The Crown makes difficult viewing for IRA apologists

Series four of The Crown begins with the murder of Lord Mountbatten at Mullaghmore in August 1979. Mountbatten was killed with three others, on the same day 18 British soldiers were ambushed at Warrenpoint. It was a devastating blow for the British establishment. But it held a more intimate horror too.

If you listen carefully to the scene in The Crown, you can hear Mountbatten speak to a ‘Paul’ as they prepare his boat, Shadow V, for its fateful journey out of the harbour before being blown to pieces by the IRA.

‘Paul’ is 15-year-old Paul Maxwell, who along with Mountbatten’s grandson, 14-year-old Nicholas Knatchbull, was one of two children the IRA murdered that day in their obsessive desire to assassinate Mountbatten, who had made his summer home across the border in Ireland.

Paul Maxwell went to my old school, Portora Royal, in Enniskillen, a few years ahead of me. Paul gets that one brief reference by name in The Crown and then later, merely as the ‘boat boy’.