From Diana to Megxit, a new biography reveals how the Queen kept her cool

Oh no, not another 700-page tome on the Queen, you groan. Surely there is nothing new to add. Well, it turns out that Robert Hardman has plenty of things to say in this latest iteration of the Queen’s life, which hits the shops in good time for the Platinum Jubilee festivities.

Most biographies of Elizabeth II follow the “Crown in Crisis” narrative, which frames the Queen as lurching from one disaster to another, and portrays her reign as one of managed decline. The TV series The Crown is an outstanding example of this story of catastrophes – and Hardman is having none of it. He maintains that, for most of the so-called crises of her reign, the Queen remained firmly in control.

Hardman briskly dismisses the suggestion that the Queen neglected her children Charles and Anne when small. As for the affair of Princess Margaret and Peter Townsend, Hardman claims that the story of “star-crossed lovers” was a myth invented by Princess Margaret after the event. In fact, Margaret herself made the decision not to marry Townsend, and the Queen supported her throughout. As for Lord Altrincham’s magazine article criticising the Queen, whom he described as a “priggish schoolgirl”, Hardman considers that its impact has been wildly exaggerated.

Hardman calls the first decade of Elizabeth’s era the “unfinished reign” of George VI, when the old guard of the previous Household remained in charge. By the late 1960s, the old men had gone. The Queen was firmly installed, and she embarked on a programme of modernisation.

The decision to make the 1969 fly-on-the-wall ITV documentary Royal Family, which showed the royals off-duty, is usually seen as a mistake because it seemed to license invasion of the family’s privacy. According to Hardman, however, the Household “thought the complete opposite”, as the film made the royals more popular than ever.

Prince Charles’s investiture at Carnarvon was a modern take on royal ceremonial designed by Snowdon, but it became a target for terrorist Welsh nationalists, and Prince Charles was lucky to escape a bomb. Hardman reveals how shattering this was for the Queen. For the first time she cancelled her engagements and came close to breakdown.

The real crisis for the monarchy came in 1992, when the very public breakup of the marriage of Charles and Diana combined with widespread criticism of the Queen for not paying taxes to create her “annus horribilis”. The Queen remained impressively calm throughout. Her aides found it “immensely reassuring” to work for someone “who isn’t knocked back – never short, never irritable, completely steady”.

So unpopular did the monarchy become that, in 1995, on the 50th anniversary of VE Day, the Queen worried that only a threadbare crowd would attend the celebrations at Buckingham Palace. On the day, however, the vast crowd of well-wishers was even larger than it had been in 1945. “That’s when I realised what a strong institution the monarchy is,” said Lord Cranborne, the minister in charge of the party.

The book shows that the events following the tragic death of Diana have been misrepresented. Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell got the credit for prodding a blinkered monarch to do the right thing. But in fact, at Balmoral, the Queen was working on a plan of action, and in London Royal Household officials remained in the driving seat, and the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Airlie, was busy organising the funeral.

There are plenty of good stories. Who knew that Thelma Holland, who did the Queen’s makeup for her Coronation, was the daughter-in-law of Oscar Wilde? There’s an anecdote about the sharp-eyed Queen inspecting film footage of Queen Victoria at one of her Jubilees. “That’s interesting,” she remarked after a pause. “They had eight horses on the landau.” Or a glimpse of the Queen on a Pacific cruise in the 1970s helping one of her equerries to dress up as a Polynesian beauty. The Queen was kneeling on the floor, and “he was stripped to the waist and she was fitting a brassiere on him.”

Hardman takes the story right up to today and the Platinum Jubilee. The later parts of the book, which are dependent on interviews, will be invaluable to historians. By the second decade of the 21st century, the Queen had become the focal point of a revival of monarchy, driven by the two princes William and Harry. As ever, however, the danger came from within, in this case the war between the Sussexes and the Cambridges. The Queen acted with characteristic decisiveness over the Sussexes, insisting that they must choose to be either “in or out”.

The Queen emerges as remarkably robust, even today. One aide remarked there was no danger of her going to pieces over Philip’s death. “She is much stronger than that.” The head of state who appeared on film with James Bond at the 2012 Olympics is still able to adapt to change, as shown by her new-found enthusiasm for Zoom. Hardman’s exhaustive and endlessly enthusiastic biography paints a vivid picture of a phenomenal sovereign.

Robert Hardman's Queen of Our Times is published by Macmillan at ￡20. To order your copy for ￡16.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books

Jane Ridley’s latest book is George V: Never a Dull Moment (Chatto & Windus, ￡30)