This week’s column is a little different. I want to put down the gossip, set aside the farmhouse dramas and the burner phones, and take a proper moment, Tuesday, 21 April, would have been Queen Elizabeth II’s 100th birthday. And as I sit here thinking about what to write, I find myself unexpectedly emotional, which I suppose is a testament to the kind of woman she was.
My fascination with the Queen began, as it often does with little girls, with the clothes. Those luminous blocks of colour – turquoise, primrose, coral chosen, I later learned, so that people in a crowd could spot her. The black handbag she carried absolutely everywhere, the sensible black pumps, the brooches that told stories to those who knew how to read them. But it deepened into something much more than that. My grandmother had commemorative plates and she recounted the story more than once about the day the Queen visited for the Sydney Opera House’s 50th anniversary in 1973, how she sat in the Botanic Gardens waiting for the queen to pass and what it meant to her to be there.
My grandfather, in boarding school in northern New South Wales, was given day leave so that he and his classmates could stand by the train track and wave as the royal train passed through their town. He never forgot it. Neither did I.
The Queen has always fascinated me, I often wonder: what makes her special? What does it feel like to be a real woman who is also a queen? This week she would have turned one hundred years old. And I find it genuinely wild that it has already been four years since she died at ninety-six.
It is difficult now, four years on, to fully articulate the scale of what the world lost when Queen Elizabeth II died at Balmoral on the eighth of September 2022.
For seventy years she had been a fixed point in the universe. Not a fixed point of politics, she was scrupulously, magnificently non-political but something more fundamental than that. A fixed point of steadiness. Of service. Of the quiet assurance that some things do not change, even as everything else does.
Most of us spend our entire lives searching for continuity in an unstable world. We anchor ourselves to family, to place, to tradition. And for the citizens of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth, and for many millions beyond it, Queen Elizabeth was one of those anchors. Not because she was glamorous, or because she was beloved, but because she was there. Every Christmas, without fail. Every moment of national grief or celebration. She was there for fourteen prime ministers, from Winston Churchill to Liz Truss. She was there through the Cold War, the Falklands, September 11, Brexit, and an unprecedented global pandemic. She met twelve sitting American presidents. She received diplomats from nearly every nation on earth. She sent a telegraph to the moon.
King Charles, filming his centenary tribute from the library at Balmoral said honestly “Much about the times we now live in, I suspect, may have troubled her deeply, but I take heart from her belief that goodness will always prevail and that a brighter dawn is never far from the horizon,” he said, before closing: “God bless you, darling Mama. You remain forever in our hearts and prayers.”
He is right about the troubling. Look at the world now in 2026 and try to imagine what it would have meant to have her here still, that clear-eyed steadiness, that unshakeable sense that duty and decency are not negotiable, that service is not a burden but a calling. The world feels her absence in ways that are difficult to name precisely.
In a century that she witnessed from birth to near its end, Elizabeth saw the world transformed almost beyond recognition. Colour television. The moon landing. The first email. She witnessed women gaining equal voting rights in her own country, a universal declaration of human rights, and her own annus horribilis in 1992 – the year three of her four children’s marriages collapsed, and Windsor Castle caught fire. Through it all, she endured. Never complain, never explain. She did not flinch.
She was fourteen years old when she first spoke to the nation – not yet the heir presumptive in anyone’s imagination, simply a young princess standing beside her sister at Windsor Castle on 13 October 1940. Princess Elizabeth’s first public speech was a radio address to the children of the Commonwealth, many of them living away from home due to war. In that crackling broadcast on the BBC’s Children’s Hour, she told them: “My sister Margaret Rose and I feel so much for you, as we know from experience what it means to be away from those we love most of all.” It was not a political speech. It was a fourteen-year-old girl speaking directly to the hearts of other children, and it was remarkable.
She also trained as a mechanic during the war, joining the Auxiliary Territorial Service in 1945 and learning to drive and maintain vehicles, insisting on doing her own work despite her royal status. It was among the first signs of what would define her entire reign: a determination to live a life of service to her people.
Eighty years later, during another national crisis, she returned to that same note. Her COVID-19 address in April 2020 echoed her wartime broadcast almost word for word and closed with words that stopped a nation: “We will meet again.” From a fourteen-year-old princess to a ninety-three-year-old queen, the impulse was the same. Comfort the people. Hold the line. Keep the promise.
Elizabeth was not born to be queen. She was born to be a princess, the eldest daughter of the Duke of York, a man who loved his family and never wanted the throne. The abdication of her uncle Edward VIII in December 1936 – for love of a divorced American woman – changed everything. Her father became King George VI, a quiet, devoted man who bore the weight of an unwanted crown with enormous grace. Elizabeth watched him do it, and she learned.
When George VI died on 6 February 1952, Elizabeth was twenty-five years old, on safari in Kenya with Philip. She came down from the treehouse at Treetops as a princess and went to bed as a queen. The coronation followed on 2 June 1953, the first ever to be televised, watched by an estimated twenty-seven million people in Britain alone and broadcast around the world. A young woman, crowned in Westminster Abbey, promising to serve for life.
She kept that promise for seventy years.
She fell in love with Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark at a naval college in Dartmouth in 1939, when she was thirteen and he was eighteen. She never really fell out of it. Their marriage of seventy-three years was, by all accounts, one of the great love stories of the twentieth century – imperfect, tested, and fundamentally unbreakable.
Philip was restless, occasionally difficult, endlessly entertaining, and completely without deference to the fact of her position. He called her “Lilibet.” He pushed for the monarchy to modernise. He gave up his own naval career, which he loved, to walk three steps behind his wife for the rest of his life and never publicly complained once. She described him as “my strength and stay.” He died in April 2021, fourteen months before her, and those who knew her well said she was never quite the same afterwards.
They had four children, eight grandchildren, and fourteen great-grandchildren. She was a mother who loved school runs and Christmas mornings and dogs and horses and the smell of the Scottish Highlands. She was also a head of state who never stopped working.
In April 2020, the world locked down, and the Queen sat alone in Windsor Castle with a skeleton staff while her ninety-eight-year-old husband shielded at Sandringham. She gave four national addresses during the pandemic and they were extraordinary. Calm, warm, resolute. “We will succeed, and that success will belong to every one of us.”
But it was the image at Philip’s funeral in July 2021 that undid many people entirely. By then, COVID restrictions allowed only thirty people inside St George’s Chapel. She sat alone in her pew, small and upright and absolutely composed, in black and white, a widow in a mask, saying goodbye in public the way she had always done everything in public, without complaint, and with complete dignity. It was heartbreaking. It was also, somehow, magnificent.
In her final summer, royal biographer Robert Hardman has revealed, she wanted one thing above all else: for all her great-grandchildren to come to Balmoral, so they would each have “a really happy memory” of her. All twelve of them. Including Archie and Lilibet, even if their parents could not make it.
That detail tells you everything you need to know about the woman behind the crown.
She was the heart of the family. The gravitational centre around which the rest of it orbited. The traditions she maintained, Christmas at Sandringham, summers at Balmoral, the annual trek to the Highland Games were not mere custom. They were the architecture of belonging. When she died, the family lost not just a matriarch but the structure she had spent a lifetime building around them. The slimmed-down monarchy that is coming may well be the right shape for the future, but I hold a special reverence for the era of Queen Elizabeth, for her insistence on including the wider family, on making sure everyone had a role and a place and felt the warmth of belonging. It was a vision of family that was expansive and generous, and the world was richer for it.
On Monday 20 April, King Charles and Queen Camilla visited the Queen Elizabeth II: Her Life in Style exhibition at The King’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace, the largest ever display of Her Majesty’s fashion, featuring over three hundred garments and accessories across all ten decades of her life, nearly half of them never before shown publicly. If you love her as I do, put it on your list for the next time you find yourself in London. It runs until October 2026 and promises to be extraordinary.
On the birthday itself, Princess Anne opened the Queen Elizabeth II Garden in Regent’s Park, a calm, accessible space for reflection in central London. The royal family gathered at the British Museum to view designs for the permanent Queen Elizabeth Memorial, including a statue of the Queen in a new civic space near the Mall. In the evening, Charles hosted a reception at Buckingham Palace, where representatives from the organisations the Queen had served as patron were joined by a group of very special guests: British citizens also celebrating their 100th birthdays on the 21st of April. It was the sort of detail the Queen herself would have loved.
Charles said his mother “shaped the world around her and touched the lives of countless people,” noting that she had shared her belief that “goodness will always prevail and that a brighter dawn is never far from the horizon.”
A life spent in service to others, given freely and without reservation. The steady, unbreakable promise she made as a young woman and never once broke. ‘I declare before you all that my whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong’ We are lucky to have lived in her time. I am grateful, every time I think of my grandmother’s commemorative plates and my grandfather waving at a passing train, that she was as real to the people who loved her from a distance as she was to the heads of state who shook her hand.
Happy birthday, Your Majesty.
Until next week, keep the tea piping hot and your tiaras polished, for her.