The Queen Mother's politics were entirely conventional and predictable, given her age, class and background. She distrusted Churchill at first — not least because of his support for Edward VIII during the Abdication Crisis — but came to admire him during 1940. She thought Clement Attlee "wouldn't strike one as a star, but he was a practical little man". She despised Harold Wilson's "mismanagement of the Rhodesian question", but Shawcross does not pronounce on Ian Smith's (I suspect true) claim that she sent him supportive private messages at the time of the Lancaster House talks. She liked Jim Callaghan, but adored Margaret Thatcher, giving her a brooch. The Liberal Democrats were a bête noire.
On one of the very few occasions when the Queen Mother had any significant direct input into great political events, she and the King, Shawcross rightly asserts, made a bad mistake: taking the Conservative Neville Chamberlain out on to the balcony of Buckingham Palace to celebrate the Munich Agreement — despite this being the subject of a vote in the Commons and opposed by both the Labour and Liberal parties — was constitutionally wrong. But her superb work in maintaining morale during the war, especially during the Blitz, revealed a pure genius for public relations.
The Queen Mother was certainly at the heart of events. She sat in on Churchill's audiences with her husband, something that Prince Philip was not allowed to do after the Queen's accession in 1952. Shawcross speculates that she might even have known about the Ultra decrypts. After the King's death, she realised how "very much I am cut off from ‘inside' information".
Her strength of character was evident on several occasions during the war. It is not generally known that in February 1941 a mentally disturbed military deserter jumped out at her from behind some curtains in her room at Windsor Castle, grabbing her by her ankles. "For a moment my heart stood absolutely still," she later said, and she knew that if she screamed she might well be assaulted. So she said: "Tell me about it," and listened to him reciting his troubles — his family had been killed in the Blitz — as she moved calmly and quietly across the room to ring for assistance.
During the V-1 "doodlebug" bomb attacks on London of 1944, she wrote a letter to her eldest daughter, Princess Elizabeth, "in case I get ‘done in' by the Germans!" explaining how she wanted her effects divided. It ended with the words: "Let's hope this won't be needed, but I know you will always do the right thing, & remember to keep your temper & your word & be loving." Perhaps the Queen Mother's greatest legacy was to have brought up a monarch who has lived her life precisely by those precepts.
