The fall of Backstairs Billy

Even at midnight the two passers-by could see this was no ordinary drunk lying on his back in the gutter. Designer pinstripe suit, fashionable check shirt, gleaming tassled loafers.

The figure was prone, his hair lankly spreadeagled. 'I only want death now,' he was groaning over and over, as they lifted him from the litter and grime of a South London suburban street, and began to help him home. 'I've nothing to live for.'

How the Queen Mother would have wept to see what her death has done to her faithful favourite, the man they knew at Clarence House as 'Backstairs Billy'. It's as though, when her life ended, so did his.

For 50 years his life, indeed his world, was her world, running her household with crisp impeccability and discretion, plumping up her cushions, his tinted bouffant hair always perfectly in place.

Gate Lodge, his ornate residence in the grounds of Clarence House, was filled with pictures and antiques, many of them gifts from the Queen Mother.

The storekeeper's son from Coventry,

who grew up dreaming of working for the Royal Family, was at the very centre of royal life, an integral part of the pageantry.

But now, six months later, they were gently lifting Billy Tallon to his feet, and trying to help him straighten up his suit.

As he mumbled continuously of his misery and despair, they helped his stumbling, drink-sodden figure home, to a tiny flat on a graffitistrewn estate in Kennington.

Backstairs Billy - Steward and Page of the Backstairs, to give him his old official title - is one of the diaspora of displaced staff whose royal roles ended when the Queen Mother was buried in April.

Their relationship was extraordinarily close and in an average day they laughed a lot together.

In six months he has slid from a royal retainer proud to work for her for a mere £10,000 a year (though it included the grace and favour use of Gate Lodge) to a sorry figure finding life in the outside world so lonely that it is almost too much to cope with.

Billy had hoped the royals would

allow him to continue to live in Gate Lodge but, no, that simply wasn't possible when he was no longer working for them.

Since then, despite the generosity of Prince Charles - who as a child with frequently absent parents viewed him as a surrogate father - in topping up his pension and arranging for him to have the Duchy of Cornwall flat rent free,

his life has been on a continuously downward spiral.

Only 24 hours before his fall into the gutter on Thursday night, he had confided in a friend about his fears on leaving Clarence House after half a century and finding himself in an unfamiliar world.

'I think I now know how a man who has served a long sentence in prison feels when he steps out into the real world for the first time in years,' he said. 'Everything's so different, and it's just so hard to cope with.'

'He tried to make it sound like a joke,' says the friend, 'but you could see he meant it.' For the real world he had left at the age of 16 when he arrived to work for King George VI at Buckingham Palace.

Thursday night had begun well enough for Backstairs Billy, 66, as he made a brief return to the high life. He was invited by an old friend, Nicky Haslam, to a drinks party the designer gave at the General Trading Company off Chelsea's Sloane Square.

Also there were Cilla Black and Tessa Dahl - supermodel Sophie's mother - who is another friend of the confirmed bachelor.

He drank a lot of champagne before moving on to vodka martinis, and enjoyed being fussed over.

But all too soon the party was over and as he emerged talking with Tessa Dahl it was clear he had already had quite a lot to drink.

She helped him into a taxi and told the driver to take him home, to the loneliness and suburban obscurity his friends say he finds so hard to live with these days.

In the good days as head of the Queen Mother's staff and very much a 'royal treasure' himself, he had the companionship of his partner Reg Wilcock, a Clarence House footman - the Page of the Presence. Reg died two years ago.

It was a major blow in his life, and then came the Margaret incident.

That was when, on the Queen Mother's 101st birthday in August last year, he wheeled the frail princess out in front of the cameras - an apparent mistake that infuriated the Queen because it revealed the full extent of Margaret's decline.

The Queen gave instructions that Billy was never again to be in sole charge of her mother.

The Queen Mother's death was the final blow because it meant that the life he had known virtually since boyhood was over.

He was, however, allowed one more privilege - to walk behind her coffin in the procession to Westminster Hall before her funeral.

Billy's Kennington flat is impeccable and filled with mementoes of his royal life, with dozens of framed photographs of him with every member of the Royal Family, but on Thursday night instead of heading for it he climbed from the taxi and stepped into the bar of his local pub, the Dog House.

It was 10.30pm and there he sat, alone at the bar, drinking pints of beer. 'The poor guy looked really unhappy,' says one observer. 'He just drank pint after pint, staring at space.'

It was an hour later when he left the pub and stumbled in the direction of his flat.

But then he turned round and went back to the pub, chatting to the barmaids who know him as a regular, but no, he couldn't have another drink as they had stopped serving. Indeed, he may well have returned just to chat with someone for a few minutes.

So the sad figure of Backstairs Billy reeled out into the night, tieless but still clutching a General Trading Company goody bag containing a box of Charbonnel and Walker chocolates. And suddenly the poor man was pitching over on to his back and lying there, sightlessly looking at the sky.

Yesterday an anxious Tessa Dahl said: 'Billy is a fantastic fellow but we have been very concerned for him lately. I think he is missing his old life so much.'

Another friend said: 'Billy has tried really hard and when he's out he can be the life and soul of the party - he was on really good form on Thursday at Nicky's do.

'But when he goes home he's consumed with loneliness and often turns to the bottle. It's usually when he's had a drink that he starts saying he has nothing to live for and just wants to die.'

The friend adds: 'I just wish at such times he remembered how many friends he still has.'

All in all, a terrible irony for a man of whom the Queen Mother used to say: 'I couldn't live without Billy.'

Additional reporting: Peter Allen