He had, of course, had another bad night; a night when the recurring nightmares that he had never quite outgrown seized hold of him with such power that he’d thought, on waking, he was going to lose his reason. Now, in the Grotto Hall, he was trying to get a grip on himself. The person who had already lost their reason – the person who had begun playing the diplomat as if he were an autocratic ruler, not a constitutional monarch – was Bertie.

Almost immediately after the Boer War had ended, Bertie had made what, on the surface, was yet another of the personal pleasure trips to Paris that he had been making for more than forty years; a trip that appeared to have no political ulterior motive.

Except that it had, for devious Bertie had been laying the groundwork for an Entente Cordiale – a close, committed friendship between England and France. On his ‘pleasure trip’ he made impromptu public speeches (always, of course, in his fluent, flawless French) saying how he had always felt himself so very much at home in France. Everywhere he went – at a state banquet, at the races, at the theatre, at the Élysée Palace – he gave off-the-cuff speeches in his relaxed, affable manner. His charm-offensive and effortless bonhomie resulted in the Parisians cheering him to the rafters.

It was the kind of popularity that Willy constantly craved for himself, and the sight of arch-Satan Uncle Bertie achieving it with such effortless ease had made him want to vomit. A year later, when the Entente Cordiale had been formerly signed in 1904 and England was firmly allied with Germany’s enemy, France, he had wanted to vomit even more, for it meant there was now no possible hope of an alliance with England.

Bertie’s action had carved Europe in two, with England, France and Russia in one camp, and Germany, with her long-standing allies Austria–Hungary and Italy, in the other. And what use, Willy thought savagely, staring up at the Grotto Hall’s painted ceiling, would Italians be, when the chips were down?

It was at fraught times like this that he needed his close friend Phili and the distractions of tomfoolery that his company provided. But Phili was hundreds of miles away, writing Nordic ballads on his Liebenberg estate.

To his intense irritation, he heard footsteps approaching, and seconds later his eldest son walked apprehensively into the Grotto Hall, a newspaper held in a trembling hand.

‘Apologies for disturbing you, Papa, but I very much need to show you something.’

Willy’s jaw tightened. Wilhelm was twenty-four, had been married for little more than a year and had already begun whingeing that he found his delightful young wife boring.

‘What is it now?’ he snapped, too concerned with Germany’s future safety to be bothered with Wilhelm’s gripes about married life.