Yet there is one other counsellor who may mean more
to the Queen, in a slightly different field, than even the Prime Minister. From the moment of the King's death I have felt that hardly any question mattered so much as whether the Queen would appoint her father's Private Secretary, Sir Alan Lascelles, to be her own. There were quite plausible reasons against it. Sir Alan has reached an age when some men are glad to retire, and this would have been an obvious moment of transition. The Queen might have chosen to keep one of her own existing private secretaries at her right hand. She has not so chosen, and her decision is an early tribute to the sureness of her judgement. Sir Alan is the Queen's Private Secretary, and all the experience and suggestion and unobtrusive service that he gave to the late King will be at her command. It is hard to estimate the advantage that will be. Someone who knows Sir Alan well wrote to me of him a few months ago of his devotion to his future Queen. On the Queen's side there is plainly unquestioning trust, or the decision would not have been made and announced so quickly. She cannot, in fact, have hesitated.
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