According to the report, the 96-year-old monarch will return to Buckingham Palace from Balmoral for 10 minutes so that the nomination process is not delayed. The UK’s new prime minister will be determined on September 5, it was recently announced.
Richard Eden wrote for MailOnline: “Conservative luminary Sir Graham Brady said the new party leader would be announced on Monday, September 5.
“But the Queen will be on her Scottish retreat then, Balmoral.
“It means the Tory leader would have to travel to Aberdeenshire Castle to meet the monarch for the first time and be formally asked to form a government.
“This meeting, or ‘audience’, is known as ‘kissing hands’. After their appointment, the new Prime Minister will go straight to 10 Downing Street.
“But it is more likely that the Queen would return from Balmoral to Buckingham Palace or Windsor, so the process of entering Downing Street was not delayed.”
A royal source told Eden: “The Queen’s circumstances don’t seem to have been thought through.
“Do the politicians seriously expect a 96-year-old woman to travel 800 miles in front of a ten-minute audience?”
The Prime Minister is said to have called the Queen as a courtesy as he prepared to tell the nation he was stepping down, although Buckingham Palace declined to comment.
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After he steps down, she will say who she invited to become prime minister to replace him.
That person then goes to the Queen to accept the invitation — appointing a prime minister is “one of the sovereign’s few remaining personal prerogatives,” experts say.
A Prime Minister’s retiring audience has traditionally always taken place at Buckingham Palace, but the Queen’s age and lingering mobility issues and suggestions that Mr Johnson will remain in the role until the fall could potentially see the audience taking place at Balmoral Castle for which could be the first time in recent history.
The Queen travels to her private home in the Scottish Highlands every summer for her annual vacation, usually until October.
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