British state 'covered up plot to assassinate King Edward VIII'

The Duke of Windsor, who was King Edward for a few months of 1936, on a tour of Nazi Germany in 1937. Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Images

British state 'covered up plot to assassinate King Edward VIII'

Historian says papers challenge official version that George McMahon was a fantasist

Dalya Alberge

Published onSun 28 Jun 2020 15.55 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/28/british-state-covered-up-plot-to-assassinate-king-edward-viii

It has all the hallmarks of a 21st-century political thriller, including a plot to assassinate a controversial monarch, an MI5 double agent, and claims of a high-level cover-up.

In 1936, an MI5 informant called George McMahon tried to assassinate King Edward VIII as he rode his horse near Buckingham Palace. Just as he was taking aim with a revolver, a woman in the crowd grabbed his arm and a policeman punched him, causing the weapon to fly into the road and strike the monarch’s mount.

At his Old Bailey trial, McMahon insisted that a foreign power had paid him to kill the king and that he had deliberately bungled the assassination. Portrayed as a fantasist, he was convicted on a lesser offence of “unlawfully possessing a firearm and ammunition to endanger life” and imprisoned for 12 months.

Now claims of a cover-up at the highest level have emerged following the discovery of the would-be assassin’s memoir, in which he detailed the plot, his subsequent arrest and trial.

The previously unpublished account was discovered by the historian Alexander Larman, who told the Guardian that its claims are “explosive” because crucial details match those in declassified MI5 documents, including memos of their meetings with him.

In the account, titled “He Was My King”, McMahon asserted that he was recruited by the Italian embassy in London to assassinate the king and that his attempts to warn MI5 and even the then home secretary were ignored.

Larman said: “McMahon’s account corroborates a large amount of previously confidential and sealed MI5 documentation in the National Archives, which reveals that McMahon was also a paid MI5 informant who was passing them information about the workings of the Italian embassy in his guise as a double agent.

“McMahon informed MI5 that there would be an attempt on Edward’s life in the summer of 1936, but they ignored his information, dismissing him as unreliable. When this indeed took place on 16 July, it became hugely embarrassing to the country and a cover-up took place.”

Questioning MI5’s judgement in recruiting a heavy-drinking, Walter Mitty-type character as an informant, he described the memoir as being about 40 pages long with “barking mad” passages: “But, while it would have been easy to have written him off as a fantasist, there are declassified memos of all these meetings that MI5 had with him.” One confidential MI5 document records that some of his information was “undoubtedly accurate”.

Larman said that, because the assassination attempt was so scandalous, “the best thing the establishment could do was essentially neutralise him as an attention-seeker”. He added: “His argument in his memoir is that he was being hired by the Italian embassy to do outrageous things and that he was feeding all the information back to MI5.”

McMahon was a low-level fraudster and gun-runner to Abyssinia when he came to the Italians’ attention. They offered him cash for information about armaments. His memoir records payments as an MI5 informant: “I was to act thenceforth under the direction and supervision of the Military Intelligence Department.” Official records show that he met with intelligence services frequently in late 1935 and early 1936.

Larman discovered the memoir in researching his forthcoming book on Edward VIII and the abdication, a constitutional crisis sparked by his wish to marry the American divorcee Wallis Simpson.

He stumbled across it among the papers of Walter Monckton, which are housed at Balliol College, Oxford: “Monckton was Edward’s adviser. He not only acted for him during the abdication, but he stayed in touch afterwards. Presumably, this document came into Edward and Wallis’s possession some time after the abdication. It was then sent to Monckton and remained in his archives.”

The discovery will feature in Larman’s book, The Crown in Crisis: Countdown to the Abdication, to be published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson on 9 July.

He writes: “The accepted version of the events, as depicted by historians and by Edward himself in his memoirs, is that McMahon was a confused attention-seeker who never had any serious intention of doing any harm to the king … However, recently declassified MI5 files, to say nothing of an extraordinary autobiographical document … offer a stranger and more complex narrative.

“It is entirely possible that MI5 were aware of McMahon’s planned attempt and were happy to let him assassinate Edward, thereby removing an internationally embarrassing monarch with believed Nazi sympathies from the throne. Or, alternatively, simply that they were embarrassed by their arrogance and incompetence.”