease because she came across as a jolly nice, very kind person and that was entirely genuine."
In later years, of course, the Queen did start to show her hand, most memorably at the opening of the London 2012 Olympics when she joined Daniel Craig's James Bond on a mission to parachute into the stadium (via a stunt double), her appearance with Paddington Bear at the Platinum Jubilee concert (tapping her teacup to Queen's We Will Rock You) and when Prince Harry enlisted her for a "mic drop" moment in some trash talk with President Obama to promote his Invictus Games. These moments played to her sense of theatre.
I had the honour of being invited to a reception at Buckingham Palace before the London Olympics, thrown by the Queen for members of the media before the nation's greatest sporting event since 1966. As editors and journalists gathered in the Picture Gallery, they were gently herded towards one end where, suddenly and without warning, a grand set of double doors swung open to reveal the Queen and Prince Philip, which electrified the room.
It was a classic piece of stage management from a monarch who was acutely aware of her power to impress, and newspaper editors (including those whose publications had a distinctly republican leaning) were reduced to nervy, bowing subjects as they were singled out by her for conversation.
The Queen also liked to make entrances to meetings using some of the secret doors that are a feature of the Palace, and was clearly tickled by the reaction of those who had been granted an audience.
Despite all of that, the Queen was by nature a shy woman, which was perhaps one of the reasons she was so attracted to the supremely confident and outgoing Prince Philip.
Sally Osman, who served as the Queen's director of communications for more than five years, says: "Because she was quite a shy person, she put the cloak on when she went out, and she had coping mechanisms, like the handbag, which she didn't really need to carry but it was part of her armour."
The Queen even tried to veto the live broadcast of her coronation because she was petrified she would make a mistake that could not be edited out.
Her shyness manifested itself in a lifelong hatred of confrontation. "She would do anything to avoid confrontation," says one former aide. "She was particularly bad at tackling difficult conversations with her children, which is why Prince Philip always had to be the family disciplinarian."
At times it could be a serious hindrance. Those who were on her staff at the time say the Queen's aversion to confrontation was the reason she failed to veto one of the most cringe-inducing episodes of her reign, The Grand Knockout Tournament, better remembered as "It's a Royal Knockout".
The brainchild of her youngest son Prince Edward, the televised event in 1987 involved the Princess Royal, the Duke and Duchess of York and Edward himself dressing up in medieval costumes to captain celebrity teams in the format of the slapstick game show It's a Knockout.
The Queen had been strongly advised to refuse permission for the event, which heavily promoted sponsors like Asda and McDonald's. The Prince and Princess of Wales flatly refused to have anything to do with it, but the Queen could not bear to crush the Tiggerish Edward's madcap plan. The result was a collective loss of dignity the like of which the Royal family had not seen.
The Queen also pulled her punches when she was supposed to deliver bad news to another of her sons, Prince Andrew. In 2011, when his friendship with the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein first came to the fore, the Government decided to strip him of his role as the UK's roving trade ambassador. The Queen was given the task of telling him.
"Andrew went into a meeting with the Queen," a source recalls. "When he came out of the meeting it was obvious he still thought he was trade ambassador. She hadn't told him."
This inability to stand up to members of her own family is all the more surprising in the context of the Queen's immense personal courage. She would frequently ignore advice to stay away from countries that were considered dangerous, was sanguine about the threat of assassination by terrorist groups, and showed calmness under fire that would have been the envy of many a soldier.
In 1981, when a 17-year-old gunman fired six times at her from the crowd before Trooping the Colour (the bullets were blanks, something the Queen only found out later), the monarch kept her horse under control, patted it and insisted on carrying on with the ceremony.
When a concrete block was dropped on her car from a tower block in Belfast others expressed shock, but the Queen simply said: "It's a strong car."
Her cousin, Margaret Rhodes, recalled a comment made to her by the Queen when they were out riding together six months after the murder of Earl Mountbatten by an IRA bomb in 1979. The Queen matter-of-factly said: "I've been informed that the IRA have a new sort of sniper sight that sees through the mist", then carried on riding, moving on to the next topic.
Fatalistic about the possibility of assassination, whenever she was warned about security risks, she would shrug and say: "If someone really wants to get me it is too easy." She also told a friend that: "I'm not afraid of being killed. I just don't want to be maimed."
Her father George VI, who refused to evacuate from London during the Second World War, would not have been surprised.
Before he became King, when Elizabeth was less than 10 years old, he compared her to Queen Victoria, saying: "From the very first moment of talking she showed so much character that it was impossible not to wonder whether history would not repeat itself."
That "character" was manifested, in part, in a steely determination, including in her choice of husband, with whom she was in love, rather than the supposedly more suitable men placed above him in the list compiled by her mother.
Her childhood was materially privileged but emotionally challenging: when she was eight months old her parents went to Australia and did not return for six months, and for much of her childhood she was reliant on her nursemaid and nanny Margaret "Bobo" MacDonald, a woman who became so important to the Queen that she remained by her side for 67 years.
It is difficult to separate such an institutionalised childhood from the Queen's difficulty in expressing emotion in later life. Her family would say that "it is always hard to tell with Lilibet whether she is happy or not… is it one of her chin or chinless days?" On a "chinless" day she would tuck in her chin and look disgruntled.
The issue of her mothering skills is a vexed one: Jonathan Dimbleby's 1994 authorised biography of Prince Charles, every word of which was approved by the Prince before publication, accused the Queen of being a "detached" mother, "unable or unwilling" to give him the affection and appreciation he desired.
Others talk of a woman who loved young children and babies. Prince William has said that to him she was always a grandmother first and the Queen second, and it is, of course, possible that she was more indulgent towards her grandchildren than her own children, as many grandparents are.
Even expressing personal grief presented difficulties for the Queen. Her cousin Lady Brabourne, her old Girl Guide leader and a lifelong friend, once sent her condolences to the Queen over the death of one of her corgis and received a deeply personal four-page letter in reply, filled with emotion and reflections on the death of her pet. Yet when Lady Brabourne lost her father Earl Mountbatten and her son in the 1979 IRA bombing (which she herself survived), there was no letter from the Queen. Prince Philip, in contrast, wrote a long and compassionate letter to their grieving relation.
The Queen's delay in visiting Aberfan after the 1966 spoil heap disaster, and her reluctance to return to London from Balmoral when Diana, Princess of Wales died in 1997, were interpreted by the public as evidence of a coldness on the Queen's part, but in the case of Aberfan, the Queen was worried that her arrival would prove a distraction from the vital rescue work, and after Diana's death, she was trying to protect Princes William and Harry by keeping them away from the intense public response in London.
She was, of course, being urged to respond differently, particularly over the issue of the flagless flagpole at Buckingham Palace. Tradition dictated that no flag flew when the monarch was not in residence but the public and media demanded that a flag should be flown at half mast. The Queen initially dug her heels in, before eventually bowing to the inevitable, but one courtier said they had never seen the Queen so angry as when she was being told to change tradition over the flag. It was because she could not bear insincerity or pretence and was always true to herself.
There was never any need to feign enthusiasm when it came to horses or dogs. The first newspaper the Queen read every morning was the Racing Post (she also read The Telegraph and would read the Financial Times to check on her investments) and Princess Anne once divulged that the only person who could always be sure of being put straight through to the Queen whenever they telephoned was her racing manager Lord "Porchey" Carnarvon, because a call from him meant there would be news about her horses.
It was at the races that the Queen would come closest to throwing off her mask altogether, jumping up and down with excitement as her horses came down the finishing straight. In her spare time she would make private visits to Normandy to visit studs, and few things gave her as much pleasure as success on the racecourse; she was the leading owner in 1954 and 1957, and won every classic flat race except the Derby, some of them several times.
The Queen's love of corgis was well known, but she also bred Labradors at a stud in Sandringham, taking a hands-on approach to their care, to the point of removing their fleas herself. For several years she competed in gun-dog trials at Sandringham and Balmoral, and on shoots she would work four dogs at a time, using two cocker spaniels to sweep up downed birds on the nearer ground and two Labradors to carry out longer-distance pick-ups, using a whistle.
Her former gamekeeper Bill Meldrum credited her with "the finest retrieve I've ever seen", guiding a Labrador to a grouse that had fallen 800 yards away on the other side of a river.
She would even indulge her dogs by feeding them titbits from the table during meals (she liked to have her dogs under the table at lunches she hosted as it helped put her guests at ease). Her love of animals extended to pigeons; carrying on a family tradition started by Edward VII, she kept racing birds at a loft in Norfolk. She did not, however, care for cats.
As a child she had dreamed of living in the country surrounded by horses and dogs, and her annual summer stay at Balmoral – her favourite time of the year – was the closest she got to that.
One former courtier says: "One of the first things you notice was how different she was when she was at Balmoral or Sandringham compared with when she was at Buckingham Palace. She didn't have to be Queen there. You would look out of the window and she would walk past with her dogs, and wave."
It was at Balmoral, with its Ghillies Balls, Scottish dancing and barbecues, that the Queen was at her most relaxed – she once said that "it's rather nice to hibernate" there. The Queen insisted on doing her own washing-up after Prince Philip's legendary barbecues on the estate, and Margaret Thatcher was so taken aback to see her doing it bare-handed that she sent her some Marigold gloves in the post.
Holidays at Balmoral – while never work-free – gave the Queen time to indulge in some of her personal pleasures. She loved TV quiz shows, particularly Countdown and Pointless, was partial to thrillers, including Line of Duty, and would watch Masterchef with Prince Philip when he was still alive, though racing would of course be her preference during the flat season. Comedies like Morecambe & Wise, Yes Minister and The Two Ronnies were favourites, and she ploughed through thrillers by Dick Francis and Hammond Innes. There would usually be a jigsaw on the go at Balmoral or Sandringham. Ballet was preferred to opera (apart from Gilbert and Sullivan).
In younger life she learned to play the piano to a good standard, and she was fluent in French (official papers sent over from Canada would sometimes be in French and would not need to be translated).
Despite her taste for gin and Dubonnet, the Queen drank only in moderation and was disciplined in her eating habits to maintain her weight and health. Like most other members of the Royal family, she ate very quickly; etiquette dictated that as soon as the Queen was finished eating all of her guests' plates would be cleared, meaning slower eaters were caught out mid-meal.
Her favourite meal was afternoon tea. Prince Charles once said that "everything stops for tea" and that his family were "addicted to it".
The Queen would brew the tea, allowing one spoonful per person and three minutes to brew for small leaf tea and six for larger leaf tea. Sandwiches and cake would then be served, even in mid-flight, which gave the Queen the stamina to keep going on busier days. Her regime clearly worked: her only recurring health problem was sinusitis, and she had the stamina of an ox.
Margaret Thatcher was among those who struggled to keep up with her at times. When the then Prime Minister felt faint at a hot, stuffy diplomatic reception and had to sit down, the Queen breezed past her and said: "Oh look, she's keeled over again."
Understandably, the Queen often craved a taste of normality, away from the caged existence that gave her little real freedom.
She liked to drive her own car (and liked to drive fast on private roads even in old age), would pop into tea shops near Balmoral and hope not to be recognised (her small stature often caught people out – she was just 5ft 4in tall) and enjoyed the rare chances she had to go to the shops.
Cohen recalls: "We stopped off in Singapore [to refuel] on the way back from Australia in 2002 and she liked to buy silk there, which merchants would bring to her in a private suite. But on this occasion, for the first time ever, she decided she would just go shopping in the Duty Free at Changi Airport. We went to a stall and the people who owned it didn't recognise her, and so they started bartering with her and saying, 'Hello lady!' She was just looking at me and laughing and asking, 'What do I say?' She thought it was absolutely brilliant, it was such a fun thing."
Cohen would also catch glimpses of the wife and mother who employed her. She says: "When we were going through her red boxes she would sometimes say, 'Are we nearly finished because I've got to give Philip his lunch.' She would also do all the bedroom plans when people came to stay at Sandringham, she cared about all those things because she was a mother and a wife."
The Queen was not incapable of losing her temper with her husband though. During a six-month tour of Australia soon after the coronation, a local camera crew filmed the Queen hurling tennis shoes and a tennis racket at Prince Philip outside their chalet before dragging him back inside. The crew agreed to hand over the footage, and the Queen, according to the filmmaker, later appeared, a picture of calmness, and said: "I'm sorry for that little interlude but, as you know, it happens in every marriage."
The former Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home suggested that if she was not the Queen she might have been head of Chatham House (he saw at first hand her immense intellect, which she wore so lightly) or The Jockey Club, and she would undoubtedly have been happy doing so.
She regarded pomp and ceremony as an important part of her role, but it was not a natural fit for her personality, which was far more down to earth than some of the celebrities, aristocrats and billionaires with whom she came into contact. When she first became aware of Baroness Marie-Christine Anna Agnes Hedwig Ida von Reibnitz, the divorcee who would become Princess Michael of Kent when she married the Queen's cousin, she remarked that "she sounds much too grand for us".
Frugality was always a watchword (unless racehorses were involved), as it was with most of the wartime generation. Grand fireplaces would have a one-bar electric fire installed in the grate rather than being lit, and those who were allowed to see the Queen's private apartments were always taken aback at how outmoded they were. Aides were surprised to see an old cathode-ray television set in her living room long after everyone else had swapped them for flat-screens.
And while newspapers would react with fury to perceived breaches of royal protocol by foreign visitors, such as Michele Obama's supposed gaffe in putting a friendly arm around Her Majesty, the Queen was far less bothered than her courtiers.
For a woman whose job involved some of the most spectacular outfits ever created (and certainly the most spectacular jewels), the Queen was remarkably uninterested in clothes and fashion, and certainly was not vain.
She never asked for official photos to be retaken if they caught her in a bad light, and she would sit going through letters while her hair was being done, caring little about the finished result (and stuck with the same hairstyle for decades).
One photographer did make her tetchy: when Annie Liebovitz asked the Queen, in full Garter robes, to take off her coronet so she would look "less dressy", the Queen held up her ceremonial robes and retorted: "Less dressy? What do you think this is?"
As for her wardrobe, "working" clothes had to be practical, brightly-coloured (so she could be seen in a crowd) and largely immune to fashion trends. There were occasions though, according to Morrow, when she would don a floaty gown for a private gathering at Sandringham or Windsor and "twirl and swish in front of long mirrors" before joining her guests.
Former aides say part of the secret of her success was that she loved people, and genuinely cared about them. If she was heading off on a foreign tour, for example, she would personally oversee the gifts for presidents and their wives, asking about their hobbies and spending time thinking about what they would like, rather than simply doling out framed pictures or books.
When Michelle Obama and her daughters visited the Queen, she arranged for them to have a carriage ride around the gardens of Buckingham Palace, knowing how much the girls would enjoy it.
In her younger years, she was not averse to using her femininity to charm world leaders such as the Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, who visited Windsor in 1973. Whitlam gave the Queen a large sheepskin rug and Her Majesty, who had been warned of his republican leanings, sat on the rug, stroking it and telling him how lovely it was.
"It was an arrant use of sexuality," her former private secretary Lord Charteris later recalled. Afterwards, Whitlam told Charteris: "Well, if the Queen's like that, it's all right by me!"
Duty, of course, overrode every other consideration in her life. The abdication of her uncle Edward VIII had a profound effect on her. Edward had put personal happiness before his duty to a generation who had laid down their lives for their country (and were about to do so again), leaving the Queen determined to do the opposite.
It was what drove her discipline of going through her red boxes of government papers every day except Christmas Day, sometimes for hours at a time (Edward VIII rarely bothered).
She did her duty during the war, joining the Auxiliary Territorial Service as 2nd Subaltern Elizabeth Windsor, and she made it clear in her 21st birthday broadcast that she would do her duty for her entire life, a duty not just to her country, but to God.
Elizabeth II prayed every day, usually in a private chapel at one of her residences, and believed profoundly in the almost mystical quality of monarchy. It was why she never considered abdicating.
Her faith was also a staff that she clung to throughout her life. Ashenden says she was an "old-fashioned Anglican, almost pre-war", whose faith had developed over the years, thanks in part to her friendship with the American evangelist Billy Graham, which began in 1955. Ashenden credits Graham with an "evangelical awakening" in the Queen which deepened her religious beliefs and helped her see out every crisis that came her way.
Her spirituality extended to superstition. Spilled salt would always be thrown over the shoulder, she would never have 13 people sitting around a meal table, and candles would all have to be lit from the same taper.
Faith may also have been the reason she was so forgiving. Despite her personal ire over the behaviour of Edward VIII (then known as the Duke of Windsor), she tried to heal the rift with him by going to see him in Paris during an official visit in 1972, nine days before his death, and she agreed that he and Wallis Simpson could be buried together at Frogmore House. She also hosted Simpson at Buckingham Palace after the Duke died.
There was even a reconciliation, of sorts, with Paul Burrell, the Queen's former footman who became Princess Diana's butler and was accused of a "cold and overt betrayal" by Princes William and Harry after he wrote a book about his time working for the Royal family. Burrell was charged with the theft of 310 of Diana's possessions in 2002, but his Old Bailey trial collapsed after the Queen confirmed that Burrell had told her he was keeping some of the items at his home for safekeeping. In recent years the Queen had allowed her staff to re-establish contact with Burrell, having previously imposed an effective ban on doing so.
"Everyone just fell in love with the Queen," says Cohen, "because she embodied trust. You absolutely knew you were with a person of innate goodness, you knew that she was so genuine that when she laughed at your joke she meant it, and when she asked about your family she meant it because she never did anything she didn't mean."
On a Golden Jubilee regional tour she was surprised at how many people had turned out to see her in Berkshire and Buckinghamshire early one morning, and asked an aide: "Are these crowds really for me?"
They were, and they will be as nothing compared with the crowds that will gather to express the nation's gratitude, respect and affection for our longest-reigning monarch.
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