One of Boris Johnson's many formal apologies during his time in Number 10, was to Her Majesty The Queen.
Few can forget the haunting image of The Queen sitting alone at Prince Phillip's funeral, keenly obeying the pandemic rules - only for it to later emerge Johnson and co had had a party in Downing Street the night before.
So how will The Queen feel about Johnson's resignation? While the Queen keeps her political views to herself, royal expert Ingrid Seward shares how she believes the news would have gone down at Windsor Castle.
She tells The Mirror: "The Queen has to be above politics. She is expected to remain politically neutral and although her meetings with her 14th Prime Minister, Boris Johnson have mostly been conducted by weekly phone calls, certain political difficulties can still arise.
"I suspect The Queen feels a certain amount of motherly sympathy for 58-year-old Boris, who is the same age as her youngest son, Prince Edward.
"She first came across Boris when he was Mayor of London and later Foreign Secretary.
"When he was appointed her fourteenth Prime Minister on July 24th , 2019, she would have been familiar with his blustery, charismatic charm and aware of his problematic private life and propensity to avoid telling the whole story.
"The Queen values honesty, integrity, and duty above all else. She dislikes dishonesty, vanity, sloppiness and lack of attention to detail.
"Unfortunately for Boris he is not blessed with the characteristics of the sort of man she admires although no doubt she was charmed by him and amused by his customary banter."
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Just hours after entering Number 10, Johnson raised eyebrows with his first blunder - a massive break of royal protocol. The Queen's meetings with her Prime Ministers are meant to remain private, however he was overheard repeating some of her comments to staff.
Ingrid says: "The first problem came after his first official meeting with the Monarch when he revealed to his staff that the Queen had been almost sympathetic at his predicament saying, “I don’t know why anyone would want the job.”
"She would not have been surprised at his leaking an innocent remark. But she would not have been pleased.
"Just over a month later Johnson was accused of misleading The Queen, by asking her to suspend parliament for five weeks in an attempt to prevent criticism of The Government's Brexit plan.
"It transpired the monarch, on Johnson’s advice, had unwittingly suspended parliament unlawfully.
"It was the first of many black marks for Boris culminating in him having to apologise to the Monarch for ‘party gate’ after he had held two parties in 10 Downing Street while the nation was in mourning after the death of the Duke of Edinburgh, including one on the eve of the funeral.
"The Queen probably didn’t agree with Boris’s way of going about things and disliked his ‘misremembering’.
"But she is a consummate hostess and when he came to Balmoral for his first official Prime Minister's Weekend, invited him to bring Carrie even though they were not yet married.
"Yet overall, The Queen is a great believer in action rather than words and must long for a straightforward prime minister who means what he says and gets on with it.
- Ingrid Seward is Editor-in-Chief of Majesty magazine and author of Prince Philip Revealed: A Man Of His Century (Atria Books)
