The idea that there is some Real Marilyn — some living, breathing person hiding within the iconography — has been reliably deployed since Monroe’s own heyday. Indeed, it was a magician’s trick used in her first interview with Life magazine, published in 1952 a pivotal year in her career.

Monroe was at this point an emerging star, widely admired for her roles in All About Eve (1950) and The Asphalt Jungle (1950). However, her fledgling career had been nearly derailed by the revelations that she had posed for nude photos in her former life as a model; the photographer Tom Kelley had flogged the images to a calendar for a quick buck without her agreement. So the 20th Century Fox executives decided on a radical PR strategy: Marilyn would admit the whole affair, saying she needed the money to pay rent.

On the magazine’s cover — the first of six in a 10-year span — Marilyn backs up against the wall, eyes nearly shut, lips parted; she looks like you’re about to drunkenly kiss her at a party, like she’s not realized her ruched top is slipping down her shoulders. The promise is the same as in modern-day celebrity content: revelation, exposure, intimacy.

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In the interview itself, Marilyn is scolded for having “posed for calendar art when she was broke”. By way of illustration, the article reproduces the nude in full color. The captions contain an in-joke: above the nude is a black-and-white image of “Marilyn clothed”; “her taste in music is distinctly highbrow”, the copy snorts. Below, a big black arrow points to “Marilyn unclothed”. Not so highbrow then, were you Miss Mortenson? The reader is satisfied. They get to be titillated by the nudes; they also maintain their moral high ground; and they get to laugh at Monroe’s pretensions. They’ve got an eyeful of the Real Marilyn, in spite of all her airs and graces. Meanwhile, Monroe has swerved the scandal and saved her career. The interview was also the source of her best-known quip, a gag about wearing only Chanel No 5 to bed.

So this “sturdy blonde named Marilyn Monroe”, as the Life profile calls her, was already mastering a public-private Dance of the Seven Veils, a sort of PR striptease which is by now baked into the grammar of female celebrity. Her publicity coup was no doubt familiar to Kris Jenner, the momager of Kim Kardashian, who was alleged to have leaked her own daughter’s sex tape; half a century later, in 2007, the effect was precisely the same. But latter-day celebrities are Marilyn’s heirs, whether explicitly or not. In 2022 Kardashian wore Monroe’s “Happy birthday, Mr President” dress to the Met Gala, the subject of much indignation from Marilyn-watchers. In 1985, Madonna channeled the Monroe of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) in her Material Girl music video; later she would adopt a punkier version of Monroe’s peroxide crop. Both women were the subject of erotic taboo, closely watched by the press in every romantic clinch — often in a way that overshadowed their work. Madonna said of Monroe that she “became an adjective”; as such her persona could be put on and taken off, a shibboleth for “Hollywood”, “sexiness”, or “blonde”.

These same signals are used today by Sabrina Carpenter, who winks at the Fifties as another blonde, corseted coquette. Carpenter has built a brand on the kind of breathy euphemism that made Marilyn so irresistible; the difference is that today, we credit celebrities like her with being in on the joke. On film and in the media, Marilyn often seemed to be surprised by her own outrageous sex appeal; in reality it was carefully curated and her apparent unworldliness was just as much of a construct. But then, the whole business of celebrity was far less complicated in the Fifties. Public personas could be utterly managed and exposure was mediated through agents. In the age of social media, celebrities cannot be as perfect as Marilyn: they are overexposed and multidimensional; they are real. After #MeToo, we are more comfortable with stars who appear to “own” their sexiness; Marilyn’s status as object rather than subject makes us uneasy.

What does it mean to know her, then? For Andy Warhol, Monroe was all surface, all abstraction. This was his contention when he copied a promotional image of Monroe from the 1953 film Niagara dozens of times via silkscreen; he began this series immediately after her death in August 1962. Marilyn’s image was seen spiraling into chaotic replication; the garish Marilyns parodied her virality by making her seem to metastasize, over and over, in freakish copies. The pictures became self-propelling objects. This is not a woman but a meme, Warhol is saying, and the only way we can see her is through the process of imitation.

Marilyn has proved an irresistible subject for writers, too — in the years after her death, Joyce Carol Oates, Norman Mailer, Gloria Steinem, everybody worth their salt had a piece of Marilyn. She was pitched as the ultimate postmodern quandary, or as a case study in sexist scopophilia; framed as a dejected victim of men or a winking puppetmaster in her own defilement. Each writer draws out of Marilyn a sweeping theory about mass media, or feminism, or sex, often taking these readings to onanistic excess. Sarah Churchwell knocked the wind out of the often-nonsense biographies in The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe (2004), most of them amounting to precisely the sort of pseudointellectualism Marilyn herself was mocked for during her Actor’s Studio era, or when she claimed to enjoy Dostoevsky. Nevertheless, more than 20 years after Churchwell put all this to bed, the Real Marilyns keep coming. Sometimes the revenants come in the form of literary figments, and sometimes real people — Jasmine Chiswell, or “the TikTok Marilyn Monroe“, makes a living out of impersonating her; she lives in Marilyn’s former home in Burbank, twirling and pouting and selling beauty products. The house is haunted, she says, by Marilyn’s ghost; the real ghoul is closer to home.

The obsession with the “realness” of Marilyn Monroe is always voyeuristic. It always involves prurient study of her marriages; of sex and rape; of the Hollywood casting couch which by all accounts was her means of introduction to studio life. She once said she didn’t “want to be sold to the public as a celluloid aphrodisiacal”. So you can only imagine how she’d feel about this posthumous literary meta-eroticization. Her body has continued to be mined for tantalizing lumps of “real” ever since her death.

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The specific weirdness of Marilyn Monroe is her fame’s incomparable afterlife. Even as more and more people claim to find the Real Her, the memory of the woman has faded. I’d bet that most Zoomers don’t know what Monroe’s voice sounded like. I wonder how many have even seen Some Like It Hot or The Seven Year Itch. The oddity is that the search for the “real” Marilyn only intensifies as the real Marilyn recedes.

The hunt for the real Marilyn Monroe is part prurience, part catharsis. She is a pseudo-religious icon of a Hollywood heyday; but her status as icon jars with the vulnerable, ordinary, troubled woman who must have lived beneath. Her young, lonely death at 36 from barbiturate poisoning at the age of makes us uncomfortable; her secret pain, the miscarriages and violations, her asylum-bound mother and runaway father all leave a gauzy guilt over her pristine image. But if we don’t see her as real, this protects us from this guilt. In this sense she is more Anne Boleyn than Lady Diana, a historical curiosity rather than a woman in our time. Every biopic, every book, every exhibition is a failed excavation attempt — be under no delusions about that. The search is endless because Marilyn’s image was designed for endless reproduction.

As such, she slips through our fingers. Are we even sure there is a real woman beneath the white gown, beauty spot and fluttering eyes? This too-famous figure squats awkwardly between person and symbol, a category error. Every new attempt to pin her down peels back another layer; every new attempt merely produces a different copy. Really, all these retrospectives are a sort of land-grab: everyone wants Real Marilyn for himself.

Access to the mound was previously uncontrolled, which is how someone — most likely organized criminals — managed to dump so much crud here in the first place, on the outskirts of the village of Bickershaw. Now, it squats behind a thin wire fence. A sign put up by Wigan Council states that unauthorized access is a criminal offense. It reads: “Children must not play on this site”.

Bickershaw skirts the edge of Makerfield, one of the safest Labour constituencies in the country. It therefore falls to Josh Simons, who has represented the seat since the last election, to make entreaties on the villagers’ behalf. He is a wiry, cerebral young man who, before the age of 30, had joined and then left Jeremy Corbyn’s office over antisemitism, enjoyed an academic career at Cambridge and Harvard, and written a book on democracy in the age of AI.

But Simons has now been overtaken by a scandal of his own. It features a think tank he used to run, some donations from very wealthy people, a consultancy firm, a Sunday Times investigation. It is very Westminster. On Saturday, as Israel and the US started bombing Iran, he slipped out a statement resigning as a Cabinet Office minister.

Back in Bickershaw, locals — one of whom described the area a “black hole” — seem more worried about the mound. Daunted by the cost, no one wants to take responsibility. Not the King, who came to own part of the land on which the waste sits by accident and feudal right; nor Wigan Council, who have no money; nor the Environment Agency, who have no power. Residents are left furious that the latter is cleaning up an illegal dump in Oxfordshire, but not the one on their doorstep. Campaigning vigorously for May’s council polls, Reform UK, who came second in Makerfield at the last general election, sense blood.

When I visit Bolton House Road in the week leading up to Simons’ resignation, there isn’t much of a smell. This is not unusual, according to Chloe Humphreys, a blonde 29-year-old who lives in a neat, whitewashed house at the end of the street — closer than anyone else to the mound. The stench depends on the direction of the wind and how warm the weather has been. When it is bad, though, it smells as if Chloe is living with her head stuck inside a bin.

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As we stand in her porch, she points out the broken fence across the road and abandoned trailers and dumped scrap metal beyond. “People are really nice around here but if you look back on Google Maps in 2011 people had pride, they made an effort,” she says. “Now it’s a state.” They may not have realized it themselves, but whoever dumped the waste was exploiting an area that was already on the decline, like a virus taking advantage of a body wracked by disease. “You kind of feel a bit like, ‘what’s the point? No one else cares’,” Humphreys says. For residents to do up their houses would be like, “chucking glitter at feces, really.”

When Chloe’s father, Andrew Humphreys, steps into the porch I ask his opinion of Simons. “I think he thinks everyone up North is stupid,” he says. “And if he thinks the person he’s talking to knows what he’s talking about he tries to shut him down.” I had only asked about the waste on their doorstep, but Andrew pivots immediately to Simons’ scandal: “To pay £36,000 to investigate two journalists is like…” he trails off, shaking his head.

Across Makerfield, knowledge of the affair seems hazy. Many people I speak to seem to have a sense that he has done something wrong. Fewer can articulate exactly what that is. Counting in his favor is a more pervasive sense that all politicians are screwing us in one way or another. If we know which rules Simons broke, then at least his sin is public.

The seat itself is a patchwork of urban and rural areas spread out below Wigan, in the badlands between Manchester and Liverpool. Flags — Union Jacks in some areas, St George’s Crosses in others — flutter from lampposts. Makerfield has been rock solid Labour for over 100 years now, but no one I meet can muster much enthusiasm for the party. According to an MRP poll published by Electoral Calculus in January, Reform would take Makerfield with over half the vote if a general election were held tomorrow. Simons, who won 45% in 2024, would crash to as low as 19%.

Ashton-in-Makerfield, the constituency’s largest town, is red-brick and handsome, albeit in a faded kind of way. A library endowed by Andrew Carnegie juts out at one central junction, but this great slab of Victorian architecture has been shuttered for years. Ashton Market was closed in 2017. There are “too many nail shops, vape shops, charity shops, kebab shops,” a middle-aged woman in a green apron tells me from behind the counter of a bakery.

She voted Labour because she was brought up supporting them and probably will do so again. “They’re doing a slightly better job.” She trusts Nigel Farage as far as she could throw him. But, she says, migration is a big issue. “People don’t feel safe in their own town any more, especially if they go out on their own at night.”

Personnel antipathy to Farage aside, it is this profile of voter that will make Reform confident they can make inroads here. Makerfield has a lot of working-class residents but is not particularly poor, falling near the middle of English constituencies in terms of deprivation. Demography helps in other ways too: at the last census, Makerfield was 97% white.

Altogether, then, many here vote Labour more from ancestral ties than conviction. Speaking last year at Reform’s North West Conference, Simons’ 2024 rival, Robert Kenyon, told supporters that Labour didn’t care that towns such as his had been transformed by the transplantation of “fighting-age males”. Talking to The Telegraph afterwards, the plumber said that the local Reform machine had “ramped up massively”. Already, he claimed, the party was putting on training workshops and gearing up for a fight.

Simons is well aware of the risk. Writing to ministers before last year’s spending review, he urged them to commit funding to build a road between Bolton and Wigan before the region lost faith that Labour might actually improve their lives. First proposed after the Second World War, Simons called the road link “among the most over-promised and under-delivered” infrastructure projects in the country. Certainly, the road between the two towns is often clogged bumper-to-bumper, slowing driving speeds to a crawl. Locals, Simons said, are “tired of being promised change but seeing little”.

Losing nearby Gorton and Denton in last week’s byelection, Labour saw its vote cannibalized from two directions. While some rejected the party over mass migration, others are turning Leftwards thanks to Gaza and Keir Starmer’s hardening rhetoric on asylum. Shaun Medvid-Staunton, keffiyeh-clad and walking his shitsus through Platt Bridge, a drab suburb running along an A road south of Wigan, is archetypal of the latter camp.

He tells me about how he was the first person to vote for Labour in Chester in 1997. He talks about serving as the in-house photographer for the party’s local branch when Ian McCartney — who described himself as the “Socialist MP for Makerfield” — represented the constituency. But, he says, “I watched the party become gentrified.” He considers Simons to be Blue Labour, not a proper Leftie. He will never vote for the party again.

Unlike in Manchester, there is no ethnic minority vote to speak of here that the Green Party might peel away with Urdu-language campaign videos. At the last election, they lost their deposit. But increasing their support among progressives such as Medvid-Staunton could help to deprive Simons of victory. Several people tell me they’re considering the party simply because they are neither the Conservatives nor Labour. One man, drinking alone in the town’s JD Wetherspoons, says he hopes Starmer will be replaced by Andy Burnham. If he isn’t, he may flip to the Greens.

If some are dumping Labour for more radical options, many others seem exhausted of politics altogether. At a gray pebbledash building, hunched behind a row of terraced houses, I meet Sarah Myler. When, as a small child, her daughter was diagnosed with serious health problems, Myler decided to teach her and her siblings herself. She discovered there was no home parenting group for Wigan — so she set one up. Then she realized how many elderly people in Ashton were lonely and how many others were broke, so she founded a community center. “I think it’s just, you see issues,” she tells me as we sit between rails of second-hand clothes and a pay-what-you-like café. “People moan about it but I’m more like ‘well, how can I fix this?’”

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A few years ago, Myler’s eldest daughter, Scarlett, was elected as one of three independent councillors for her ward. She was just 18. “I think people are just so, like, pissed off with the big parties,” her mom says. “So we tried Tories, nope. We’ve tried Labour, nope. It’s just picking between two bad things, really, isn’t it?”

Around Makerfield, the British state has proved unwilling — or incapable — of fixing problems. The illegally dumped waste squats by Bolton House Road; the road to Bolton is unbuilt; the high street keeps declining. A retreat into hyper-local politics and community organizing seems a natural consequence. Myler has been following Rupert Lowe’s independent inquiry into the rape gangs with interest. He, like her, took action after the Government declined to do so. If Myler had her way, she tells me, every political party would be dissolved.

As we speak, a gaggle of elderly locals chat on the other side of the room. I walk over and ask who they might support at the council elections. “They’re all as bad as each other,” says a man in a gray hoody. “At the last elections one man said, ‘I vote Labour’. I said, ‘what’re their policies?’ He said, ‘I don’t know. I vote for them ‘cause my dad does.’” The group all laugh.

Then an older man, blind in one eye, says he can remember canvassing for a Labour candidate in St Helens when he was eight. “There was a gang of us running around singing ‘vote Hartley Shawcross, vote Hartley Shawcross’,” he says. “But I’ll tell you what — he only did one term in St Helens because he got what he wanted.” And then Sylvia Wilkinson, another independent councillor, whose thick gray hair is streaked with white, adds: “They’re all the same!”

But Hartley Shawcross did not do one term and leave because he’d got what he wanted. He served for 13 years. And he was not the same as any other MP: he was Britain’s lead prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, filleting members of the Nazi high command with an elegant grace. As attorney general, he ensured Lord Haw-Haw was hanged. Now, he is no more than a punchline. In its traditional home, all Labour representatives have become just as bad as each other. And if they’ve not yet been exposed for some disgrace, as Simons now has, their collective future still looks grim.

Half a millennium on from Gutenberg, it is taken for granted that if something is written down, it’s remembered — which means (paradoxically) we can forget about it. So what happens when written records are lost? If no one else can quite remember, does that mean the event didn’t happen? This question has loomed large with recent revelations that the Cabinet Office’s “propriety and ethics” team broke into a safe in 2022, to retrieve a report detailing a historic investigation of allegations made against Dame Antonia Romeo, and then destroyed the dossier.

Romeo had been accused of bullying by Foreign Office staff while working as consul-general in New York in 2017. The investigation was later dropped, prompting some to claim a cover-up. The report was stored in said safe until 2022 when Darren Tierney, then head of the government standards watchdog, retrieved and destroyed the documents.

Was this a career-saving act of deliberate forgetting? If so, it worked: Romeo was appointed Cabinet Secretary last week by Keir Starmer. Tierney, for his part, insists he only obtained the report to help in redacting a memoir by the former diplomat Lord McDonald of Salford. The same Lord McDonald, in fact, who briefed last week against Romeo’s appointment; perhaps it’s a coincidence that a fishy incident of record-deletion should also bubble to the media surface at the same moment. Or perhaps not.

In any case, the impression is of all-out Whitehall war, as competing civil service factions vie for the chance to Yes, Minister Starmer’s ailing government. But beyond the byzantine intrigues of career bureaucrats, the casual destruction of an important report speaks to a deeper sense that Britain is now governed by a universal policy of strategic forgetfulness: an amnesiocracy.

There is surely a strategic amnesia in the ongoing, obdurate official inability to remember or grapple with the cumulative enormity of the rape gang scandals. Despite the horror this ongoing national catastrophe engenders, successive reports seem to generate outrage at intervals, only to be officially forgotten again, every time, without anything significant ever changing. Most recently, having reluctantly promised an inquiry, Labour seems to be trying to kick it into the long grass. Perhaps Starmer hopes the public will forget about all the child rape and torture, and stop asking.

A similar instinct seemed to guide the recent Ministry of Justice order for Courtsdesk, a digital court reporting resource, to delete its archives. After alleging that Courtsdesk had breached its agreement by sharing sensitive data with a third-party AI company, courts minister Sarah Sackman ordered the platform to delete its archive.

This prompted widespread outcry, with journalists warning that losing the archive would amount to covering up further grooming gang trials and drastically reducing the transparency of Britain’s criminal justice system. Then, hours before it was due to shut down, Justice Secretary David Lammy U-turned on the decision.

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Was Labour trying to make criminal justice records less accessible? It’s certainly the case that court reporting supplies a stream of judgments radically out of kilter with the moral instincts of the general public, especially where “human rights” are concerned. Were I an official in the Ministry of Justice, I dare say I’d be delighted to see a large, searchable, years-long open-access database of such criminal cases wiped, in favor of a system that required reporters to make individual (and no doubt usefully onerous) applications to individual courts for specific cases.

How deliberate you assume this habitual drift toward amnesia to be probably depends on how much trust you still have that the British government has your particular interests at heart. But even if we refuse to attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity, this still invites the question: why is our ruling caste getting stupider? Or, at least, more forgetful?

For amnesiocracy is hardly unique to Labour. In their noble recent pledge to cut student loan interest rates, for example, the Conservative Party seems unable to recall having designed the system in the first place. The same goldfish-like mentality appears to afflict the Tories elsewhere, while fulminating in Parliament about immigration, even as they appear to have forgotten just how much of this dyspeptic debate is a direct consequence of (really very recent) Tory policy decisions. Yes, they have to put on a show at PMQs; but the performance of not remembering previous policy decisions is so convincing it does look like they simply don’t remember.

When it comes to the habitual weaponized forgetfulness of our permanent bureaucracy, Cameron probably bears at least a share of the blame. For he presided over a primordial act of amnesiocracy: closing Britain’s civil service college, in 2012, to save money. This school served, from 1970 to 2012, as the repository and transmission mechanism for institutional memory within Britain’s permanent bureaucracy. When it was closed, few of its teaching functions were replaced. We can reasonably assume that, 14 years on, many of the older civil servants who trained prior to its closure have retired or left. Counting just the Fast Stream, we can estimate around 12,000-15,000 more have joined the service since Sunningdale closed; many of these have surely been promoted to positions of authority by now, all without any longer-term institutional memory.

Might this have anything to do with the complaint, now audible across both Labour and Tory figures, that ministers routinely pull levers and find that nothing happens? Was it Cameron’s decision to delete Britain’s institutional governance memory — one held in the aggregate memory of training personnel and veterans rather than written down — that began our long national slide toward the current sense of no one knowing how anything works? This isn’t quite the same kind of forgetfulness as the kind that elides “due diligence”, destroys files, or forgets to cut contact with convicted sex traffickers, but on a practical level it probably affects the public’s lives more from day to day.

Nothing is ever monocausal. Is it the phones? Hugh of St Victor would have been unimpressed with MPs who need the prompt of their iPhones to speak in Parliament, or who (allegedly) even use AI to compose their speeches. There’s also evidence that internet overuse affects memory, perhaps making all our governing class dimmer and more hyperfocused on the moment. Some even suggest this is a positive benefit: Big Thinkers have been asserting that “the Google Generation has no need for rote learning” since before David Cameron was elected.

Hugh of St Victor, meanwhile, would have insisted that without a store of memorized material to think with, everyone is more stupid. And regardless of whether you set much store by medieval monks, no one can deny that smartphones’ ubiquity has accelerated the news cycle to such a pace that a bureaucrat eager to bury inconvenient facts often only needs to wait for the next online panic. It takes a curveball event, such as the Epstein file release — by a foreign government with no particular incentive to make Labour’s life any easier — to cut through this strategy of weaponizing the public’s own forgetfulness.

Along with phones, could the comparative paucity of science and technology graduates in the Civil Service also be having an effect? The Telegraph reports that only 23% of top civil service officials have STEM degrees; once you exclude scientific advisers, this drops to a handful. And perhaps this paucity is also itself an effect. Reports point the finger at Civil Service recruiting practices that favor socially adept groupthinkers, and filter out anyone more interested in being right than being liked — a personality type that describes many STEM graduates.

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Intermittent efforts do seem to be made to inject a little more reality-orientation into the civil service. Dominic Cummings’ famous call for “super-talented weirdos and misfits” to refresh civil service thinking was, just as famously, defeated by the woman he called “Princess Nut Nut” – a woman who, despite obviously her ninja office politics chops, could not really be described as a STEM whiz. And though Cummings didn’t get his weirdos, after Covid, targets were put in place to increase STEM graduate recruitment in the Fast Stream. Recently, too, Labour have announced plans to establish a replacement civil service college, to replace the lost Sunningdale.

But what if this simply ends up transmitting the existing government culture to a new generation, amnesias and taboos and all? What if they’re still filtering out anyone detail-oriented but disagreeable? If so, nothing will change. For the amnesiocratic tic ultimately points toward something far more fundamental than training schemes or recruitment quizzes: a basic metaphysical outlook that treats reality as something conjured into being by fiat, through the written word.

Depressingly familiar among progressive arts graduates, and woefully incompatible with planning and executing anything substantial in the world of atoms, this is the mindset that asserts humans are whatever sex they say they are. It’s perhaps also the mindset that treats destroying a report as equivalent to un-happening the events in the report. The same one that writes lengthy programs for change no one has the slightest idea how to implement, and will have forgotten about next week, while private equity buys up GP surgeries and family homes, sinkhole repair lorries fall into sinkholes, and Britain’s high streets are taken over by ethnic mafias.

This conflation of speaking with doing is bad enough when we’re talking HR policy. It’s worse when the task is to complete (say) a high-speed rail link on time and to budget. It’s worse again when it tacitly opts, even in the face of the documented, organized, gang-based, racially aggravated rape and torture of children, to go on ignoring the problem, perhaps in the hope that by doing so it will magically go away.

So it may be that the root cause of amnesiocracy, is simply that we’re governed by ideologically conformist arts graduates who shut out truth-seeking nerds from power, think words are the same as action, and wouldn’t recognize a workable construction schedule if it bit them on what Hugh of St Victor might have called their “nates”. Throw in a loss of institutional memory and a dose of common or garden nates-covering and hey presto. But this is the hopeful reading, as such a situation is not insuperable: in theory, we could course-correct by re-orienting government recruitment back toward the reality-based community.

Let us hope this is the case. For the alternative is far worse: that the rot goes all the way up. That no one is coming to save us, and we are governed at all levels by at best intellectual lightweights, or otherwise outright frauds, who know exactly what’s what but simply respond to awkward facts by deleting them from the record, and hoping the public forgets they ever asked.

The short answer is abusing his royal position to fraudulently accrue a personal fortune and receive sexual favors. If rumors that he is writing his memoirs to tell his side of the story, and set the record straight of his contested legacy are true, the principal obstacle will be that he remains clueless about what he has done wrong. In reality, Juan Carlos’s conduct has not changed much over the last half a century, but what Spanish citizens expect of their leaders is now completely different. The Emeritus King isn’t accustomed to giving explanations, the Spanish media having historically treated him with kid gloves and the general population indulging rumors around his infidelities as part of his Don Juan charm.

But you’d be wrong to think it’s all sexual deviance and financial corruption. Juan Carlos is the chief architect of modern Spanish democracy, whose leadership was central to the country leaving behind its dictatorial past and becoming an active member of the European Union. While detractors claim that he had a blithe disregard for the rules and regulation of democratic law, apologists point to the fact that Spanish democracy might not even exist were it not for Juan Carlos. It remains to be seen which of the two opposing interpretations will overshadow the other in history books of the future.

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On the day Juan Carlos was born, in Rome in 1938, the exiled Spanish royal family were optimistic about returning home. The Spanish Civil War, which began in 1936 with a military coup against the democratically elected government of the Second Republic (1931-1936), was turning in favor of the Right. General Francisco Franco proved remarkably successful at convincing a broad church of conservative factions that their interests would be best protected under his command. He always gave the impression that his success would secure the return of the royal family who left Spain with the proclamation of the Second Republic.

Following his victory, however, Franco had no desire to share power. Don Juan de Borbón, Juan Carlos’s father and heir to the Spanish throne, was extremely bitter about being hoodwinked by the upstart dictator. Presenting himself as a democratic alternative, he became increasingly vocal about his criticisms of the regime following Allied victory in the Second World War. The Spanish royal family had not bothered much about democracy during the Civil War, but Don Juan played on the fact that, with Hitler and Mussolini gone, Franco was a fascist relic.

As for El Caudillo himself, he was preoccupied by the question of succession. He was not averse to a hypothetical return to the royal lineage after his own death: as long as the core values of the regime remained intact. Don Juan’s vocal criticisms of the regime therefore ruled him out as a potential successor. Used — to borrow a phrase from Spanish historian Paul Preston — as a “shuttlecock” in power games between Don Juan and Franco, Juan Carlos was removed from his family as a child and sent to Spain where he was groomed as a prospective head of state. Educated in military academies, he realized the armed forces would never forgive his father for speaking ill of Spain abroad. Juan Carlos was not particularly academic or intellectual, but he developed arguably more important skills: quick-thinking, bonhomie and a chameleon-like ability to adapt to different scenarios.

Juan Carlos’s profile both in Spain and abroad were raised when he married Princess Sofia of Greece in 1962. Their honeymoon gave them the opportunity to meet foreign diplomats, and to present themselves as representing the best candidates to steer Spain towards a peaceful transition to democracy. Franco kept his own counsel, maintaining Juan Carlos close without making his succession plans explicit. Ironically, given his love of hunting and bullfighting, Juan Carlos’s first state appointment was as the president of the Spanish branch of the World Wildlife Fund in 1968. During the dictatorship, Spain never recognized Israel and maintained close socio-political ties with Arab countries. In his capacity as the Iraqi ambassador, Saddam Hussein received the Grand Cross of Isabel the Catholic Queen in recognition of his services to Spain from an ailing Franco, and a young Juan Carlos, in 1974. Juan Carlos was at least as interested in the economic and strategic importance of states as potential allies to Spain as he was in their democratic credentials, or lack thereof.

Keen not to burn any bridges, and aware of the need for dialogue if Spain wasn’t to be plunged into chaos, Juan Carlos was assiduous in meeting with Spanish politicians and opinion-makers from across the ideological spectrum in the years leading up to Franco’s death. On becoming head of state, he never tired of saying that he sought to be “King of all Spaniards” in televised and parliamentary addresses. This formulation, crucial in avoiding a return to the bitter bloodshed of the Civil War, conveniently ignored the fact that, for all his royal credentials, his institutional legitimacy derived from being a dictator’s chosen heir (and, to this day, Juan Carlos and Sofia will not allow anyone to badmouth Franco in their presence). Sofia, who speaks fondly of Franco in interviews, credits his daughter with not sabotaging the succession.

On the one hand, more influence was concentrated in the King’s hands than in any of his royal counterparts in Europe. To all intents and purposes, the remit of his role had been designed by a dictator. Conversely, he was the monarch with a most precarious position. The Spanish royal family were not as integrated into society as, say, the House of Windsor in the US. Juan Carlos walked a tightrope to mediate between Francoists with scant democratic or international credibility, who nevertheless held institutional power, and an opposition whose principal negotiating card was to imbue the transition with legitimacy. The King’s political survival being tied to non-radical democratization ensured his role is better assessed in tactical, not ethical terms. Nothing short of an expert tactician would have delivered, given the constant threat of potential saboteurs to Spain’s nascent democracy.

The Basque terrorist organization ETA had assassinated Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, Franco’s Prime Minister and right-hand man, in 1973. His successor, Carlos Arias Navarro, shed tears on live television when announcing Franco’s death. Committed to keeping Francoism alive, Arias Navarro was an obstacle to democratization. In July 1976, Juan Carlos requested Arias Navarro’s resignation. He was replaced by Adolfo Suárez, an ideal ally to secure democratic evolution not revolution. Aged 43, his relative youth signalled a changing of the guard. But the fact he had been a politician and director of the state broadcaster under Franco reassured the more conservative sections of Spanish society.

When it came to the first general elections since before the Civil War in 1977, the King showed a complete lack of impartiality. Leaving nothing to chance, he wrote to the Shah of Iran and Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia to request funds to support Suárez’s election campaign, playing up the then anti-monarchist Socialist Party’s Marxist credentials at a time when communism was a very clear and present danger to the status quo in the Middle East.

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Suárez won comfortably in 1977, but his popularity soon waned. With a challenging economic situation, and violence in the Basque Country, many Spaniards arrived at the conclusion that democracy wasn’t working. The 1979 general elections had the lowest turnout in recent Spanish history. Suárez narrowly defeated the Socialists who, under party leader Felipe González, then became less threatening by ditching references to Marxism from their party constitution. González and Juan Carlos had a shared interest in moving the Socialists towards the center, as well as sidelining the Communist Party as a major force on the Spanish Left. Opinion polls consistently stressed that the general public’s principal priority was stability, and avoiding another Civil War, as opposed to the installation of democracy. Juan Carlos was seen first as a guarantor of stability and, only later, of democracy. Paradoxically, his reputedly indispensable role in both respects meant that he was free of checks and balances, a hallmark of any genuinely democratic state.

Juan Carlos was, in more ways than one, a hands-on monarch. Amadeo Martínez Inglés, a retired member of the military turned amateur historical sleuth, calculates that the Emeritus King has had 4,786 lovers, peaking with 2,154 between 1976 and 1984. Amid political turmoil, Juan Carlos’s playboy lifestyle rivalled that of Julio Iglesias (who would, some years later, gift him a lion cub, named “Hey” in honour of a signature song written about the romantic crooner’s ex-wife). The Spanish public was last year captivated by newly unearthed audios and photographs that seemingly confirmed long-standing rumours of Juan Carlos’s affair with Bárbara Rey, a vedette.

A mixture of gratitude and fear protected Juan Carlos from public scrutiny for many years. The transition, both at home and abroad, has traditionally been construed as Spain’s success story, the suture of the wounds of a bitterly fratricidal conflict, which cleared the way for the country’s belated modernization and European integration. In many respects, 1981 is a more important date than 1975 as regards the democratization process. For the six years following Franco’s death, a return to dictatorship was a genuine possibility, as the armed forces threatened to derail the new form of government which had left many Spaniards skeptical of the ability of democrats to run the country.

An attempted coup took place on 23 February 1981. It involved members of the Guardia Civil entering parliament, effectively holding democracy hostage, while tanks rolled onto the streets of Madrid and Valencia. The chief agitators claimed to be acting under the orders of Juan Carlos — we will possibly never know if there is any truth to their claims. A televised address from the King to his subjects, pledging his commitment to democracy, was instrumental to the coup failing. Skeptics of Juan Carlos’s democratic credentials have always asked why it took the King so long to address the nation; the televised address only took place after the coup had descended into farce. This remained a minority view until fairly recently, with footage of the King’s address shown on Spanish state television ad nauseam over the coming years. Young Spaniards were indoctrinated with the belief that potentially lethal threat to Europeanization had been averted through the fortitude and quick thinking of Juan Carlos, who steered the country towards a stable monarchical democracy, built on the bedrock of the free market and barring memories of the past from dictating the future. His private peccadillos were viewed as trifling in comparison with such exemplary public service.

The newly monarchical Socialist government, which won a landslide victory in the 1982 general elections under the party leadership of Felipe González, was the youngest in Europe, the first time the Generation of 1968 had been in charge of a major European government. When, in 2018, I interviewed González, the longest serving President of the democratic period, he emphasized the debt he and the general public had to the King for facilitating a transfer of powers to parliament. Many would beg to differ. A less picaresque figure than Juan Carlos would perhaps have been unable to midwife the transition, variously reassuring and playing off different factions of Spanish society. The issue is that he continued to act as a rogue and a rake when circumstances no longer demanded such qualities.

Juan Carlos’s instinct for measuring and manipulating the public mood deserted him with the crash of 2008. As millions of Spaniards lost their jobs, and struggled with mortgage repayments, the King considered divorcing Sofia to marry his long-term mistress, Corinna Larsen, with whom he was photographed on a hunting expedition in Botswana in 2012: all while citizens were still feeling the financial pain. Accounts differ as to what then ensued, but what we do know is that the Spanish secret services sought to persuade the German-Danish businesswoman to end the relationship, fearing that a scandal could rock the foundations of the state. She construed this as a threat.

When Larsen ended the relationship, Juan Carlos sought to recoup the millions he had lent and laundered through his mistress. She saw things differently and did not believe that her retaining funds were dependent on an ongoing romantic attachment. The Spanish press and the population were in no mood to mollycoddle the wayward Don Juan, who was now considered to be at the center of a corrupt establishment that let the country and its citizens down. An increasing number of Spaniards began to question the “great men” accounts of the transition.

In 2014, Juan Carlos was pressured into abdicating in favor of his son, Felipe VI. Fearing a potential overturning of the legal immunity granted to living monarchs, the Emeritus King sought refuge with his old political chums in the Arab world. On his occasional returns to Spain, he has been kept at a distance by his family.

Juan Carlos’s downfall is the consequence of not only his personal and political failings, but also a social structure that exalted a man with all too human foibles as almost God-like. The result is closer to farcical soap opera than classical tragedy — anagnorisis has been in short supply. It is difficult to see Juan Carlos as anything other than a foolish old man. What remains to be seen is whether he will be written into posterity as the hero or villain of modern Spanish democracy.