ague (ADL) of B’nai Brith, USA Anti-Nazi League Australian Government Australian B’nai Brith Anti-Defamation Commission Board of Deputies of British Jews Center for Democratic Renewal, Atlanta Canadian Jewish Congress Canadian League of Human Rights of the B’nai Brith Coalition for Human Dignity, Oregon Community Security Trust of Board of Deputies German Government Jewish Telegraph Agency Searchlight and Gerald Gable Simon Wiesenthal Center Surfwatch Internet censorship In a letter to a friend

in Italy, an intercept of which I found in Italian military Intelligence archives, written a day or two after the December 1936 abdication, King Edward VIII referred cruelly to his luckless brother George as Stuttering Bertie.

— David Irving April 5, 2002 (Friday) London I SPEND all morning slumped in front of a sofa, wallowing in memories of the last century as I watch on television the ceremonial procession carrying the Queen Mother’s coffin from Clarence House, her Royal standard being lowered as it leaves the gates, to its lying-in-state beneath the splendid hammer-beam oaken roof at the thousand year old Westminster Hall.

I believe I saw her only once, as a boy scout Cub, at a jamboree somewhere in east Anglia. I think it must have been just before the war ended, or just after. I was too young to take it all in, younger than Jessica is now; we all hid behind a hummock until a signal was given when we had to rush forward and greet Her Majesty. It was all a very jolly occasion, and that is the way she is now remembered.

The broadcast media have now just begun discreetly revealing the shadow side of her late husband King George VI , who died exactly fifty years ahead of her. I was shocked to hear his guttural German accent when he broadcast. Last night they showed a newsreel clip, “suppressed at the time,” showing him stuttering himself into total silence, as his brain failed to give the necessary muscle impulses to the vocal chords.

In a letter to a friend in Italy, an intercept of which I found in Italian military Intelligence archives, written a day or two after the December 1936 abdication, King Edward VIII referred cruelly to his luckless brother George as “Stuttering Bertie” (Bertie being the family name for him.).

Now that Elisabeth is gone, we may now see what the public archives have to say about that disgraceful episode — how the foreign office and Stanley Baldwin hounded Edward out of office in 1936, primarily because of his admiration for the achievements of Hitler’s Germany.

Queen Mum wanted peace with Hitler — The Independent on The footnote, on page 853 of Churchill’s War, vol.

ii, actually reads: “‘The papers of Sir Walter Monckton in the Bodleian Library contain as items 23 and 24 correspondence with Queen Elizabeth revealing her desire to accept Hitler’s 1940 peace offer; access to these items was restricted until Feb 2000 .” — See Mr Irving’s Reader’s Letter to The Spectator commenting on their review article on Churchill’s War, vol.ii.

The files of her principal legal adviser, Walter Monckton , are housed in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University: I consulted them there, and found that one file is resolutely closed — his wartime correspondence with Queen Elisabeth.

Leaked sources reveal that the file is closed because it reveals that (like her husband King George in 1940-41) she despised Winston Churchill , whom she viewed as the nemesis of her Empire; and that she had strongly favoured accepting the German peace offer when it came in 1940. How improper of both of them!

The evidence of the king’s feelings is in the papers of Harry Hopkins, Mackenzie King and others; the officially published versions of the documents have however been discreetly edited! (The passages are in my Churchill’s War, vol. I). I wonder if that Monckton file will now be opened, or will it contain the kind of mysterious blank page inserts and pagination gaps with which the more alert Real Historians of WWII are infuriatingly familiar.

I DECIDE to give the BBC another chance, given its lapse of taste on the announcement of her death a week ago — their news-reader Peter Sissons was asked to don a necktie in the BBC’s new standard livery of burgundy, rather than the black tie which decency dictated.

But today’s commentator David Dimbleby is only an inarticulate, though well-spoken, shadow of his father Richard : modern public figures (and BBC commentators consider themselves as such) have lost the art of rhetoric; their vocabulary has shrunk to the width of a staircase in some wretched mews flat in Belgravia.

Worse, they feel they must fill every available silent space, oblivious of what every graphic designer knows — that the white space on a page is often more important than the words it surrounds. Once, this morning, during a particularly poignant picture, he felt obliged to say: “And now silence reigns.” Yes, David, it did until you said that. Not that Richard Dimbleby was above the occasional lapse.

I recall his words as he waited for Princess Margaret to emerge from Westminster Abbey after her first (as it proved, disastrous) marriage: “And there,” intoned Richard, “waiting outside the great Abbey door, is the state coach which is soon to be filled by the figure of Princess Margaret.”

It would take a stern eye not to yield the occasional tear at the solemn spectacle of the thousands of young marching servicemen, arms reversed, and the gun carriage, and the sparkling Koh-i-Noor diamond on Elizabeth’s crown, and the dissonant clash of the marching bands as each new ones heaves into view, and the wonderful drill of the naval marching detachment, although their hatbands showed them mostly to be from the London shore establishments.

Seeing the Scots Guards in their black bearskins and scarlet tunics recalls to me the day over forty years ago when I visited “Butcher” Harris, Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Arthur Harris, at his home in Goring: he proudly showed off to me, in a glass case the length of a wall, his collection of lead soldiers portraying the Queen’s entire Coronation procession.

Now it is as though those lead soldiers have come to life and are slow-marching down the Mall, to the thump and blare of military funeral music. Seeing these Royal Navy officers marching with drawn swords suddenly brings