Margaret Thatcher reportedly described it as “purgatory”, while Tony Blair needed a stiff drink to survive it.
Now Rishi Sunak is expected to meet the king during a weekend trip to Balmoral Castle, continuing a long-held tradition of the monarch hosting the prime minister at the Scottish royal retreat.
The visit to the royal estate comes ahead of parliament returning from recess on Monday.
For past prime ministers, it was not always the most relaxing of weekends.
During Queen Elizabeth II’s time, such invitations would inevitably mean bracing walks, an oft-soggy picnic in the Highland mist, a spot of fishing if desired, and one of the late Duke of Edinburgh’s famous barbecues.
The queen’s late biographer, Prof Ben Pimlot, recorded that Margaret Thatcher initially regarded the annual jaunt as “purgatory”, something seized upon and, undoubtedly embellished, by the producers of the hit Netflix series The Crown. The show depicted Thatcher as arriving in unsuitable heels, participating with great reluctance in the outdoor sports and parlour games, and departing as soon as was decently possible.
While The Crown may have indulged in some artistic licence, Thatcher reportedly did once send the queen a pair of washing gloves as a Christmas gift after observing her washing dishes without a pair after one of Philip’s barbecues. And the former prime minister often had to borrow wellington boots.
One former Whitehall official told Pimlot of Thatcher’s awkwardness at one of Philip’s famed barbecues, saying: “Monarch and consort cooking sausages for the disconcerted premier and her husband on a windswept hillside, each couple desperately trying to be informal.” Thatcher arranged to depart at 6am. “She couldn’t get away fast enough,’” the official said.
Blair confirmed such scenes of informal domesticity when he said in later years: “You think I’m joking, but I’m not. They put the gloves on and stick their hands in the sink. The queen asks if you’ve finished, she stacks the plates up and goes off to the sink.”
But protocol was never really absent. In his autobiography, A Journey, Blair wrote that he found the Balmoral experience to be “a vivid combination of the intriguing, the surreal, and the utterly freaky”, from the personal valet offering to iron his underpants and draw his bath, to the hearty breakfasts “straight out of Trollope or, perhaps better, Walter Scott”.
There was a “routine to everything” he wrote. “The blessing was the stiff drink you could get before dinner,” which he described as “rocket fuel”. “Had it been a dry event, had the queen been teetotaller or a temperance fanatic, I don’t believe I could have got through the weekend.”
Theresa May described her embarrassment at dropping cheese on the ground during one meal. “I picked up the cheese, put it on the plate and put it on the table. I turned round to see that my every move had been watched very carefully by her majesty the queen. I looked at her. She looked at me and she just smiled. And the cheese remained on the table,” she said.
Harold Wilson was said to have loved his visits. Edward Heath, less so, and he was said to have been always short of breath and trying to keep up on the walks.
David Cameron was said to have enjoyed the bracing walks, which offered “a bit of a change from running in the park,” the late queen once told him in a moment captured by documentary makers.
John Major found difficulty in attending to affairs of state while there. He said on one occasion that he found himself talking on the phone to the Italian prime minister. Major explained: “After a while he said, ‘What on earth is wrong with the line, I can’t hear a thing?’. It was the bagpipes. I had been there a few days and utterly forgotten that they were being played, but they were. I’d shut them out, but he couldn’t. [It was] a very difficult conversation with him.”
The original house at Balmoral was purchased in 1852 by Prince Albert for Queen Victoria and was refashioned by the royal couple into the neo-gothic style castle that exists today at the centre of a 20,000 hectare (50,000 acre) estate.
The late queen spent almost every summer there, and for Charles it was a magical place where many happy childhood memories were forged. Many of the royal family’s home movies were shot there.
Charles and Diana spent part of their honeymoon there. But it was also the backdrop to tragedy, as the place where Princes William and Harry, as young boys, were told the shocking news of their mother’s untimely death.
It was also where the late queen appointed her 15th and final prime minister, Liz Truss, just two days before her death.
A new reign may see some of the late queen’s traditions abandoned. Will the parlour games – which the late queen once noted had been “so nobly endured” by all of her prime ministers – still be obligatory, for example?
Charles, as Prince of Wales, was renowned for offering a variety of guests overnight invitations to stylish dining events at Highgrove, where everything from flower arrangements to the menu would be meticulously planned.
Sunak’s Balmoral visit is likely to have been a mainly social affair, and, like prime ministers before him, he will be encouraged to scale back on work while there.
