Churchill
But her first Prime Minister, who after all occasionally relaxed by laying bricks, certainly knew how to wield the trowel. Winston Churchill, growing sentimental with age, was more than a little in love with his new 25-year-old sovereign who had so much to learn. Arriving for his weekly audience in frock coat and top hat, Churchill assumed the role of kindly, wise and indulgent uncle, guiding the Queen through the thickets of political life just as his distant predecessor Lord Melbourne had done to the young Victoria.
Their audiences grew ever longer. Churchill’s secretary Jock Colville, banished to a downstairs room, was so intrigued that he asked his master what they talked about. ‘Oh, mostly racing,’ Churchill replied.
‘He acted upon her lightest word,’ Sir Edward Ford, the Queen’s Assistant Private Secretary at the time, recalled. When she mentioned casually to Churchill that she had not greatly enjoyed that year’s royal film performance, Beau Brummell, the Prime Minister immediately ordered the creation of a selection committee to scrutinise future offerings and ensure that they were more suited to the royal taste.
When Churchill eventually retired in 1955, long after he should have done, the Queen was genuinely sorry to see him go. He was a towering world figure, who had served her great-great grandmother Victoria as a young cavalry officer, and whom she had known well during her wartime teenage years. She accepted his invitation to a retirement dinner at 10 Downing Street, and awarded him the highest honour in her personal gift, the Order of the Garter.
Churchill’s retirement meant that the Queen could, if she wished, exercise the Royal Prerogative for the first time in her reign by choosing his successor. The outgoing Prime Minister claimed in his memoirs to have given her no advice on who should follow him, although she was entitled to ask for his recommendation, but the choice of the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, seemed so obvious to all within the Conservative Party that the Queen merely went with the flow.
