“Edward VIII’s abdication was a blessing in disguise. He was a shallow, weak character”

Nigel Jones discusses Alexander Larman’s The Crown in Crisis

The Crown in Crisis: Countdown to the Abdication

b[ #lexander .arman Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 352 pages, £20

The royal soap opera saga of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle gives an uncanny topicality to this account of the last time a British royal gave up his regal responsibilities for an American wife: the 1936 abdication crisis. The two episodes echo Karl Marx’s dictum that history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce. For where Edward VIII’s slavish passion for the twice-married Wallis Simpson rocked the monarchy and threatened to bring down the government, Harry’s devotion to another US divorcee has not had quite the same political impact.

Alexander Larman has done a thoroughly researched job in retelling this oft-told tale and has made some fresh discoveries that shed new light on the affair. In particular, he shows that a man named McMahon, who pulled a loaded gun on Edward, was in close contact with MI5 before the mysterious incident, and that the security service was bugging the king’s phone on government orders throughout the crisis.

The book’s two heroes are Walter Monckton, a smooth and skilful lawyer who brokered a solution to the crisis which satisfied all sides; and Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, often seen as having a malevolent determination to force Edward off his throne. Larman portrays Baldwin much more sympathetically, with a human understanding of the king’s dilemma, yet a steely determination to ensure that the crisis would not disrupt constitutional propriety, and that the royal show would go seamlessly on even after Edward’s enforced departure.

In hindsight, the abdication was a blessing in disguise. Edward’s Nazi sympathies and shallow, weak character would have made him a poor wartime monarch, and his pushy, grasping wife was too exotic for the staid society of 1930s Britain. They were two drones who deserved each other.

Nigel Jones, author of Countdown to Valkyrie: The July Plot to Assassinate Hitler (Frontline, 2008)