Back in 2016 as the UK was poised to vote on whether or not to leave the European Union, The Sun newspaper published an explosive front page. The headline “Queen Backs Brexit” sent shockwaves through the news agenda, sparking a rare official complaint from Buckingham Palace to the press regulator and a public statement that the Queen remained “politically neutral.”
However, a new book by royal journalist Valentine Low has now claimed that in fact the Queen did privately hold views on the matter and they were the opposite to The Sun’s headline. “Now, years after that headline, evidence of what the Queen really thought about Brexit can be revealed,” he wrote in The Times’s serialization of his book, Power and the Palace. “A senior minister who spoke to her in the early spring of 2016, three months before the referendum, recalls that she said, ‘We shouldn’t leave the EU.’ They discussed the referendum, and she said, ‘It’s better to stick with the devil you know’…it is now clear: if the Queen had had a vote, she would have voted Remain.”
The Queen of course did not have a vote because she was constitutionally bound to be politically neutral. While her ability to perform this role successfully in public was one of the things that characterized her reign, Low highlights in his book that she “had opinions on all sorts of subjects; it was just that she chose not to share them. Or, more accurately, she did sometimes share them, but those who heard were usually too discreet to repeat them.”
Said to be based on nearly 100 interviews with “senior politicians, top civil servants, royal aides and constitutional experts,” Power and the Palace follows Low’s first book, Courtiers, in which he lifted the lid on some of the fallout when Harry and Meghan stepped back as working royals.
Town & Country Contributing Editor Victoria Murphy has reported on the British Royal Family since 2010. She has interviewed Prince Harry and has travelled the world covering several royal tours. She is a frequent contributor to Good Morning America. Victoria authored Town & Country book The Queen: A Life in Pictures, released in 2021.