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Royal expert Hugo Vickers met the late queen over 40 times and he joins us in the studio to talk

about his new biography of her. What was her marriage to Prince Philip really like? What's the

truth behind giving Andrew that money to settle with Virginia Gifrey?

And why did the Queen suspect the Sussexes were miced up on one visit to see her?

Hugo lifts the lid on life behind Palace Gates during the reign of Elizabeth II.

Welcome to The Daily Tea with me, Camilla Tomini, and me Tim Stanley.

We have in the Daily Tea studio today, Hugo Vickers, author extraordinaire, royal expert. You've written many, many books.

This enormous tome, Queen Elizabeth II, a personal history, I assume Hugo is the culmination

of many, many years' work. Yes, I sort of claim of 60 years of work because I started very early.

I mean, the Queen, my mother took me to see the Queen and the Shara of Persia in the

state procession in the Mall in 1959 and I enjoyed it so much that I insisted on being

taken out of school to see General de Gaulle the following year.

What was interesting about his ride up the Mall was at a certain point he suddenly stood up and saluted his old office for Carlton Gardens where he'd been during the war. And so years later, the Queen came to unveil a walkway panel in the mall and I asked her whether my memory was right and she said, yes, with me very much, but trying to persuade him not to. Really? Because as you can imagine, the thought of an enormous general standing up in an open carriage was the last thing you wanted. Yes, of course. You might fall out. Tim, you were thumbing through some of the photographs. Yes. I was just looking through some of the photos in the book, you younger in 1979 with the Queen, at a children's party. This is based upon your private diaries, I believe. Well, quite a lot, yes, because what I found was that, thank goodness, when I first started being a writer and I was writing a book about a woman called Gladestique and Duchess of Marlborough, a lot of people told me things which were fascinating but didn't really, they weren't relevant to the book. So I started keeping a diary and I kept writing things in. Thank thank goodness I did because I don't know about you, we all forget so much. Oh, yes. And so there's a lot of conversations with people who knew the Queen and indeed the Queen herself sometimes and other members of the Royal Family all went into the diaries. And so one of the sources was my own diary and you met her on over 40 occasions

yes and saw her of course many many more times than that but the first time i met her was in

st george's chapel when i was a school guide there in 1968 when she came to look at the little

tomb house being built where they're now all buried and um she just came around the corner with Prince Edward held

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