The King Maker by Geordie Greig - review

The runaway success of the Oscar-winning movie The King's Speech has established the notion that King George VI would have been a hapless, hesitant failure of a monarch were it not for his Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue.

Now this perceptive, well-researched and engagingly written book, which doesn't so much as mention Logue, has been reissued. It argues that the king was saved by a Glaswegian naval doctor and former Scottish rugby captain named Louis Greig, who became the young prince's mentor, comptroller, doctor and friend long before Logue appeared.

So who is right? Geordie Greig - who edits this newspaper - has had access to his grandfather Louis Greig's diaries and conducted invaluable personal interviews, including with the Queen, who told him of her father and Louis Greig: "They were so close, so close." From this and much other detailed research he has established that from the moment Louis Greig insisted upon and took part in a successful stomach ulcer operation on the then Prince Albert, Duke of York in November 1917, King George V trusted Greig to look after his second-eldest son.

Quite whether he ought to have is another matter.

Louis Greig opened Prince Albert's previously socially constricted world to include chorus girls and music hall singers such as Phyllis Monkman, to whom the prince probably lost his virginity using the nom d'amour of Lord Chester, and the "dark-haired, voluptuous" South African actress Madge Saunders, who had "a full bosom and an even broader sense of humour". Greig rightly states that his grandfather was the prince's "constant guide and adviser" but also his "cupid" during this heady period before the prince met Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (later the Queen Mother).

Greig describes the contrasting worlds of dutiful royal life under the martinet King George V versus carefree evenings in the London of the Roaring Twenties expertly, and the prince emerges as deeply sympathetic. His grandfather's correspondence underlines George VI's essential decency and good nature; as he told a Hollywood paper after the Abdication crisis: "He is, and always will be, a fine simple fellow, easy to get on with and devoted to his wife and family."

As for whether it was Lionel Logue or Louis Greig who made King George VI such a successful monarch, however, the answer is: neither of them. It was Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother.

Andrew Roberts's The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War is published by Penguin.