Away from the stressful role of guiding East Hampshire’s planning policy, a Liphook councillor has just won a nationwide competition with her Jubilee poem about the Queen.

Angela Glass of Bramshott is East Hampshire District Council’s cabinet member for planning – since she was young the former PA to TV gardener Alan Titchmarsh has scribbled down lines of poetry, and ideas for poems at every chance.

Her entry To Queen and Country for the Jubilee Literary Society competition was submitted by email on the last day; but the grandmother of ten suspected it failed to arrive at its destination.

But it did, and judges Tiffany Atkinson, poet, critic and a professor of creative writing, Salma Begum who has worked with former Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, BBC journalist and presenter Susie Fowler-Watt, Kit Hesketh-Harvey, award-winning scriptwriter and author, and Bishop Dagmar Winter were impressed.

Angela, who has contributed poems to Liphook Community Magazine and the Bramshott Bugle, said: “This was my first competition, and I still can’t quite believe I won. One judge said my poem was ‘as bang on at the final line as it was at the first’.

“I hope to publish a selection of poems next year.”