Tuesday April 16, 1985

 Moorhouse Inn

Gunther von Reibnitz.

6:30am start. Went to shift barrels around the cellar in readiness for the dray delivery. Up at 8 for bacon. Ally couldn't get up. Switched on Breakfast TV and saw the news. The headlines are the revelation that Princess Michael of Kent's father was a member of the Waffen-SS from 1933. Bit of stink. I fail to see why such excitement has been generated by this. A palace spokesman says the news, printed in a new and scurrilous book, came as a shock to Princess Michael. Has there been a cover-up? Did the Queen know? &c. It is nonsense. You'd hardly expect a German aristocrat with the name Baron Gunther von Reibnitz to join the Scots Guards, could you? Living in Germany in the 1930s he would have had little choice. Princess Michael did not meet her father until she was 18. He disappeared to Africa after the war. All very tenuous and trumped up. The anti-monarchists are having a field day. The coverage on the BBC news is outrageous. Pictures of Hitler and Eva Braun at Berchtesgaden intermingled with horrific shots of Belsen and the Kents wedding in Vienna in 1978. Surely, not acceptable? HRH is expected later to be at a Buckingham Palace banquet later for the state visit of the president of Malawi.

Phoned Dad.

-=-