She welcomes Truss – 70 years after Churchill

For seven decades, she has played an important constitutional role in British power shifts. Today, Queen Elizabeth shakes hands with Liz Truss – her sixteenth Prime Minister.

When Liz Truss arrives at Balmoral Castle in the Scottish Highlands, she joins a long line of British prime ministers who have been given the go-ahead by Queen Elizabeth to form a government.

The very first Prime Minister she met as Queen – Winston Churchill – was born over a century before Liz Truss.

Ever since her first year on the throne, Queen Elizabeth’s relationship with the sitting prime ministers has been the subject of the British gossip press – not least their first meetings. According to the British media, for example, neither Tony Blair nor Gordon Brown impressed the Queen.

Johnson gossiped about the meeting

Tony Blair has described his first meeting with the Queen in his memoirs:

“She was quite shy, strangely shy for someone of her experience and position; but at the same time she was straightforward,” he wrote in 2010.

The biggest scandal was, not surprisingly, Boris Johnson. Just minutes after his first royal audience of 2019, he broke protocol when he shared the private conversation with the Queen.

“I don’t know why anyone would want that job,” the Queen is said to have jokingly told Johnson behind closed doors at Buckingham Palace – which he then repeated in front of jubilant reporters. According to the British media, Johnson will later, on several different occasions, have apologized to the Queen for the piano stomp.

Third woman

The Regent and the sitting Prime Minister traditionally meet once a week, but the Queen is not allowed to officially speak on political matters or discuss her views on the sitting leaders. Despite that, pundits think they can read both one and the other in her attitude.

After the meeting with Johnson, for example, the magazine Vanity Fair stated that the Queen – who postponed her annual trip to Scotland for the audience – had a demeanor that “shouted ‘I’m going on holiday the second you go'”: her dress was a bit casual and she held tight in her purse, the paper thought.

Liz Truss becomes the third woman in history to be formally given the go-ahead by Queen Elizabeth to form a government. According to the British media, she got along well with Theresa May, while the relationship with Margaret Thatcher was rumored to be characterized by frosty rivalry – something that Thatcher, however, firmly denied, writes the Washington Post. What relationship the Queen will have with Liz Truss remains to be seen. The 47-year-old has not always been the conservative royalist she is today.

First Scotland ceremony

As a young liberal democrat, Truss wanted to abolish the monarchy:

– We liberal democrats believe in opportunities for everyone. We do not think that some people are born to rule, she said in a speech in 1994, according to British media.

Usually, the first meeting between the Queen and the new Prime Minister is held at Buckingham Palace. Tuesday’s gathering will be the first time the ceremony has taken place outside central London since Winston Churchill met the Queen at Heathrow Airport in 1952. At the time, Elizabeth, during a trip in Kenya – then part of the British Commonwealth – had just received the news of her father’s death and landed in London as a new queen.

Facts

Queen Elizabeth’s Prime Ministers

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