THE QUEEN will formally appoint the next Prime Minister at Balmoral in a historic first, Buckingham Palace confirmed today.
Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak will officially become Britain's new premier in Scotland on September 6 to save the monarch travelling back to London with her ongoing mobility issues.
Boris Johnson will also make the 1,000-mile round trip to officially resign as PM next Tuesday, before his successor has an audience with Her Majesty.
It is understood the decision to have the "kissing of the hands" ceremony at Balmoral was taken now to provide certainty to the PM's diary and prevent a last-minute change of plans.
The Sun revealed last week that royal officials were drawing up plans for the meetings to happen at the Queen's Scottish estate.
It is the first time in living memory the so-called kissing of the hands happens outside London or Windsor.
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It is understood when the Queen arrived in Scotland last month for her ten-week holiday she had hoped to make the journey south when the PM is appointed.
Foreign Secretary Ms Truss is on course to become Britain's 56th PM and the 15th formally appointed by the Queen.
Windsor Castle had been earmarked for the traditional constitutional ceremony.
The Queen kissed hands with her first PM Winston Churchill in 1952 at Heathrow when she returned from Africa after her father King George VI died.
Every other PM since has travelled to Buckingham Palace.
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But in 1908 after the sudden resignation of a sickly Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman the ceremony was carried out in France.
His replacement Herbert Asquith was forced to travel to Biarritz where the Queen’s great-grandfather King Edward VII was on holiday at the time.
Asquith was appointed after an audience in a private room in a hotel and remains the only PM to have taken office on foreign soil. The Queen has suffered “episodic mobility problems” for almost a year and spent a night in hospital last October.
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