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One would have thought this particular can of worms might, after nearly 80 years, be well past its sell-by date. But books about Mrs Simpson and her infatuated king appear with thudding frequency, each with some ever more far-fetched theory about this curious union. Now comes the leaden hand and leaden prose of Andrew Morton, with yet another: that Wallis was, all her life, in love with another man long before, during and after her experience of vitriolic abuse, first as the besotted prince’s obsession, then scapegoat for his abdication, and object of vilification during her years as his wife.

This love (to borrow words from her step-great nephew, ‘whatever love is’) may well have been real. The man in question was Herman Rogers. The scion of an aristocratic family, he was educated at Yale where he was a ‘Bones man’ — the highest recognition of pure decency that institution can bestow — and handsome and rich to boot, and therefore certainly attractive. He was also artistic, gentle, kind and generous — and long married to a woman with whom he shared entire and mutual happiness. It’s not, therefore, unlikely that Mrs Simpson, even when still the wife of the alcoholic, cruel Win Spencer, may have seen Rogers as an exemplar for a platonic liaison. One can be in love with people one esteems.

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But in this meretricious book, Morton claims that all along it was Rogers she desired sexually. Attributed sources (a rarity for Morton) for this laughable premise are scant; Rogers’s stepgranddaughter, one Barbara Mason; and a Kitty Blair, his stepdaughter-in-law. Neither was close or old enough to be a witness and, fatally, they contradict each other on the very same page. Blair tells Morton that Wallis ‘was never intimate with Herman’, but two paragraphs earlier Mason claims that she ‘wanted to try a different type gene-pool for the father of her child’.