King Charles III has paid tribute to his late mother, Queen Elizabeth II, as he attended the Highland Games today – an event that was a firm favourite of the monarch.

The King represented the Royal Family at the event alongside his wife Queen Camilla – the first since the Queen Elizabeth’s death.

The King and Queen were joined by Anne, Princess Royal, and her husband Sir Timothy Laurence, as the royal siblings sat next to each other and shared a giggle.

The Braemar Gathering – the most famous of the Highland Games – was a particular favourite of the late Queen Elizabeth, who rarely missed the spectacle which takes place in September each year near Balmoral Castle, Aberdeenshire.

It comes a year after the late Queen was forced to miss the event – prompting the initial grave concerns for her health, and less than a week before her passing.

Prince Charles would often accompany the monarch at the gathering which has existed in some form for 900 years – and its most modern form stretching’s back nearly 200 years.

Then the Prince of Wales, Charles still attended the event last year despite officials saying at the time that the the decision was made that the late Queen wound not be there ‘for her comfort’.

The festival is known to attract visitors from all over the world and frequently featurs competitors from Scotland, England, Australia and America. 

Various events throughout the day include traditional Scottish games, including caber-tossing and tug-of-war, and take place at the Princess Royal and Duke of Fife Memorial Park in Braemar.

The Braemar Gathering is the most famous of the Highland Games and is known worldwide. Each year thousands of visitors descend on this small Scottish village on the first Saturday in September to watch one of the more colourful Scottish traditions.

The King wore a kilt to the games, donning the newly created King Charles III tartan, while Camilla wore an outfit by Mr Roy.

‘The green, blue and red tartan was designed by The Scottish Tartans Authority earlier this year to mark the occasion of the coronation and in recognition of His Majesty’s strong support in preserving the culture and traditions of highland dress and Scottish tartans,’ the Scottish Tartans Authority said of the tartan.

‘The unique design presented to His Majesty, is based on the Balmoral tartan sett which dates from c.1850 and continues to be worn by the King and members of the royal family today.

‘The new tartan has been officially registered with the Scottish register of tartans which is administered by the National Records of Scotland.

‘The cloth, woven in 100% Scottish wool by Lochcarron of Scotland in Selkirk, includes a central triple stripe motif (one broad and two narrow) which is a feature of royal tartans previously worn by His Majesty including the Duke of Rothesay, Duke of Rothesay Hunting and Lord of the Isles Hunting tartans.

‘The colours have been matched to the natural dyes of 18th century tartan specimens in the collection of the Scottish Tartans Authority.’

The Royal family originally started attending the games in the in the mid-1800s when Queen Victoria and Prince Albert purchased the castle.

It comes almost a year to the day after the late Queen Elizabeth was forced to miss the event over her ailing health and mobility issues. She would pass away some days later.

Attending in place of his mother last year, the then Price Charles officially opened The Queen Elizabeth Platinum Jubilee Archway during the festival before presenting awards to the top-performing competitors as the events across the day.

The Archway was opened last year to commemorate the Queen’s historic 70 years on the throne in recognition of Her Majesty as a patron of the world-famous event.

While she could not attended in person last year, the late Queen was able to watch from the comfort of Balmoral as the events were streamed online.

Book of the week

The Last Secret of the Secret Annex 

by Joop van Wijk-Voskuijl and Jeroen De Bruyn (S&S £20, 288pp)

When SS officer Karl Silberbauer and his two Dutch Nazi henchmen marched into the warehouse of Opekta Ltd in Amsterdam on August 4, 1944, and shouted, ‘Where are the Jews’?, 25-year-old Bep Voskuijl knew the game was up.

As she watched those men pulling out the movable bookcase and walking up the staircase hidden behind it, to round up Anne Frank and the seven other terrified Jews in the secret annexe, Bep fell to her knees and prayed.

Every day for 760 days, working as a secretary in Otto Frank’s warehouse, Bep, along with her colleague Miep Gies and a tiny number of trusted helpers, had kept the annexe a total secret. 

The only other person in Bep’s family who knew about it was her father, who’d also worked at Opteka until he had to leave due to cancer. It was he who’d built that bookcase to hide what would become known as ‘the helpers’ staircase’.

With great bravery, aware of reprisals meted out to anyone discovered aiding or hiding Jews, Bep had helped the Frank family and their co-hiders for more than two years, sourcing and bringing them food, and keeping them cheerful.

Bep and the teenage Anne had become particularly fond of each other. Once, Anne had begged Bep to stay for a sleepover in the annexe, which Bep did, squeezing onto the strip of floor next to Anne’s bed.

The shock of that August morning was terrible. Of the eight hiding in the annexe, only one, Otto, would survive the ensuing horrors of forced slave labour, Auschwitz and — for Anne and her sister Margot — starvation and typhus at Bergen-Belsen.

Bep and Miep entered the deserted Annex a few days after the family had gone. It still smelled of the boiled kidney beans they’d had for breakfast on their final morning and the table was laid for mid-morning coffee. 

That glimpse brings home the suddenness of the catastrophe which befell them just before elevenses on the 761st day.

The story of Anne’s diary, and other loose sheets of paper covered in her handwriting, being discovered on the floor of the ransacked annexe by Miep and Bep, and Miep keeping it all safe until Otto returned in 1945, is well-known. 

In this compelling new book, Bep’s son, Joop van Wijk-Voskuijl, with the help of fellow-sleuth Jeroen De Bruyn, tells the much less-well-known story of Joop’s deeply troubled and haunted mother.

The secret annexe was a taboo subject in his family while he was growing up after the war— and he wonders why. 

Shouldn’t Bep, his heroic mother, have welcomed the halo and semi-celebrity of having been someone who had helped the Frank family during those dark years of Nazi occupation, even though the end was tragic for those people?

Instead, he writes: ‘If my mother started even thinking about the secret annexe, she would get a migraine, slip into a depression and spend much of the next day in bed.’

Was this due to a guilty conscience? Was she nursing a secret she couldn’t bring herself to divulge?

‘Who betrayed Anne Frank?’ is an abiding mystery of the Holocaust. Last year, Canadian journalist Rosemary Sullivan concluded, at the end of a long ‘cold case’ investigation, that the betrayer was a Jewish notary, Arnold van den Bergh, who’d told on the Franks to save his own family.

Scholars were quick to tear apart her theory. Joop is careful here not to come to any certain conclusion, or to claim to be ‘cracking’ a ‘cold case’. We may never know the truth, he writes.

His mother Bep was the eldest of seven siblings in an impoverished and unhappy family. One of her younger sisters, Nelly (born in 1923), was a keen Nazi.

Early in the war years, Joop’s Aunt Nelly took a job as a servant for a wealthy family who entertained German officers, and she fell in love with a Nazi called Siegfried. 

She followed him back to Austria, found out he was secretly engaged to another woman and returned heartbroken to Amsterdam — but, importantly, her return was after the raid on the secret annexe. At least, that was what Joop had always been led to believe.

Then, writes Joop, in March 2010, ‘everything changed’ and ‘the scales fell from my eyes’.

Jeroen had come across a typescript of some lengthy, never-before-published passages from Anne’s diary, in which she mentioned Nelly as Bep’s sister, who ‘probably kept a photo of the Fuhrer in her wallet’. 

It turned out that Nelly had, in fact, returned to Amsterdam in May 1944, three months before the betrayal.

Joop and Jeroen then visited an old man called Bertus, who’d been Bep’s fiance during the war years. Bertus recalled a row at the Voskuijl dinner table, when Nelly had stormed out of the room after yelling at Bep: ‘Just go to your Jews!’

So Nelly suspected the truth. She was jealous of the bond between Bep and their father, Johan, who liked to chat quietly together in a separate room most evenings.

Nelly guessed they were keeping a secret from her. So, was it she who informed on the hidden Jews as a form of revenge? Silberbauer did mention, when he was eventually tracked down by Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal and questioned in 1963, that he’d been told that the informant on the telephone ‘had had the voice of a young woman’.

And why was Bep spared the ordeal of interrogation by the Nazis after the raid? Gies was subjected to harsh interrogation, and the other two helpers, Victor Kugler and Jo Kleiman, were arrested and imprisoned for helping the Franks.

Could it be that Nelly had betrayed the Jews to the police on the condition they did not arrest or interrogate her sister Bep?

Another sister, Diny, recalled that, on the evening after the raid, their father kicked and hit Nelly, violently beating her over the head.

Three times, over the decades, Joop dared to ask his Aunt Nelly what exactly had happened to her during the war. Her eyes fluttered, he writes. She nearly fainted; once, she actually had a seizure. ‘I’ve never been the same since Father kicked me over the head,’ she said.

She went on to live a normal life, working as a cinema usher and a church sexton. She died in 2001 after falling down the stairs.

Bep was a deeply unhappy woman for the rest of her life, and it was not easy to be her son. She married a drunken, unkind man. 

Once, Joop came home to find Bep in the bathroom having taken an overdose, and saved her life. She swore him to secrecy. She and her husband went on to have one last child, named Anne, after Anne Frank.

One day in 1960, when pregnant with Anne, Bep quietly told her younger sister: ‘Rumour has it that Nelly is the betrayer. As a matter of fact, we think it is true, but things should be proven first.’

Until that proof comes, we can only use conjecture. But that cinema usher may well have been guilty of one of the Holocaust’s darkest secrets.

An inspiring, real-life story about a couple who had a pivotal role in helping Anne Frank hide from the Nazis has received a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes.

Dutch couple Miep and Jan Gies helped the young German diarist and her Jewish family hide during the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam.

Now, their story has been re-told as a National Geographic Disney+ limited series starring British actors Bel Powley andJoe Cole as Miep and Jan Gies.  

While Anne Frank’s tragic story is world famous, epitomising the terror of Hitler’s genocidal regime, less is known about the experience of the heroic Gies while they risked their own lives by hiding the Franks.

The eight-episode series titled A Small Light, tells Anne Frank’s story from ‘the other side of the bookcase’. 

The synopsis, as per Disney+, reads: ‘Based on a true story, A Small Light follows Miep Gies, a young, carefree secretrary who hid Otto Frank and his family from the Nazis in WWII.

‘For nearly two years, Miep and her husband Jan protected the Franks and others while she held down a day job, kept her marriage intact and shouldered more responsibility than anyone could imagine.

‘While millions are familiar with Anne Frank’s diary and her family’s life in the Secret Annex, A Small Light is the lesser-known story of how an ordinary secretary showed extraordinary courage during one of the darkest moments in history.’

Anne had to go into hiding with her parents and sister when the Nazi anti-Jewish measures in the Netherlands made it too dangerous to stay in their own home. 

And, thanks to the help of Miep Gies – known as the woman who saved Anne Frank’s world famous diary – the Frank family went into hiding in the annex of a building at Prinsengracht 263, Amsterdam.

In addition to provisioning the ‘Secret Annex’ for more than two years, Miep and Jan Gies hid another Jew in their own apartment. 

The family lived there, mainly on the second and third floor. The only way to enter the hiding place was through the secret entrance.

But on August 4, 1944, the Franks’ Amsterdam hiding place was raided by the Nazis and Dutch police. Of the eight Jews in hiding, only Otto Frank returned from the Holocaust.

Shortly after Anne’s father returned to Amsterdam from Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Gies presented him with a stack of his daughter’s writings – including her diary and short stories.

Though Anne had never intended for her diary to be published, she did write in her diary that she planned to write a book about her experiences. 

And while her writings survived, Anne died of typhus fever at the age of 15. 

Filmed on location in Amsterdam and Prague, the Disney+ series – created by Joan Rater and Tony Phelan – has already achieved a 100 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

This is despite the first episode only being released at the start of the month, on May 1.

It also received a score of 8.2/10 on imdb.

Viewers have flocked to social media to praised the creators and directors for the well-written and informative series.

One user wrote on Twitter: ‘Nat Geo/Disney/Hulu show A small Light is such a beautiful told story. I mean we know the ending but I’m still *crying emoji*.’

Another person said: ‘A Small Light, the Miep Gies story on Disney is so good everyone should watch. So interesting to see the Anne Frank story from a different perspective outside of the annex.’

And a third wrote: ‘Highly recommend A Small Light on Disney about Miep Gies and others who helped Otto Frank and his family including of course Anne Frank.’

One more person put: ‘A small light on Disney plus is sooo good!!!’

While another said: ”This show is fantastic!’ 

And a sixth Twitter user commented: ”A small light’… series on Disney+ So very well made, it kicks hard in the feels!’ 

A Small Light is available to watch on Disney+, National Geographic, Hulu and ESPN+.

Anne Hathaway was a sexy bombshell in a plunging white Versace gown at the Met Gala on Monday night.

The 40-year-old longtime actress – who is the face of the brand’s Icon campaign -modeled a look stitched together with gold safety pins.

The Armageddon Time star teased her perky cleavage in the look, which was extremely low cut and boasted a thigh-high slit.

Anne turned heads in the ensemble, commanding attention as she rocked its fingerless opera gloves.

It also came with a jacket that she draped over her arms during some red carpet moments.

Anne’s look piggybacked off Liz Hurley’s iconic black safety pin Versace dress from 1994.

Anne’s getup was created with tweed and she described the look as a ‘marriage between Versace and Chanel.’

Speaking to Vogue on the red carpet, the mother-of-two said, ‘I just do what Donatella [Versace] tells me to do, very gratefully. 

‘She sent me a sketch for this and I just went, “Well, alright.” I do have to say I work with an amazing team. 

‘My stylist Erin Walsh, she always puts everything together so it’s really her that does the collaboration. I’m just a lucky girl.’

The version worn by Hurley to then-boyfriend Hugh Grant’s Four Weddings and a Funeral movie premiere was originally modeled by Helena Christensen in Versace’s Spring/Summer 1994 runway show.

Hathaway was decked out in Bulgari jewelry, including a decadent choker that complemented the gold and pearl hardware adorning the gown.

On her feet she donned a pair of satin, ivory, pointy-toe platform heels.

And she leaned into the role of vixen with her rich brunette hair styled in a voluminous half-up/half-down look.

Her makeup was soft and subtle, expertly applied using pink tones on her cheeks and pout. 

The 2023 Met Gala returned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City on Monday evening, with everyone from Kim Kardashian to Paris Hilton set to attend the annual fundraising event.

Since 1948 stars have ascended the majestic staircase into a very exclusive party where no selfies are allowed.

In keeping with tradition, the event will be held on the first Monday of May. It is scheduled to begin at 6:30PM EST on May 1, 2023.

Fans can watch the event unfold in real-time via a livestream on Vogue.

This year, the ball’s theme is Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty. The late German designer was Chanel’s long-time creative director. He passed at age 85 in 2019.

His beloved cat, Choupette, has even been invited to the festivities.

The decision to honor Karl has sparked controversy given the many offensive remarks he has made over the years, from slamming the #MeToo movement to opposing same-sex marriage.

‘I’m against it for a very simple reason: In the 60s they all said we had the right to the difference. And now, suddenly, they want a bourgeois life,’ he told Vice of same-sex marriage.

‘It’s difficult to imagine—one of the papas at work and the other at home with the baby. How would that be for the baby? I don’t know. I see more lesbians married with babies than I see boys married with babies. And I also believe more in the relationship between mother and child than in that between father and child.’

While he ultimately showed his support for same-sex marriage at his spring 2013 Chanel haute couture show, he still said he was ‘less keen’ on same-sex couples adopting children, according to AP.

Along with the Vogue editor-in-chief, Anna Wintour, who runs and hosts the annual event, the 2023 MET Gala will also be co-hosted by Penelope Cruz, Dua Lipa, Michaela Coel and also Roger Federer.

While the show may be known for its glitzy and over-the-top red carpet — with details of what occurs inside often remaining mysterious — at its heart, it is a fundraising event for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute.