Friday, October 12, 2007

Sideways promotion

David Pryce-Jones about Mohamed Fayed's fixation that the Duke of Edinburgh had the British secret services assassinate his son and Diana.

There is no record of British secret services murdering anyone anywhere at any time. Brigadier Mason-Macfarlane was British military attaché in Berlin before the war, and in a memorandum in 1938 he offered to shoot Hitler. Horrified superiors had him transferred at once to be governor of Gibraltar. Michael Grant, a wartime intelligence officer and afterwards vice-chancellor of Belfast university, once told me how early in the war he had had a hand in recruiting a Military Intelligence team of assassins. The authorities were then so frightened by the men they had trained that they kept them enclosed in a country house in Worcestershire for the rest of the war, and disbanded them as quickly as they could.

I have no idea about the factuality of the above, (though he says carefully, "There is no record..."), but I love the reaction to a man volunteering to shoot Hitler:  make him governor of Gibraltar.

No comments: