Every waking day (and not all of them ARE at my age and in my health) its another fucking thing, and I’m always ready for a murder, sex scandal, thieving tory, gagged and bound sex slave MP or insanity of some sort. Some days it can be, “Look over there… the Right Honourable is fucking a bear, and the next – “Come visit the hidden Nazi Royal before she croaks.” Other days pass alone witnessing Royal do’s, ado’s and muse, alone, in a haze of omeprazole, hydrocodone, good bhang, coke, Macallan and gin.
The Range Rover, an ancient model from the days when decent folk thought of them as new monied, faux country cars lurched on suspension as taut as a slinky, from left to right, weaving through the winding Sussex country lanes. The rest of those filthy paparazzi fuckers were in London, reporting on every neigh of a Household Cavalry horse, as it pranced a few hundred yards down the Mall; the grumbles of old sausage fingers as he sat with the woman he shagged as he courted the virgin, teenaged Diana and of course, Andrew’s stolen flouncey getup. The lead up to Charlie’s big dressing up day had enraptured the country. Millions of serfs and terfs had bedecked their sheds and bungalows with Union Jacks and had prepared miles of trestle tables covered in paper tablecloths ready to serve lumpy, half baked quiche and limp ham sandwiches to crying babies and locked in octogenarians who would be silently, inwardly screaming, remembering the days before they’d been abandoned by their families, when they had routinely set fire to butchers aprons on town hall steps.
Not me. I was on the move again. I was on the hunt for the REAL story. The hidden skeleton. The ultimate scandal of the Windsors. The family member who DIDN’T turn up. And she wasn’t in America.
Driving was “The Insider.” I can’t say too much about her, other than she was good for her age. This Lady in Waiting, no longer waited… she had chosen sides, all of those years ago. 1936, to be exact. She and her Windsor. The secret Windsor. The Windsor who wasn’t so much WRITTEN out of history, as erased completely. Wiped off all family trees. Ejected. And all trace utterly covered over. Denied. Ignored. Forgiven.
Rumours of her existence have been whispered in Court, and amongst journalists and those of us with a familial connection for years (or between those who pay attention). And last week, as you all orgasmed over Queen Camilla’s dress, and Charlie’s quick stage changes into gowns far more flamboyant than Liberace’s famous Grecian/Aztec/Copacabana/bondage mashup phase I was on my way to a secret meeting with her.
It all began a fortnight ago when a spidery handwritten note arrived on my doormat via a decrepit, hobbling satin dressed footman … or wheelman as he was on a capability scooter with a wonky wheel. He tried to leave before I could get to the door, but his battery ran out and I had to help him in and he and I polished off a bottle of Jameson while his battery charged and he muttered, “you cant see me. I’m the powdered pimpernel…” I recognised these symptoms as those of someone coming down from a five day cocaine, Baileys and statins bender. I let him ramble, pouring him shot after shot until he managed to blurt out, “Don’t go! She’s a 111 year old fucking mad woman. She’ll kill us all!”
The note he had delivered said, ‘Await a call. I’m alive. Bring barbiturates. Alice W.’
The swastika gave it away. I knew who this was. My mother had sang for her… though none of my family other than me had believed her as she had revealed this as she ran naked across Piccadilly Circus with me and three nurses in pursuit. This was the scoop I’d been trying to write all of my journalistic career. The hidden Royal. The whisper who moved across the world, party to party, making just enough noise for those of us listening to know she was there, but disappearing before we could gaze upon her.
The clues had all been there. Walking beside Philip at the Nazi funeral. The photographer who captured young Queen Elizabeth, her sister and their mother in a nazi salute. Doctored photos of Edward and his American wife touring pre war Germany, and the immaculate stitching around the swastika armband on Harry’s teenage SS shirt… She was ever present, ever grooming, ever planning and certainly well connected to power circles given the state of the present Tory Party.
As the satin dressed drunk wobbled onto his recharged metal steed, he turned to me and said, “Leave it, dear boy. Let it die. She’ll be gone and this lot will be out of power by next June…”
“But what if that isn’t true,” I replied? “What if this is just the beginning?’
He laughed and reversed, beeping on to Kensington High Street. “The Rees-Mogg Reich will NEVER be…,” he cackled, and drove off.
I knew what to do.
I was deeply disappointed that Hitler’s diaries turned out to be fakes but I wasn’t in the least surprised, because I knew who recorded the real ones. Not him… he was a fool- a man without grounding. Writing a diary took a grounded mind. A mind that wasn’t ruminating continually over his own survival and the mass murder of others. Her… The whisper. The shadow. The link. The Royal Family that might have been. The secret Rudolf Hess took to his swinging death.
My Range Rover driver was trying to calm me by drumming up conversation. “You think this driving is bad… I killed my father in a car crash and when they took him to hospital they found a dozen condoms in his pocket. He was 94.”
“That’s reassuring,” I shouted over the roar of the engine. “I’m seventy something or so, and a prophylactic has as much relevance to me as a flying fucking dinosaur…”
“You might get a second wind,” she shouted.
“I have… it’s the fucking chia pudding…”
The Sussex countryside never looked so beautiful, I reassured myself. It would be as fragrant a place as any to bleed out under a broken four wheel drive.
The Coronation signified many things, none so apparent as the fact that 13 years of Royal PR shittery aimed at the proles had ended in the deaths of its two central characters and the rising sun of the American branch of the Windsor family. The racism and naziism was the underbelly they tried to cover using such liberal rags as the Mail and Express, and such reputable journos as Piers “I luv ya Meghan, take me back” Morgan. Despite their efforts, you can’t keep a good bigoted Cult down.
In order to ‘Await a call,’ I had asked my local sustenance provider for a delivery. Weatherall, my favourite pub landlord, arrived with the supplies. He knew something was afoot, but I had to dissuade him from staying. He looked forlorn as he left. He had to uncharacteristically miserably go back to his pub, a regal premises that over the past few years had held out from these Royal festivities for idiots, but falling profits due to Tory corruption, Brexit, covid and Weatherall’s propensity for inviting me and pretty much every other interesting alcoholic from Soho through to Kensington to regular lockins, meant he had to break out the bunting and his one Kiri Te Kanawa CD for the Game of Thrones role players.
I sat by the phone.
And sat.
And drank.
And sat.
And drank.
And slept…
And was awakened by a thump at the door. I jumped to my feet, and my head spun and I passed out, draped across the settee. Luckily this time my bladder didn’t let me down. Despite her age, ‘The Insider’ broke my door down, and pulled me from the edge with a series of hard slaps to my jaw while shouting, “Aufwachen! Der Anführer möchte sprechen! Sie braucht deinen Stift! Wach auf, du betrunkener bastard!”
The leader needed my pen. Like Hitler needed others to write his diaries, the Royal Nazi couldn’t record her hidden existence. Others were needed. She was in plain sight, yet denied. She was in those photos, those nazi dress up boxes. Those salutes, and The Insider was to drive me to record her deathbed confessions on this the day the Last King of the Commonwealth was Coronated. The press knew… but refused to write…
I told her I needed to reboot my system and directed her to the drugs cupboard in my kitchen. She returned with a half bottle of Stolichnaya, the bag of barbiturates Weatherall had kindly brought, enough coke to kill a rugby team, about a tablespoon of ground dandelion root (don’t knock it until you try it), two glasses and a reefer as big as a miniature dachshund. The Stoly was knocked back between us in ten minutes, the reefer took twenty, the coke and dandelion root in two. The barbiturates were stuffed into The Insider’s pockets. I’d ascertained she was The Whisper’s only surviving Lady in Waiting… and she was fucking old.
“Slow down, for fuck sake!” I shouted.
“Spark up another joint, Herr Knobinson!’ she shouted back. So I did.
The road widened and we turned onto an A road. I passed her the j and asked, “What’s she like?”
She turned and scowled.”Vot do you think a 111 years old nazi is like? She is as angry, dumm and mad as you’d imagine.” She turned to concentrate on the road ahead. “But she is wery happy mitt the cleansing of this country and how der Royls haf schlotted into der nu reich.”
I laughed. “But its over. The game is up. The aristocracy dealt its last card. Right wing liberalism through to proto fascism in 13 shit years… it ate its own dick.”
“Nein. This is just der beginning. She has normalised these things. She whispered to May, to Boris, to Truss and to Sunak, Suella, Raab and der Rees-Mogg and der rest. She normalised Farage. She jettisoned Meghan und Harry. Und der masses, they cheer. They call for blood, for drowning, for Putin, fur Assad… unt William unt his bride, they say nothing. Charles, he says nothing. Der Royls, they verstehen. Der aristocracy THEIR MEN, haf die pinne. They are in control and if the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha say nothing, regardless of the cost to the poor, the vulnerable, the minorities THEY STILL KEEP THEIR PLACE.” She spat at the dashboard.
“Why does she want me?”
“She needs you to record the last words of someone who never lost faith. Someone who knew Royalty once again would reign supreme über der rechtmäßigen Aristokratie…”
I felt sick. This old git had read the runes via The Daily Mail. The Express. GB “News.” Talk Radio. She thought they were reporting truth. She’d been taken in by propaganda yet again.
We rounded a bend, and drove onto a long, stony drive. The lane was unkempt. An estate without staff. A crumbling kingdom. And then we saw smoke, billowing black into the sky.
“Jesus Gott im Himmel!” She Accelerated faster, and my head banged repeatedly against the roof of the car.
And then, as we reached the summit of the hill, we saw the source of the plumes of rank, dirty soot that were flecking the bonnet of the car. A huge tudor style mansion aflame from wing to wing.
She sped towards it. “Nein! Nein!” and brought the galloping machine to a halt at the bottom of a great stone stairway that led up to huge burning oak doors. We opened the car doors and stepped into the heat, the dried ancient timbers and treasures crackling and banging and falling.
The Insider fell to her knees and wept. And I laughed and clapped at the nasty death of the secret head of a nasty regime that I knew now would crumble. The Tories, their Etonian thieves and their Royal propaganda was over. Old sausage fingers, or big headed William, or Diana’s torturer, or even Harry or Meghan couldn’t put this together. The Rees-Mogg reich had been the last straw. The spark that over excited the racists, the opportunists and the outright mad, hidden little nazis. We were about to enter a new age when the world… or at least the British Isles and its satellites would reset and take a real part, rather than an imagined place in the world.
This was the beginning of the end. The awful flummery and grotesque parade of last Friday when old King sausage fingers gained nothing but a meaningless tiara for his stable doorway shag. The political Parties were full of young things who knew Windsor was in the all together. Who knew this house of grasping, chinless idiots clinging to a medieval past were done for. Who knew that these blethering idiots would turn on a sixpence to support depraved regimes in order to keep their position and imaginary magical orbs. The Whisper was gone, unable to entice politicians through honours, and all that was left was a past steeped in blood, racism and privilege so disgusting that as it stepped out of that golden carriage, it fell to the floor in flames.
And, I thought, Diana was gone. She who WOULD have stood on Kent beaches, welcoming poor souls who had been forced into boats by this lot. She who would have hugged them. Gone. And none to take her place.
The fire brigade came. Nothing was saved. The Court dissipated. The Insider drove me home, relieved it was all over. At last she could live a life without servitude to a lie. And here, as I type she has presented me with a large joint and opened a bottle of 15 year old Glenfiddich. We’ve both decided to witness the death of the House of Wndsor together, whilst out of our fucking skulls.
Später mehr.
Ungagged Royal Reporter
