Winston Churchill’s grandson has spoken of his “desperate sadness” at the death of the Queen.

Sir Nicholas Soames, a former Conservative MP and son of Churchill’s youngest daughter, paid tribute to the Queen on Friday, adding that his grandfather had “loved” her.

He told Times Radio: “That is the only word to use. It’s the only word that can begin to cover his feelings for this young sovereign.

“I think the Queen found him a great comfort. I think she must have been slightly alarmed to start with, but on the other hand, she’d known him since she was a little girl.”

Churchill was the Queen’s first Prime Minister on her accession in 1952 and is commonly regarded as her favourite.

On his retirement in 1955, she sent him a hand-written letter saying no successor “will ever for me be able to hold the place of my first Prime Minister to whom both my husband and I owe so much and for whose wise guidance during the early years of my reign I shall always be so profoundly grateful.”

Speaking of his own feelings, Sir Nicholas said: “All, most of us, our generation, we have grown up with the Queen as our head of state and as the sort of absolute guarantor, in my view, of our stability.

“Through hard times, through bad times, through thick and thin, the Queen was always there, wonderfully reassuring, calm, I think, sage figure, fortified and sustained, obviously, by a profound faith.

“So my feeling is one of desperate sadness. I really am sad for her family, and I think it’s also worth remembering that the King has lost his father only quite recently, and now loses his mother.”

Asked about the King’s prospects, Sir Nicholas said: “He has been very, very well prepared and prepared himself for this moment, which was always going to come.

“He has made, in my view, a great success of the job of the Prince of Wales, for which there is no job description. He has achieved some remarkable, really extraordinary things – things of national importance.”

Sir Nicholas added that the King would be “the same man in every way” but with “the added burden of Kingship”.