The public “won’t know how to be British anymore” after the Queen dies, author and journalist Tina Brown has claimed.
The former Vanity Fair editor behind the 2007 biography The Diana Chronicles released a new title last month, The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor, the Truth and the Turmoil.
The book explores more than 30 years of the lives of the Queen and her immediate family including her children, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
In a new interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Brown said the death of the monarch – who recently turned 96 and is due to celebrate her Platinum Jubilee in June – will be a “seismic event”.
“I think there is going to be enormous instability of mood when the Queen does pass because 70 years, it’s three generations, it’s almost like people won’t know how to be British anymore when the Queen goes,” Brown said.
“It’s really validation for the kind of English woman she was, the stoic, the love of duty, behaving in a certain way - a lot of people [will be] mourning for something that [will be] no more.”
Concerns for the Queen’s health have heightened since she spent a night in hospital in October 2021. She also contracted Covid-19 in February, the same month she became the first monarch in British history to reach 70 years on the throne.
She has been absent from several public engagements in recent months and missed the Easter Sunday service at St George’s Chapel in Windsor in April.
Brown continued: “I think it’s going to be a very traumatic time in this country and it’s going to be for Charles to try and be the transitional bridge to the future and it will be a big challenge for him.”
The Queen’s eldest son, Prince Charles is set to become King after she dies.
In February, the Queen used her Platinum Jubilee message to announce that she hopes the Duchess of Cornwall will be known as Queen Consort when Charles ascends to the throne.
In her latest title, Brown writes that the late Duke of Edinburgh “ruminated that Charles ‘was not King material’”.
She also claims an acquaintance told her that Charles is “the wrong sort of person for [the Queen]” because he is “too needy, too vulnerable, too self-centred, the sort of person she cannot bear”.
