In her forty-five years on the throne, the Queen had dealt with ten prime ministers, starting with Sir Winston Churchill. She had got on well with some, less well with others, and the new occupant of 10 Downing Street, Tony Blair, fell firmly into the latter category. ‘Too much too quickly’, was her unguarded summary of her current prime minister.

Blair had been at Northolt military airfield in West London to greet the plane bearing Diana’s coffin, draped in a Royal Standard. On the Sunday, he had issued a statement which sounded more American than British in its wording. It read in part: ‘We are a nation in a state of shock, in mourning, in grief . . . She was a wonderful and warm human being.’ But it was the soundbite in the last sentence that really caught the nation’s attention: Diana, the prime minister declared, was ‘the People’s Princess’. That was the headline in most of the newspapers delivered to the castle on Monday morning and the phrase struck a resounding chord in the hearts and minds of millions who had never even met Diana. They knew little about her other than what they read in the newspapers they professed to disbelieve, yet had come to see her as one of their own.

The Queen was not amused, to put it mildly. She disliked the title ‘People’s Princess’ and the implicit challenge it posed to her position as the Queen of all her people. A traditionalist to the core, she had quickly come to the conclusion that New Labour was no friend of the monarchy or the values she believes it embodies. She distrusted its plans for the reform of the House of Lords and its decision to accommodate homeless people in Admiralty Arch at the other end of the Mall to Buckingham Palace (she called that ‘a publicity stunt’). After her regular Tuesday meetings at the palace with Blair, she would often emerge tut-tutting under her breath. On this morning and in the days to come, her irritation became more sharply focused on the belief that the government was trying to expropriate the princess for its own political ends.