The Queen will have the unusual job of dispatching with one prime minister and welcoming another during her annual summer break to Scotland.
Having been declared winner of the Conservative Party leadership contest, Liz Truss will travel to Balmoral Castle on Tuesday to see the monarch and be appointed the UK’s new political leader.
But not before Boris Johnson has resigned in person after his party moved against him in July in the aftermath of Downing Street lockdown parties and for his handling of sexual harassment allegations against one of his ministers.
Liz Truss will become the 15th prime minister of the Queen’s seven-decade reign and the first who she has appointed in Scotland rather than London.
What will happen when the Queen meets Liz Truss?
Before the prime minister-in-waiting meets the 96-year-old Head of State, Boris Johnson will formally tender his resignation and have a short audience with the Queen on Deeside.
Mr Johnson met the Queen less frequently face-to-face than some of his predecessors due to coronavirus restrictions in place for almost two years during his three-year premiership.
Once that meeting is done, Ms Truss will arrive and will be formally asked by the Queen to form a government due to leading the largest party in the House of Commons.
This audience — taking place at Balmoral rather than Buckingham Palace due to the Queen's mobility issues — is known as the “kissing of hands”.
Ms Truss is expected to spend no longer than an hour with the Queen.
Royal experts say the pair are likely to make small talk as they set the foundations for the traditional weekly phone call between the monarch and the No10 incumbent.
After the conversation, Ms Truss is expected to fly to London where she will give a speech in Downing Street and start forming her new administration.
What is the “kissing of hands” between PM and the Queen?
The formal audience between Ms Truss and the Queen will likely be described in the Court Circular — the official record of royal engagements — as “kissing hands”.
The new prime minister kissing the monarch’s hand is designed to show loyalty from the politician when setting up a new government in the king or queen’s name.
But there have been conflicting accounts of whether there is actually a physical kiss that takes place in the modern age.
In his autobiography, My Life, Our Times, former Labour leader Gordon Brown said there was no kiss but instead only a handshake between him and the Queen in 2007.
However, his predecessor Tony Blair said that, 10 years prior, he was told by a Buckingham Palace official to “brush them [the Queen’s hands] gently with your lips”.
Mr Blair recalls in his own memoirs, A Journey, of how he tripped on a piece of carpet on his way to greet the Queen, turning the kissing of hands into “not so much [a] brushing, as enveloping them”.
Who have been the Queen’s favourite prime ministers?
The Queen has kept tight-lipped about her opinions of prime ministers, but there are some whom she is known to have been particularly close with.
War leader Sir Winston Churchill is thought to be her favourite, having also been the first of her reign.
He greeted the young, grieving monarch back on British soil after her sudden return from Kenya on the death of her father, King George VI.
When Sir Winston retired in 1955, the Queen sent him a hand-written letter telling him how much she missed him and how no successor “will ever for me be able to hold the place of my first Prime Minister”.
Sir Winston had nurtured her through the early years, giving her invaluable advice.
Even though Conservative Sir Alec Douglas-Home’s premiership was short-lived in the 1960s, he reportedly met with royal approval.
An aide said they were of a similar ilk. “He was an old friend. They talked about dogs and shooting together. They were both Scottish landowners, the same sort of people, like old schoolfriends.”
Former Labour PM Harold Wilson endeared himself to the Queen, even though they came from very different walks of life, with Mr Wilson from the lower middle-classes.
“They got on like a house on fire,” one long-standing member of the Labour Party said.
The Yorkshireman used to join members of the Royal Family for riverside picnics at Balmoral and the pair reportedly had a “relaxed intimacy”.
Following their first meeting, the Queen took the rare step of inviting him to stay for drinks, and he was reportedly allowed to smoke his pipe during their audiences.
It is a far cry from David Cameron famously having to make a grovelling apology to the Queen in 2014 after he was caught on camera saying the monarch had “purred down the line” when he rang to tell her the result of the Scottish independence referendum.
