Over the ten-day mourning period that followed Queen Elizabeth II’s death on 8 September 2022 I interviewed dozens of her subjects in London and Windsor. Outside palaces and residences, walking past the flat-pack media villages that seemed to spring instantly out of the ground, among the mostly tearless and aimless crowds savouring the odd reflected glamour of a famous person’s death, one phrase repeated itself again and again in those conversations.
“It was like I knew her.”
The Queen, one third bank-note-post-stamp, one third human being, one third deity, was nevertheless considered to be part of our extended families. The people I spoke to were dumbstruck by a strange kind of distant grief, an emotion mediated by television and social media. I was too. And the longer they spoke to me, the more I realised her subjects were not describing the Queen at all. (How, after all, can you ever really know a person who is one third bank-note-post-stamp, one third human being, one third deity?) Elizabeth’s death gave them permission to talk about all the people they had lost. Their own grandmothers, mothers, aunties, sisters. Everyone they had lost was somehow mixed up with the death of this enigmatic woman.
“It was like I knew her”. They talked about Elizabeth while imagining their own grandmother fixing a Sunday lunch, or poking about in a fireplace, or heading down the races.
I remember writing down something I overheard a woman say in Windsor the afternoon before the Queen’s coffin was finally put to rest: “My mum has messaged me saying I’m so glad you’re coming home this weekend because I don’t want to be on my own.” The Queen’s death reminded many of us that life is short and precious, that we often take the people closest to us for granted and that we need to look after each other. It revealed, I thought at the time, a yearning among some of us to return to the seemingly settled and ordered world of her coronation in 1952, when a third of the Queen’s new subjects believed she was placed on the throne by God.
Did we know her though?
In September 2022 I thought that the Queen was, as Jenny Diski once put it, part of the “great amorphous conspiracy that keeps society on a roughly even keel”. In my more snobbish moments, I would probably have agreed with Walter Bagehot that monarchy is “a visible symbol of unity to those so imperfectly educated as to need a symbol”. I find those seductive words a lot less convincing today. Read this morning’s frontpage report in the Sun: “SHAMED Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was loaned £12 million by his parents and brother Charles to pay off sex accuser Virginia Giuffre – and has yet to give any back. The late Queen is said to have stumped up £7 million for the 2022 settlement, with another £3 million coming from Prince Philip’s estate – a year after his death.”
What are we supposed to know about the late Queen again? That Elizabeth was a grandmother who everybody in this country felt like they knew. She made picnics. She liked a Dubonnet and Gin with lunch. She kept a commoner’s crap electric heater in a few of her many multi-bathroomed palaces. She seemed to prefer dogs and horses to most of her relatives. She never really said or did anything in public other than make dry remarks inside freshly painted municipal buildings, a supposed fact that Craig Brown recently managed to get a whole 672-page book from.
But Elizabeth also gave millions and millions of pounds to her son long after it had been established that he had a close relationship – a relationship that he demonstrably lied about – with a man who had once been jailed for procuring an underage girl for prostitution. The millions allowed Andrew – against his wishes, if Andrew Lownie’s Entitled is to be believed – to pay off Giuffre in March 2022. The prince never had the day in court that might have thrown some daylight on his activities with Epstein. He has always denied any wrongdoing. Giuffre took her own life last April.
The Sun doesn’t say where the money came from. Part of the settlement Andrew reached with Giuffre – £1.5 million – came from Charles, then the Prince of Wales. This raises the spectre of profits from the posh Duchy Originals organic stuff sold by Waitrose being put forward as hush money to one of the women allegedly abused by the Prince and Jeffrey Epstein. Or perhaps Charles’s money came from the rents derived from his enormous commercial landholdings spread all over Britain.
But most of the money came from the Queen. Add those millions to the allowance she continued to pay Andrew after his epochally stupid Newsnight interview in 2019. Who was this woman we all knew so well again? A corgi-walking great grandma juggling her tupperware while organising pay-outs to alleged victims of sexual assault like the PR fixer for a MeToo’d Hollywood producer?
Before the latest tranche of Epstein files were released, we didn’t know very much about the Queen’s attitude towards Andrew after 2010. Last week ITV found an email which might have revealed some of her thoughts. “He has full support of his mum,” Andrew’s then advisor David Stern told Epstein over email on 9 March 2011. “Only dealing with you was ‘unwise’.” His mother’s money was more welcome than her advice. However “unwise” Andrew’s connection with Epstein was, in January 2025 the Times reported that the pair remained in communication for five years longer than the Prince claimed to Emily Maitlis in 2019.
You might say that the Queen was doing what any mother would do in that situation. But “any mother” is not the Queen. “Any mother” is not, as Roger Scruton wrote “the light above politics, which shines down on the human bustle from a calmer and more exalted sphere”. The duty and service that were so often invoked by Elizabeth during her reign extended to a rather more local circle than most of us once imagined.
Monarchists often despair of the image of a Queen who shared marmalade sandwiches with Paddington bear. They have a different image. Elizabeth was actually hard as nails, with the outlook and values of Britain’s classical governing class. Skilled at creating the appearance of distance from the maelstrom of our public life, Elizabeth reigned over us, silent as a sphinx, strategic as a general, more restrained than any nun. All the subtle, non-verbal communication could be summed up in one phrase heavy with aristocratic elan: Never complain, never explain.
If that was true, why did she give millions of pounds to Andrew after he torpedoed himself on Newsnight in 2019? (Why did Charles?) Why did she give him that money in the full knowledge that funding a pariah would risk threatening the entire firm?
We are left at a loss. A Queen of sentiment, duty and honour who nevertheless indulged her son knowing his “unwise” connection to a convicted sex criminal. A Queen of strategy, nous and coldness who could not see the possibility that her son would bring the whole Windsor show down with him. “It’s like we knew her.” Do you still think that’s true? And more importantly, what did she know about her son, and when did she know it?
Update: since this article was published the King has denied that he contributed to the £12 million then Prince Andrew paid to Virginia Giuffre in 2022.
[Further reading: Gordon Brown: Police need to interview Andrew]
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