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The Queen held a virtual visit with employees and partners at KPMG, an accountancy firm, to mark its 150th anniversary. During the chat the monarch spoke with several partners of the firm, but she was left red-faced when a technical glitch occurred.
During a conversation with John McCalla-Leacy, the firm’s first black board member, the connection at Windsor Castle went down for a few moments.
The Queen’s picture vanished from the video chat and she made a passing joke when she returned to the call.
She said with a smile: “You just disappeared, all of you.”
The monarch then told Mr McCalla-Leacy he was talking about the pandemic when the connection was lost.
The Queen experienced a work from home nightmare when on a video call with KPMG earlier this week (Image: Buckingham Palace)
He then went on to explain the impact of the pandemic on the firm and the effect of this summer’s Black Lives Matters protest.
The board member then discussed the killing of George Floyd, a black man who was killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis, the US.
The KPMG partner, who spearheaded the firm’s work to improve inclusion and diversity and support black heritage colleagues, told the Queen: “This year was really an incredibly difficult year for us within the firm, within KPMG because not only did we have to adapt to the many challenges that the pandemic brought.
“We also witnessed, like everybody around the world, that just deeply, deeply distressing scenes and the event unfold which ignited the Black Lives Matter campaign right across the world but also here in the UK.”
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The Queen held a virtual visit with employees and partners at KPMG (Image: PA)
He said KPMG was already a member of a number of equality initiatives and the firm had committed itself to an externally published Black Lives Action Plan.
Mr McCalla-Leacy, a former international white-water canoe slalom competitor who was supported by the Prince’s Trust early in his sporting career, ended the chat by asking the Queen to pass on his thanks to her son, Prince Charles, who founded the Trust.
He said: “Receiving the support that I did, and when I did, changed my life and I will never forget this.”
The Queen replied: “I’ll indeed pass it on to my son, who is very proud of the idea of the Prince’s Trust, which I think has helped a lot of people.”
The Queen hosted the video call from Windsor Castle (Image: Getty)
The Prince of Wales founded The Prince’s Trust in 1976 to help vulnerable young people get their lives on track.
It supports 11-30 year-olds who are unemployed and those struggling at school and at risk of exclusion.
At the end of the virtual visit, the Queen told the group: “Very nice to hear about KPMG’s 150th, it sounds as though it’s all going very well, in spite of all the difficulties.
“It is difficult when people are used to being so close to each other and, and it’s been – you know – everybody’s been divided up so much.”
British line to the throne (Image: Express)
KPMG was founded in 1870, when the firm’s namesake, Sir William Barclay Peat, joined the business.
David McIntosh, who joined KPMG as an apprentice in 2017, told the Queen his father was a Falklands veteran who served with the Scots Guard and also guarded Buckingham Palace in the 1980s.
He said: “So meeting with you today, brings me very full circle, I’m so very proud of him and I’m sure he’s so proud of me today.”
Speaking about the benefits of video calls, the head of state replied: “Well thank goodness for technology, so one can still do this.”
The video called ended with KPMG’s choir wearing Christmas jumpers, hates and reindeer antler headbands performed We Wish You A Merry Christmas for the Queen.
