Queen Consort pays her respects to her brother-in-law following his death aged 82

King Charles and the Queen Consort yesterday joined mourners in Dorset for the funeral of the Queen Consort’s brother in law, Simon Elliot, according to the Daily Mail. Simon Elliot, who was married to the Queen Consort’s younger sister Annabel, 74, for 50 years, was a businessman and landowner who died at the age of 82 after a long illness, the family announced on 8 March. 

Police cordoned off roads for the coffin to be driven through his home village of Stourpaine, Dorset, and mourners gathered at Holy Trinity Church for his funeral before heading to the White Horse Inn after the service. 

Sources told the Independent that Elliot was a man known for his quiet charisma: ‘He was beyond courageous in his last few months, his family and friends are devastated to lose a man whose middle name was loyalty. He was a fount of common sense and wisdom and it is a great sadness that he has gone so early.’ Elliot, whose father Sir William was an Air Chief Marshal of the RAF, also had business links in the Middle East. 

The Sun also reported that the Elliots were so close with the King and Queen Consort that they attended the then-Prince of Wales and his new wife’s honeymoon at Balmoral in 2005, with the Independent reporting that ‘staff laid the wedding-night table for four instead of two’. In 2021, he joined the then-Prince Charles, Duchess of Cornwall and the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge at the premiere of No Time To Die and last year he was among the mourners at Queen Elizabeth II’s State Funeral. 

The Queen consort’s sister, Annabel, is an interior designer and antiques dealer who studied fine art in Florence. She has been an interior designer many times for King Charles, including at his Dumfries House, and she opened an interior design shop in the village of Stourpaine. She married Elliot when she was 23, and they had three children together: Alice, Catherine and Ben Elliot – who was the former Tory Party chairman, but resigned after the announcement of Liz Truss as the UK’s Prime Minister in 2022.

It was at Annabel’s 40th birthday that Princess Diana confronted Camilla over her affair with Prince Charles, and at her 50th party at the Ritz that Camilla announced that she was Charles’ mistress, which was known as ‘Operation Ritz’. 

The news of Elliot’s death comes after Camilla’s cousin, Charles Villiers, was found dead after taking his own life in a hotel in Marylebone last August following a decade-long divorce. Camilla and Annabel’s brother, Mark Shand, died tragically in 2014 following a fall in New York. At the time, Tom Parker-Bowles, Camilla’s son, and Ben Elliot flew out to escort his body back to the UK.