Character assassination

I love all monarchies - they are usually ancient and always a rebuke to the principle that all men are equal - but I generally have little interest in monarchs and much less in their children. 

Royal biographies were very dull. 

Harold Nicolson complained, writing King George V's official biography, that "For seventeen years he did nothing at all but kill animals and stick in stamps". 

Yet Kenneth Rose's biography of him is one of the funniest books I ever read. 

Craig Brown's book on Princess Margaret and his Voyage Around the Queen are great fun because he is a comic genius.

Andrew Lownie's biography of King Edward VIII was excellent though vitriolic. 

Vitriol is understandable. Ribbentrop's lover Wallis Simpson as Queen would have been an outrage, because she was American and middle class as much as because she was divorced. 

Andrew's new book on the Duke and Duchess of York, Entitled, which I read last night is a depressing catalogue of girls, despots, shady businessmen and sex gossip. 

I didn't find anything interesting that I hadn't already read in the papers except that an equerry called Amanda Thirsk persuaded him against his better judgment to be interviewed by Emily Maitlis. 

The BBC people knew he would hang himself and hoped for it. This was not the BBC of Lord Reith.

What comes across is how very boring, stupid and vulgar the Duke and Duchess are. 

Why did beautiful, intelligent women like him?

“Why have such scores of lovely, gifted girls
Married impossible men?" 

asked Robert Graves.

This goes for some of the Duke's conquests. 

The Duchess of course is neither lovely nor gifted, is as stupid and vulgar as her former husband and greedier, but she is a bit more street-wise and tougher than he. 

He leans on her. 

He is a puer aeternus, a Peter Pan. Perhaps he married his mother, though his real mother was very different.

He is a crashing bore who tells lavatory jokes that revolt people at dinner.

It reminds me of someone close to Queen Victoria's court saying the only thing that makes the royal family laugh is if some catches his finger in the door.

It's odd that Prince Philip's blood has not meant his children are more intelligent than previous generations. 

He, people said, could have been an Admiral of the Fleet on merit had he not married the late Queen and become one automatically. 

But perhaps this was not true.

I recommend reading Whitney Webb's One Nation Under Blackmail instead of Entitled to learn about the poisonous ecosystem in which Epstein flourished. Here is an extract.