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.