The crown that fitted perfectly

Professor Preston has done his subject proud. This is a better biography than his 1,000-page indictment of Franco, not only because he is in sympathy with the Spanish king but because, in some respects, he now appears less implacably hostile towards the Generalisimo. It was thanks to Franco, after all, that the monarchy was restored, and in the person of a man who, by his sacrifice and dedication, was far better qualified than the other candidates for the succession to transform his country from dictatorship following civil war to a democratic system acceptable to his people. The old Caudillo might have turned in his grave a few times, but he unquestionably chose the right man for the job, albeit not quite the job which he had envisaged for his protégé.

The outlines of Juan Carlos’s earlier life may be familiar. He was sent to school in Switzerland aged eight, to Spain for the first time shortly before his 11th birthday, to be educated at private schools, followed by military training in the three armed services and a spell at Madrid university. Until 1975, when Franco died, Juan Carlos lived, as Preston puts it in a chapter heading, ‘a life under surveillance’, and though the monarchy was nominally ‘restored’ in 1948, the prince had to wait another 20 years before Franco appointed him his successor. The value of Preston’s book consists in the exhaustive, and occasionally exhausting, detail which he provides in telling the remarkable story of Juan Carlos’s often troubled life. (Apart from being constantly under Franco’s super- vision, as a teenager he accidentally shot dead his younger brother.)

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Treading an almost impossible path between his ‘guardian’ in Spain and his exiled father in Portugal, Juan Carlos was regarded by the Left as Franco’s puppet and by Falangists as the son of his father and therefore a dangerous liberal.