Royal Ascot in person, the late monarch was still a presence at her favourite course during the biggest week of its year. “Even though she wasn’t here last year, she was still at Windsor Castle and watching the whole affair,” Nick Smith, Ascot’s director of racing and public affairs, said this past week. “She did still feel very much part of the event.”
The Royal meeting was often said to be the first – and most sacrosanct – engagement in the former Queen’s private diary each year, and she did not miss a single day at Royal Ascot during her long reign until Covid sent the meeting behind closed doors in 2020.
Even in 2017, when Theresa May rather thoughtlessly engineered a clash between the state opening of parliament and the Prince of Wales’s Stakes, commandeering the horses for the royal procession in the process, Queen Elizabeth II rattled through her speech like an auctioneer with a plane to catch and still got to Ascot in plenty of time for the opener.
