MAN IN THE BROWN SUIT: MI5, Edward VIII & An Irish Assassin

This is the first full length study of the threat to the life of Edward VIII. James Parris uses material from MI5 and police files at the National Archives to reach explosive conclusions about the British Establishment's determination to remove Edward from the throne. On 16th July 1936, a man in a brown suit stepped from the crowd on London's Constitution Hill and pointed a loaded revolver at the King as he rode past. The monarch was moments from death, but MI5 and the Metropolitan Police Special Branch had known for three months an attack was planned - the man in the brown suit himself had warned them. This mysterious man, lost to history, was George McMahon, a petty criminal with a record of involvement with the police, an MI5 informant who provided intelligence on Italian and possibly German espionage in Britain. Dismissed by the rest of the world as a drunken loser and fantasist, he saw his life as an epic drama. But why did MI5 and the Police fail to act? Was it a simple blunder on the part of the security services, or something far more sinister? The 32 year old Irish gunman at his Old Bailey trial in September 1936 was dismissed by the Attorney General Sir Donald Somervell as an attention-seeking eccentric acting in pursuit of a petty grievance against the police. He was sentenced to 12 months in prison with hard labour. But McMahon had met his MI5 handler on the 13th July and named the day and place that the regicide attempt would be made. They neither placed him under observation nor tailed him as he set out on 16th July carrying a .36 calibre revolver loaded with four bullets and with more ammunition in his pocket. He even had the nerve to ask a mounted policeman to shift out of his line of vision and he took the gun from his pocket, yards from the King. The King had no doubt that the threat to his life had been real and he and his future wife Wallis Simpson wrote after the incident, 'The shot at HM and the upset summer plans have all been very disturbing...No place seems very safe for Kings'. 276pp.