Royal scandal

The Document series on Radio Four is often an absorbing pursuit of information triggered by the discovery of one document which leads to another. The sleuthing involved can be revealing about an historic event and occasionally is of some importance. But not always, it seems to me. This week’s programme, A Right Royal Affair (Monday) — the second in the current series of four — began without a document, namely the will of the Queen Mother, who died three years ago. The Queen succeeded in having her mother’s will sealed, its contents remaining a secret.

This puzzled the presenter of Document, Mike Thomson, who told us that he’d always understood that wills were public documents available to anyone who wished to see them. As he delved into it, he discovered that royal wills have been private since 1911 when the future Queen Mary applied to the High Court to have the will of her brother Prince Francis of Teck sealed. Why she did this turned out to be an intriguing but really rather minor tale from the libidinous royal circles of the Edwardian period, which in any case is not exactly new.

As I settled down for a good old yarn of ancient royal scandal, I heard the dreaded name of Alan Williams mentioned. He’s the obsessive anti-monarchist, the Labour MP for Swansea West and a member of the Commons Public Accounts Committee who seeks any pretext to have a go at the royal family. In this case, he huffed and puffed, he thought it wrong to have secret royal wills as younger royals might use the system to avoid paying inheritance tax, which is obviously nonsense. No doubt the programme thought that getting Williams to table a parliamentary question, which he did, would give their probing some validity; it had the opposite affect for me.