On a Silver Salver Plate, Please

Queen Helen Mirren has told GQ magazine she used cocaine during the 1980s but stopped when the former Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie was found to be making money from the class-A drug.

‘I loved coke,’ she told interviewer Piers Morgan. ‘I never did a lot, just a little bit at parties. But what ended it for me was when they caught Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyons, in the early Eighties. He was hiding in South America and living off the proceeds of being a cocaine baron.’

‘I read that in the paper, and all the cards fell into place and I saw how my little sniff of cocaine at a party had an absolute direct route to this horrible man in South America.’

Here are some of Dame Helen's recent holiday snaps...