Eighty years ago, an icon of Royal bagpiping goes to the bottom

As Prince Paul, the anglophile Regent of Yugoslavia, twisted and turned to escape unremitting German attempts to bring the country into the Axis, his British friends came to his assistance to improve his freedom of movement domestically. For long the strong man of Yugoslavian politics had been Milan Stoyadinovitch, who was broadly friendly towards Hitler and Mussolini, although he was chiefly interested in his own power and was widely thought to entertain hopes of making himself dictator. Prince Paul had Stoyadinovitch arrested and handed over to the British army in Greece. He was then interned in Mauritius as (in Churchill’s words) “a potential Quisling and enemy”. Churchill insisted the Governor of Mauritius, “should be informed he [Stoyadinovitch] is a bad man …Food and comfort should be appropriate to the scale of a Colonel.” The British foray into internal Yugoslav politics did not help ward off the diplomatically inevitable. In spite of growing popular opposition, in particul