LETTERS Ali is at it again
Sir: I was rather surprised to read Antony Lambton's judgment that Philip Ziegler, in his 'official' biography of King Edward VIII, 'has little new relevant information'. Yet Ziegler himself in his foreword refers to the moment Freda Dudley Ward's sur- viving daughter told him that he could see and quote freely from the 2,000-odd letters from the Prince of Wales to her mother 'as 'being one of the most exciting in my life as a biographer'. My own eye was sharply. caught by the one in which the prince says: 'I love Verie a tiny bit for herself, though more because you love her so. You will remember our discussing her as a possible wife for me, darling . . In the event Verie, the enchanting Freda's younger sister, was to marry a soldier called Blew- Jones, Rebecca West's only posh relation, so it was said in her family. Their only child, Belinda, became the wife of Guess- Who! Tony Lambton! (their Golden Wed- ding is indeed likely to be the second most important Single Act of 1992). Surely a little inside information on this revelation would have been better than instead devot- ing an entire third of his review to the only 30 pages out of 654 that concern the little Prince's svelte and faithful Irish Falstaff, `Fruity' Metcalfe.
But Lambton's wholly jutifiable com- plaint about the book's 'deplorable index' was scarcely answered (Letters, 13 Octo- ber) by Mr D. Bowron's apparent adoption for his profession of that dread British Media motto, 'If a thing's worth mention- ing, it's worth getting it wrong'. Nor are Ziegler's source notes any more reliable. For example, a letter quoted and written to me by my dear and highly heterosexual friend Prince Paul of Jugoslavia is ascribed by the author to my very slight acquaint- ance, the late and notoriously bisexual King Paul of the Hellenes. When it comes to the text, some of my younger friends may read with surprise of the Duke of Windsor 'after a visit to the gala at Monte Carlo with Lord Rothermere and the journalist Alastair Forbes' as if we three had gone out en garcons on the town, instead of as in fact closely chaperoned by Duchess Wallis and her amiable but portly Baltimore aunt Bessie Merriman.
As for the 'style and elegance' of which Lambton wrote, I thought the book fell far short on both counts of what Ziegler to his credit has rightly recognised as Lady Donaldson's 'perceptive and brilliant' un- official life of 1974, and further still below that of the best Official Royal biography ever written, the late James Pope Hennes- sy's life of King Edward VIII's mother Queen Mary, for which the author, nota bene, nevertheless did not receive the knighthood recommended by Lambton (not a quarter from which the Sovereign would be likely to welcome advice) for Ziegler. The latter is said to have his biographer's eye now set, should she pre- decease him, on Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, whose uncharacteristic condemnation of her father-in-law as 'a narrow-minded autocrat' to her more char- acteristically described 'very, very naughty, but delicious' elder brother-in-law he has already winkled out from the Royal Arc- hives. But mindful of what Ziegler has himself called 'the many generations of middle-class respectability that lie behind me', and his incorrigible tendency to sound like a provincial Crown Court Judge malapropping away from his bench, she might choose to veto that appointment in advance. Indeed, I seem already to hear her beguiling aristo voice dwelling teasing- ly on a fresh-coined pejorative adjective, synonymous with another royal biog- rapher's 'bedint': 'Rather Ziegler, don't you think?'
Alastair Forbes
1837 Chateau d'Oex, Switzerland
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