Bizarre and disturbing episodes are revealed in this excellent history of the royal family’s relationship with espionage
On a March evening in 1974, having shot and wounded Princess Anne’s protection officer and driver, Ian Ball began remonstrating with her to get into his white Ford Escort. “I want £2m,” he explained, “will you get out of the car?” “Not bloody likely, and I haven’t got £2m,” she replied. A prolonged argument ensued, with Ball occasionally shooting at curious individuals who had wandered over to see what the fuss was about. After some minutes, and having been punched in the back of the head by a passing heavyweight boxer, Ball fled into St James’s Park, where he was eventually rugby-tackled by the police, who had belatedly turned up. Afterwards Anne said she had “lost my rag” with Ball only after he accidentally ripped her dress. “A very good story,” prime minister Harold Wilson observed in the margins of his report on the affair. “Pity the palace can’t let it come out.”
This single episode, according to the book, encapsulates the disturbed chancers, hapless security professionals, stone-cold sang-froid, and brainless secrecy by senior officials that characterise the royal family’s relationship with the world of espionage through the ages. Richard Aldrich and Rory Cormac’s fascinating history argues that modern intelligence evolved out of efforts to prevent Queen Victoria being assassinated, though their account begins earlier with snapshots from a golden age of British espionage under Elizabeth I. This period bears all the hallmarks of the spy thriller: rival intelligence houses feuding for the monarch’s favour, handlers running networks of European assets, and serial bunglers frantically reinventing themselves as double or triple agents to stave off trouble.