Seniors courtiers talk of 'disappointment' in Tony Blair at Buckingham Palace
by Tim Walker , The Telegraph, 03 Sep 2010
If anyone was more dismayed than Gordon Brown by Tony Blair's shameless volume of memoirs, it was the Queen. Senior courtiers tell Mandrake that there is a "profound sense of disappointment" in him at Buckingham Palace for betraying Her Majesty's trust by revealing sensitive details of private conversations he had with her when he was the prime minister.
"Her Majesty has to be able to talk to her chief minister in confidence, without any sense of trepidation that her words might some day be retailed in a cheap and cheerful volume of memoirs," one courtier tells me. "No prime minister before has ever done this and we can only hope that it will never happen again."
Among other indiscretions in A Journey, Blair tells of a chat he had with the Queen at Balmoral after the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, in which he claimed Her Majesty had told him that lessons had to be learnt from the way things had been handled after her death. He claims that at their first meeting, the Queen had told him: "You are my tenth prime minister. The first was Winston. That was before you were born." In a remarkable example of lèse majesté, Blair writes, too, of how the Queen occasionally exhibited "hauteur" towards him.
The rest at The Telegraph.
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