Cancer, affairs, Meghan – Gyles Brandreth's biography of the late Queen truly is an intimate portrait

Gyles Brandreth is perhaps uniquely well-qualified to write this “intimate portrait” of the late Queen. He is supremely well-connected – he mentions here that the Queen Consort regularly attends his annual parties marking Oscar Wilde’s birthday, at one of which he was pleased to introduce her to the celebrity drag queen Baga Chipz – and is a born charmer, able to coax indiscretions out of the courtiers and other Royal hangers-on he has met.

“None of them is guilty of betraying any confidences,” he writes dutifully in his introduction, but the gossipy gallop through the Queen’s 96 years that follows shows that plenty of them are happy to sing like canaries about anything they haven’t been sworn to secrecy over.

The book overflows with nuggets of insider knowledge. The marriage of the Princess Royal and Vice-Admiral Laurence has, after many “rifts and separations”, “once again begun to thrive … with the advent of grandchildren”. The Duchess of Sussex “quite liked” cosy Nottingham Cottage at Kensington Palace, until she was invited “for dinner with William and Catherine and [saw] the scale and grandeur of the Cambridge residence”.

Brandreth’s other great advantage, apart from his way with loose-lipped ladies-in-waiting and porous pages, is his tenacity. Having networked himself into a position in which he was able to spend a fair bit of time with the late Queen, he spent hours peppering her with questions on a topic in which she had seemingly minimal interest: herself. (Her Majesty was not one for introspection: when Brandreth asked her if she had found the prospect of becoming Queen daunting, she replied, “I don’t think I ever thought about it really”).

But Brandreth’s persistence in probing this least forthcoming of interviewees (he claims to dash off and write down everything she’s said in his diary as soon as he’s able, but I wouldn’t be surprised if those flamboyant jumpers he wears conceal hidden wires – he captures her voice very convincingly) has paid off. Among the host of non-committal comments, he captures a few moments that bring her to life more vividly than any of the other recent rash of biographies has managed.

At one point, Brandreth records an argument they had over whether Rupert Bear was a bear or a boy with a bear’s head. “If you look at the pictures, you’ll see he’s got fingers on his hands and very human-looking feet,” says Brandreth. “I’m sorry you told me that,” the Queen replied. “Some things are best left unknown, don’t you think?” Glorious in its own right, this exchange also perhaps sheds a little light on the late Queen’s cast of mind – might a habitual unwillingness to acknowledge things she preferred not to notice explain how she allowed certain members of her family to get themselves into such terrible messes?

Brandreth also winkled out the fact that Her Majesty once hired an exorcist after staff at Sandringham reported a strange presence in the room in which George VI died. And who else but Brandreth would have found out from the Queen that she stopped watching Countdown when it was moved to a slightly earlier time slot, or bothered to put the fact in a book? Yet it brings home to the reader what strength and support she must have drawn from clinging to a rigid schedule.

Then there is the late Queen’s habit of understatement, which becomes cumulatively funnier as the book progresses. When Brandreth tells her he has seen the two Victoria Crosses that Idi Amin had specially made for himself in the 1970s, she responds: “He was certainly quite a character.” The news that a man was apprehended in the grounds of Windsor Castle threatening to kill her with a crossbow on December 25 2021 prompted the response: “Well, that would have put a dampener on Christmas, wouldn’t it?”

There are other scoops in this book, notably that Queen Elizabeth found solace in Line of Duty in her widowhood, and that she was apparently suffering from myeloma when she died. Nevertheless, many readers will find the bulk of the book fairly stale, as great swathes of it have been copied and pasted word for word from Brandreth’s 2004 book Philip and Elizabeth: Portrait of a Marriage. Moreover, many of the same chunks of text – tens of pages at a time – also appeared in Brandreth’s Philip: The Final Portrait, published shortly after the Duke of Edinburgh’s death less than two years ago.

I’m not sure there is enough new material in this book to justify its purchase by anybody who has read either of the previous two. It is true that, in this book, he publishes the details of his conversations with the Queen for the first time, but Brandreth might have served his readers better by publishing a volume of stocking-filler proportions.

Nevertheless, I found it an interesting exercise to read through the more familiar bits of the book to see what extra sentences Brandreth has snuck in that he had to exclude in the previous volumes while the Queen was still alive. For example, a familiar passage about the Duke of Edinburgh’s love life reappears in which the literary agent Robin Dalton tells Brandreth that Philip had a love affair in Australia at the end of the War – only this time Brandreth adds an extra line, quoting Dalton as saying: “I’m sure they slept together.” Brandreth goes on to add that Barbara Cartland once told him that Louis Mountbatten told her that Philip had fathered a child in Australia – this is the first time he has mentioned it, although Dame Barbara died in 2000.

I was singing along to the familiar words of Brandreth’s chapters on the Queen Mother, when I noticed that he had slipped in for the first time some disparaging remarks the Duke of Edinburgh had made about his mother-in-law, complaining that she had an emotional hold over Prince Charles “that’s not always been to his benefit, in my opinion”, and opining that she was “occasionally irritatingly gushing”. One of the key themes Brandreth broaches in this book for the first time is that the Queen flourished following her mother’s death in 2002 because she had previously been wary of exciting her disapproval – she would not have taken part in something like the Olympics James Bond sketch if her mother had still been alive, he asserts – and found a new self-confidence in old age.

Like most biographers of the Queen, one feels that Brandreth loses sight of her a bit too often while he’s busy detailing the far more juicy activities of other members of her family. Although readers may share his belief that Charles and Camilla will make a fine king and queen, and agree with him that the Duchess of Sussex’s emotional incontinence compares unfavourably with the late Queen’s stoicism, many will feel his emphasising of these views becomes rather repetitive.

What we really want from a book like this is stories about the Queen that are fresh and yet confirm what we have always thought about her – and there are just about enough here to make the book worth while. One that sticks in my mind concerns the Queen at the Royal Variety Performance, where Brandreth noted that she seemed to be enjoying every act equally. “Not really,” she replied. ‘But I like to be seen to be giving everybody the same amount of support. We are on television, after all. Their families might be watching.”

We have had, and will have, more intellectual and exciting monarchs than Elizabeth II, but that little insight into the way she thought gives you a glimpse, I think, of why she was probably our most loved.

Elizabeth: An Intimate Portrait by Gyles Brandreth is published by Michael Joseph at £25. To order your copy for £19.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books