King Charles Will Appoint an Official Biographer of Queen Elizabeth ‘In Fairly Short Order,’ Royal Biographer Says

The biographer chosen will likely have access to the late Queen’s diaries as they write about her life

is expected to appoint an official biographer soon to write the official biography of his mother, , royal biographer Robert Hardman said.

Speaking on an episode of , Hardman said that the biographer appointed will use Queen Elizabeth’s diaries as primary source material. The Queen kept a daily diary throughout her life as monarch, and in Hardman’s recently updated book Charles III: New King. New Court. The Inside Story, he revealed that the late Queen’s last entry was written just two days before she died in September 2022 — and contained just five words.

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While the public is unlikely to see the contents of Her late Majesty’s diary, the official biographer chosen will take that material and use it to “write the official life of the previous monarch,” Hardman said on the podcast.

“I’m not sure we will see them,” he said of the diaries themselves. “You know, we won’t be able to rummage through them ourselves. I very much doubt they’ll be published. But what will happen is, you know, in fairly short order — I would expect in the next year or two — the King to appoint an official biographer, because each monarch appoints an official biographer to write the official life of the previous monarch.”

Queen Elizabeth did the same when her father, King George VI, died on Feb. 6, 1952.

“Now, obviously, that hasn’t happened for a very long time,” Hardman continued. “The last time was after the death of George VI, when the Queen appointed John Wheeler-Bennett back in the early ‘50s to write the life of her father.”

Queen Elizabeth’s diaries — kept over the course of her history-making 70-year reign — were not places of deep introspection and reflection but instead a daily log of events, written down to likely not only help her remember what happened on any given day, but to also help the person she knew would one day write her official biography in the future as well as other historians covering her life and reign.

“I have no time to record conversations, only events,” Queen Elizabeth once told society diarist Kenneth Rose.

A former member of the royal household told back in 2019 that the Queen wrote in her diary with a fountain pen using black ink, and that each of her diaries was marked with her cypher and numbered with a Roman numeral.

The diaries were leatherbound, and writing in her diary was the last act of the day for Her Majesty every night “no matter how late the hour or how weary she may be,” the former member of the royal household said. “It is an unmissable duty, and she writes at a desk, never in bed.”

For his part, King Charles also keeps a journal, but “He doesn’t write great narrative diaries like he used to,” a senior courtier told Hardman for his updated book, which was released Nov. 7. Instead, he “scribbles down his recollections and reflections” at the end of every day.

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Elsewhere in the episode of A Right Royal Podcast, Hardman discussed royal funerals, including their respective codenames. Queen Elizabeth’s Sept. 19, 2022 funeral was codenamed Operation London Bridge, and plans had been in place for the event for at least 20 years before her death at age 96 on Sept. 8 of that year.

“The fact is, anything that’s going to involve thousands of troops, a large part of the police and all the other services, as well as all the broadcasters and media, requires a few plans,” Hardman said on the podcast.

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Members of the royal family’s funeral codenames all correspond with names of bridges, he said.

“So the , for example, was Operation Tay Bridge, and the Prince of Wales [now King Charles] was Operation Menai Bridge, Menai Bridge being the bridge between Anglesey and Wales. And so that process has resumed, as one might expect,” Hardman said of future plans for the King’s funeral.

“But it was quite interesting to discover that, actually, the designation for the monarch remains Operation London Bridge, and for the Prince of Wales is Operation Menai Bridge still,” Hardman added. “Whereas previously, for , it was Operation Clare Bridge, because Clare Bridge is a famous bridge in Cambridge, and he was the Duke of Cambridge.”