On the face of it, there is no smoking gun for those suspecting a dark conspiracy involving the Queen and the British Establishment to sack a democratically elected Labor prime minister of independent Australia.
Smoking guns are sometimes carefully hidden but the Queen does seem to have stayed out of the decision itself when the then Governor-General of Australia, Sir John Kerr, sacked the Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, on November 11, 1975.
In fact it seems Sir John Kerr didn't warn the Queen in advance of his decision to axe Whitlam.
The Kerr-Buckingham Palace letter - immaculately typed (though no doubt not by the authors themselves) - do give a delicious flavour of the way the upper crust of the Australian and British public service talked to each other - "clubby" would be the word.
This is a genteel shared world of college and club and common values (by which I do not mean the values of the common people).
Common values like the lore of cricket.
Here's Sir Martin Charteris, The Queen's Private Secretary, writing to His Excellency Sir John Kerr, Governor-General of Australia on October 8, 1975: "From your point of view, this would have been a real bouncer and not at all easy to play."
They are discussing scenarios - what would the constitutional position be if this were to happen or that? What might you do if so and so did that? It is a discussion involving lots of shoulds and woulds and coulds, all couched in that immaculate public (civil) service way made familiar in the Yes, Minister series. It really is the Queen's English.
The Queen was clearly kept well informed and if she didn't talk to the GG in Government House herself, then her son did.
There is an intriguing line in another letter from Sir Martin (or, to give him his full title as written in the letter: Lieutenant Colonel the Right Honourable Sir Martin Charteris, K.C.B., K.C.V.O., O.B.E., Private Secretary to The Queen).
He wrote from Balmoral, the Queen's autumn residence in Scotland: "Prince Charles told me a good deal of his conversation with you (Sir John) and in particular that you had spoken of the possibility of the Prime Minister advising the Queen to terminate your commission with the object, presumably, of replacing you with someone more amenable to his wishes."
The Queen would "take most unkindly to it" but she would have done it.
It raises another crisis scenario: Mr Whitlam asking the Queen to sack Sir John who was trying to sack Mr Whitlam - and that would have brought the Queen right into the middle, deciding who should stay.
The letter ends: "Let us hope none of these unpleasant possibilities come to pass."
But "unpleasant possibilities" did come to pass.
