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Mike Tindall recognizes he’s lucky to have spent time with Queen Elizabeth before she passed. While he knows he’s fortunate, the former rugby player—who married the late monarch’s eldest granddaughter Zara Tindall in 2011—also has regrets. During a special episode of The Good, The Bad & The Rugby, Mike confessed, “I have loads of regrets about not asking her so many more things.”
“Having nervousness when you sit down to talk, you get that lucky seat of being sat next to her,” he continued.
Asked what he would ask the Queen now if he could, Mike replied, “Just going back through history and everything that she’s possibly seen. Obviously, 15 prime ministers. I don’t know how many Presidents it is, but to go through everything. You know, when she’s meeting dictators she has to stay neutral. She has to just perform her duty.”
Mike admitted that he was “sort of starting to get to that point” of asking the Queen, but he “hadn’t barreled in.” Princess Anne’s son-in-law said, “Once you sit there, it’s not that easy to just barrel into.” Though he did reveal that he asked the Queen about Donald Trump.
The Queen passed away on Sept. 8 in Balmoral. Mike attended Her Majesty’s state funeral on Sept. 19 with his wife Zara, as well as the Committal Service at St. George’s Chapel. On the podcast, Mike said it was “amazing” to see the “family come so close together overnight.”
“You never predict it. Obviously a 96 year old lady, you know at some point it’s gonna happen, but you’re never ready for when it does,” Mike added. “I’m not even a direct sort of family member in terms of blood, but watching what my wife, what Zara had to go through, obviously she loved the Queen beyond everything else. Their connection with horses, the same with the Princess Royal. They had a real sort of bond around that.”