“QUEEN BACKS BREXIT” ran a striking headline across the front page of the Sun on March 6, 2016, three months ahead of the UK’s referendum.
The article, by then political editor Tom Newton Dunn, claimed that the late monarch had been “hailed as a backer of Brexit” following an unlikely “alleged bust-up” with deputy prime minister Nick Clegg in which she left onlookers “in no doubt about her views on Europe”. The article led to a complaint to the Independent Press Standards Organisation which ruled that the headline was “significantly misleading”.
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The story is widely believed to have been given to the Sun by then justice secretary and prominent Brexiteer Michael Gove. Clegg himself told a documentary later that year that “Michael Gove obviously communicated it – well, I know he did”. Gove has never actually formally denied it, only saying disingenuously: “I don’t know how the Sun got all its information”.
Now we know the Queen believed in staying in the EU, at least according to a new book, Power and the Palace, by the royal correspondent Valentine Low. According to the book, serialised in the Times at the weekend, 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”.
And what became of the protagonists behind the original Sun story? Gove is now the editor of the Spectator. And Tony Gallagher, the editor of the Sun who ran the original story and, even after being forced to publish a retraction still insisted “you’re asking me if I accept we made a mistake – in all conscience I don’t”? He’s now the editor of the Times, the paper that ran the extracts at the weekend under the huge front-page strapline “The Queen was a remainer”.
