Sarah Vine’s Windsor knot

“I can’t help feeling that there is something a little distasteful about the Remain campaign trying to ‘own’ the late Queen, even at a distance of almost a decade,” fumed Sarah Vine in her Daily Mail column this week. “We know they’ve never truly accepted the result of the referendum, and this feels like just another attempt to undermine it.”

There is so much to unpack in the reaction of the Mail’s hater-in-chief to a new book about the monarchy, which revealed that the late Queen Elizabeth II favoured staying in the EU. According to Power and the Palace, by the royal correspondent Valentine Low, she told a senior minister in the spring of 2016 that “we shouldn’t leave the EU” and “it’s better to stick with the devil you know”.

There’s the dig at not accepting the result of a vote, when the Mail, more so even than the Telegraph, still appears to view the existence of a Labour government as illegitimate, as if it came to power last year in a blood-sodden coup, rather than as the result of a democratic landslide.

There’s Vine referring to anything as “distasteful” given that she has devoted much of this year to hawking a tawdry tell-all memoir, bemoaning her loss of the Camerons’ friendship to a string of interviewers, while simultaneously flogging a book detailing in depth how awful they were.

And there’s the fact that there’s nothing on the record to suggest Vine had any misgivings about trying to “own” the Queen in March 2016 when the Sun splashed with the headline “QUEEN BACKS BREXIT” over the story of an unlikely “alleged bust-up” with deputy prime minister Nick Clegg. The story claimed the monarch left onlookers “in no doubt about her views on Europe”. If Vine did object to that story at the time, she could have complained to the man widely thought to have leaked it to the Sun – none other than the justice secretary Michael Gove, her then-husband.

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“One area that neither side ever deliberately sought to weaponise was the monarchy, and specifically the late Queen,” she wrote this week, somewhat forgetfully.

But all that apart, is it really all that surprising that the late Queen might have misgivings about leaving the European Union? Her own familial heritage aside, her views were almost certainly internationalist, born less than a decade after the First World War and then seeing as her father, George VI, dedicated himself both to defeating the Nazis in the second then rebuilding peace in Europe. She would enjoy a deep and enduring friendship with Winston Churchill, who first proposed a United States of Europe.

And what monarch wants to see constitutional upheaval? The Queen, we know, was opposed to Scottish independence, whispering to a well-wisher outside a church service shortly before the vote “I hope people will think very carefully about the future”, before, supposedly, “purring” down the line to David Cameron upon hearing the result. We can even reasonably suspect she was sceptical about devolution itself, given that at the opening of the then Welsh Assembly in 1999 she bore the expression of a couple from Stafford who’d hit the 101 on Bullseye only to discover they’d won the speedboat.

Perhaps, above all, she’d foresee the constitutional chaos she’d be dragged into. A woman with the statecraft of a thousand David Davises, is it unlikely the Queen foresaw what would follow a yes vote in a referendum with existential ramifications, but in which the pro side had never set out how they intended to achieve their stated intentions?

Maybe she even anticipated a scenario in which, faced with parliamentary deadlock, a charlatan of a prime minister hoodwinked her into prorogation. That, of course, was a particularly distasteful form of deliberately weaponising the monarchy, and also something Sarah Vine doesn’t appear to have had anything to say about at the time.