THE WIZARD BEHIND THE THRONE?

Merlin’s Muggle Puppet, the Prime Minister,and the Scandal That Some People (Not Me, Obviously) Refuse to Stop Talking About

Rita Skeeter Staff Reporter

The Hero We Never Asked For

When the Statute of Secrecy finally collapsed—after centuries of denial, cover-ups, and the usual Ministry insistence that dragons are rare atmospheric disturbances—the wizarding world did what it always does in a crisis.

It panicked. Politely.

Or at least that’s the official version.

I personally found it more… theatrical than that, but I’ll leave the historians to argue over adjectives.

Committees appeared first—obviously. Britain does not respond to chaos so much as it schedules it.

Then came subcommittees, because someone always believes the first committee was too emotionally stable.

Journalists, meanwhile, abandoned sleep in favour of speculation, while civil servants everywhere quietly discovered that the phrase national security had become rather more complicated than it had been the previous Tuesday.

I confess I felt almost sorry for them. Almost. Well — no, not really. But it sounded good on the page, didn't it?

Britain, however, had acquired a rather different problem.

Britain’s new Prime Minister (PM), meanwhile, was Arthur Pendragon.

Yes. That Arthur Pendragon.

And before anyone accuses me of embellishment—again—I checked three separate Ministry confirmations, three denials, and one secretary who simply laughed for seventeen seconds and hung up.

So yes. Him.

Tall, golden-haired, and infuriatingly photogenic, Pendragon looked less like a politician than the sort of man newspaper editors dream about during slow news weeks. Every public appearance seemed to produce another flattering photograph, another admiring headline, and, sooner or later, another entirely avoidable tabloid scandal. One month he was merely another rising politician. The next, he was somehow steering Britain through the greatest constitutional crisis of the century.

Coincidences happen. Every journalist knows that — or at least, they ought to. They also know that coincidence is an extraordinarily convenient explanation (and I mean extraordinarily) whenever the real story proves awkward.

Readers are, of course, free to believe that an exceptionally handsome young politician bearing one of the most famous names in British legend simply happened to arrive in Downing Street at precisely the same moment the magical and Muggle worlds collided.

Stranger things have happened.

I have reported on several of them.

Years in this profession have made me difficult to impress.

They have also made me deeply suspicious of stories that fit together a little too neatly.

Because there is one awkward detail that refuses to disappear.

Wherever Pendragon goes, Merlin Emrys has an astonishing habit of already being there—or arriving shortly afterwards.

It is worth pausing here to remember exactly who we are discussing.

Merlin is more than a decorated war hero, but he is the architect of modern magical reform, nor even the Merlin whose Chocolate Frog card has almost certainly outsold the memoirs of several former Ministers for Magic.

Merlin.

The wizard whose name survived the rise and fall of kingdoms.The sorcerer whose life has blurred so completely into legend that children hear stories about him long before they learn the names of half the Hogwarts founders.

Somewhere along the way, admiration quietly became assumption.

Universal admiration has always struck me as one of the least natural phenomena in public life. Whenever it occurs, a journalist would be wise to ask how it came about—and who benefits from preserving it.

That question became rather more pressing when I noticed how frequently Britain's newly elected PM happened to be standing beside the most famous wizard alive.

Professional necessity demanded curiosity.

Over the following weeks, I accumulated a remarkable collection of notebooks, but it left unanswered questions, Ministry files, contradictory witness statements, and enough over-brewed tea to concern even the most forgiving Healer.

None of it answered my original question.

If anything, it made the question larger.

By the end, I found myself considering a possibility so gloriously improbable that sensible people will almost certainly dismiss it at once.

Fortunately, unanswered questions have always sold rather better than comfortable answers.

Part I: The Puppet Master – Merlin’s Hidden Hand

Every investigation has to start somewhere.

Mine started with an argument.

Not because anyone was trying to prove a point, but because two otherwise sensible witches in Diagon Alley nearly came to blows over whether Pendragon had ever made a political decision without Merlin standing somewhere nearby.

By the time someone threatened to hex the teapot, I decided the rumour deserved another look.

Rumours are curious things.

Most collapse the moment you examine them.

Others grow stranger the closer you get.

The truly troublesome ones refuse to disappear at all.

Pendragon had not climbed quite as high as everyone believed on his own.

Merlin, according to those telling the story, had quietly been pushing from behind all along.

Over the following weeks I interviewed Ministry officials, retired Aurors, Muggle civil servants, two bartenders who remembered far more than they probably should have, a portrait with remarkably strong opinions about constitutional law, and one house-elf who refused to leave the cupboard for reasons that remained unexplained.

Agreement proved disappointingly rare.

Dates wandered.

Locations changed depending on who was speaking.

One witness confidently described events in an order that would have required time itself to exercise unusual flexibility.

I briefly considered checking whether anyone had misplaced a Time-Turner.

The details rarely matched.

The conclusion almost always did.

Somehow, no matter where the story began, it eventually wandered back to Merlin.

Different people remembered different meetings.

Different years.Different conversations.

Yet every version contained the same inconvenient figure standing quietly somewhere in the background.

Merlin had an extraordinary habit of appearing wherever history later decided something important had happened.

Again and again, at moments people later decided had mattered, someone remembered seeing Merlin somewhere in the background.

One particularly enthusiastic source offered the following account:

— I saw it wiv me own eyes, I swear. That great wizard, right, he comes into the Muggle election office—dressed up like one of them canvasser types, can yer believe it?—an' he waves his wand at the ballot boxes. Flash of green light, an' next mornin', Mr Pendragon's poll numbers? Doubled, just like that. Doubled! Ain't that a bit fishy, eh?

— (Anonymous Ministry source)

Extraordinary.

Not necessarily impossible.

Unfortunately, the gentleman also believes Cornelius Fudge has spent several years disguised as a badger somewhere in Devon.

Professional caution therefore seemed advisable.

Tempting though it may be, dismissing the story outright would be every bit as careless as accepting it without question.

The account is almost certainly exaggerated.

That does not make the timing any less inconvenient.

Exaggeration and coincidence have an irritating habit of sharing the same table.

Pendragon's rise was undeniably swift.

One month he was simply another ambitious politician attracting occasional attention.

Next, he had become almost impossible to avoid.

His face appeared on front pages with suspicious regularity.

Television producers seemed unable to book him often enough.

Even international summits somehow discovered that their official photographs improved considerably whenever Arthur happened to be standing in the front row.

Editors, I suspect, had realised what every tabloid eventually learns: handsome politicians sell remarkably well.

By the time much of Britain had finally learnt his name, an alarming number of people had already decided they trusted him.

Charm undoubtedly helped.

So did confidence.

History has never been especially resistant to either.

Electorates, as generations of politicians have discovered, are often remarkably forgiving when presented with good timing, convincing speeches, and someone who looks exceptionally comfortable in front of a camera.

One detail, however, kept finding its way back into my notebook.

No matter how often I crossed it out, another source mentioned it again.

After employing methods I shall describe only as inventive—and which my solicitor continues to discourage me from discussing—I eventually obtained what appears to be an internal memorandum from the Muggle Electoral Commission.

According to the document, investigators detected traces of unexplained magical residue on several voting machines shortly before polling day.

The Ministry responded with admirable speed.

Officials assured both governments that the residue posed no danger whatsoever and attributed it to nothing more alarming than lingering Floo powder—an unfortunate case of magical contamination, regrettable but entirely harmless.

Readers are, naturally, free to accept that explanation.

Government departments are forever explaining why curious events are perfectly harmless.

Experience has taught me that such explanations deserve to be read very carefully indeed.

I eventually obtained what appeared to be an internal memorandum.

Exactly how is a question my solicitor has advised me not to answer.

After enough years reporting on Ministry affairs, one develops certain occupational habits.

Mine include becoming deeply suspicious whenever officials appear unusually eager to reassure the public that nothing at all has happened.

The memorandum, interesting though it is, raises a more intriguing question.

Why Arthur Pendragon?

Why is him?

Britain has never lacked ambitious politicians. Nor has it lacked experienced ministers eager to occupy Downing Street. Pendragon was neither the oldest nor the most obvious choice.

He was neither a veteran statesman, nor the architect, and certainly not — well, let's be honest — any of the senior ministers one might reasonably expect to influence government.

Before long I noticed another pattern.

Whenever Merlin appeared in the records, Arthur was rarely very far away.

Occasionally it happened the other way round.

The result was much the same.

Photographs captured them together so frequently that one wonders whether newspaper archivists eventually abandoned the effort of filing them separately. Merlin addressed Arthur by his first name without the slightest concern for appearances, while Arthur seemed entirely untroubled by the fact that the most celebrated wizard alive had an uncanny habit of appearing wherever he happened to be.

Oddly enough, none of this seemed remarkable to the people who worked around them.

They behaved as though such familiarity were perfectly ordinary.

I found that considerably harder to believe.

For centuries, Merlin has cultivated a reputation for being almost impossible to find. Historians have spent careers trying to reconstruct fragments of his life. Researchers have crossed continents pursuing rumours of his whereabouts. Biographers eventually reach the same weary conclusion: just when the trail appears promising, Merlin disappears again.

Arthur Pendragon has never appeared burdened by that difficulty.

People who struggled for decades to arrange a single meeting with Merlin often found Arthur already sharing tea with him.

Perhaps that is nothing more than the privilege of an old friendship.

Perhaps years of mutual trust naturally make surprise unnecessary.

Or perhaps coincidence simply begins to resemble careful planning after repeating itself often enough.

As journalists, we are generally expected to notice when that happens.

Part II: Arthur Pendragon – A Beautiful Face, a Surprisingly Convenient Career

Let us, for the sake of balance (a quality I am frequently accused of lacking, unfairly I might add), turn to Arthur Pendragon himself.

Britain’s Prime Minister. 

However influential Merlin may be, there are still rather dull constitutional realities he cannot hex away. He does not stand for election in the Muggle world. Britain, in its infinite wisdom, elected Arthur Pendragon, and it is Arthur’s rather more visible ascent through the political ranks that deserves closer, and frankly less comfortable, scrutiny.

The easiest place to begin is also the least likely to provoke argument.

Arthur Pendragon is, and I know this is going to sound shallow, but honestly—by almost any reasonable standard, extraordinarily handsome. 

Even those who would happily question his policies, his judgment, or his taste in ties tend to concede this point—usually with the kind of reluctance normally reserved for admitting a tax audit went smoothly.

Arthur Pendragon is, and I say this with some reluctance, the sort of man who makes journalists forget they are supposed to be cynical.

I am not proud of that fact.

Nor do I deny it.

It is simply observable.

Everyone wants to dig something out of him. And if it's a scandal, well, that just makes it rather more interesting.

Veteran political journalists, long past the point of believing they are immune to charm, tend to retreat into safer phrasing. 'Infuriatingly photogenic' has become something of a compromise. One columnist, less restrained than most, once described him as a haircut that appears to have acquired executive authority somewhere along the way.

Excessive? Or entirely baseless? That depends on how closely one has stood beneath the glare of a camera when Arthur enters a room.

Still, appearances have a limited electoral lifespan. They open doors, smooth introductions, soften opposition for just long enough to matter. And then they stop working.

Which brings us to the more interesting question—what, exactly, is left once the lighting is removed, the cameras are gone, and the carefully neutral expression drops away.

Those who claim to have known Arthur Pendragon during his Hogwarts years tend to suggest the answer is rather less reassuring than the public image would prefer to admit.

— Brilliant in Defence Against the Dark Arts. Couldn' fault 'im there. Everythin' else? Mostly ordinary. Professor Slughorn used to say Arthur brewed potions the way other people started house fires—full o' confidence an' very little plannin'.

— (Former Gryffindor classmate)

It is an unkind description.

Unfortunately for the PM, it was hardly unique.

Former classmates, teachers, and acquaintances remembered Arthur with striking consistency. Nobody questioned his courage. Plenty admired his determination. Academic brilliance, on the other hand, was mentioned rather less frequently.

One former classmate told me, after a drink and what I suspect was at least partial regret:
— He thought the PM was hereditary. I corrected him. Twice. He did not improve.
— (Former Gryffindor student, still emotionally recovering)

I honestly couldn't make that up if I tried. Nor would I want to.

And, inevitably, there was this.

— Lost an argument with a moving staircase.

— (Former Gryffindor prefect)

I never did manage to verify that final story, though not for lack of trying. And did that stop anyone from repeating it? Not in the slightest.

If anything, it only made the tale more irresistible.

On their own, these little anecdotes don't prove much, except maybe that Arthur has always had a gift for making everyone else laugh while somehow missing the joke himself.

But when you put them all together, a rather different picture starts to form.

Here was a man whose school record was perfectly respectable, sure, but hardly the stuff of legends. His understanding of Muggle institutions? Let us say it developed rather later than you would hope for someone who would end up running the country.

 And yet, somehow, he went on to become one of the most successful political leaders of his generation. That is a contradiction worth digging into.

Stories are good for reputations, but careers are another matter entirely. And none of those amusing little tales, as entertaining as they are, really explains what came next. Because if Arthur Pendragon were truly nothing more than a charming mediocrity, how did he ever end up in Downing Street? His political career should have fizzled out long before. Instead, it flourished. Rather inconveniently for those of us who prefer simple answers, I might add.

That inconsistency kept surfacing, over and over, in every interview I conducted. People remembered Arthur as impulsive.

Many called him reckless. Surprisingly few went as far as calling him unintelligent, and I think that distinction is worth making. More than one former classmate remarked on his infuriating habit of charging into situations before anyone else had even finished thinking them through, only to emerge with everyone somehow convinced that the chaos had been worth it.

It is an alarming quality in a schoolboy, but politics has a way of rewarding just that sort of thing.

Merlin, however, appeared in those stories with almost the same frequency. Not as Arthur's superior. Not as the one making decisions for him. Simply as someone who always seemed to turn up just a little earlier than everyone else.

One former Hogwarts professor, who asked to remain anonymous for reasons that became clearer the longer we spoke, made an observation I have not been able to shake.

— Arthur never stopped leaping before he looked, everyone knows that. Myrddin—I mean Merlin,  Well, he never really tried to stop him. He just had this irritating habit of showing up wherever Arthur was about to land, and I mean exactly where.

— (Hogwarts professor)

It is a subtle distinction, but an important one.

Watching where someone is going is not the same thing as choosing the destination for them.

Another former prefect remembered something rather different.

— We used to joke that Emrys had some secret spell for finding Arthur. Didn't matter whether Arthur was in the Great Hall, halfway across the grounds, or hiding somewhere he absolutely wasn't supposed to be. Merlin always turned up eventually.

— (Former Hogwarts prefect)

School jokes have an unfortunate tendency to become historical anecdotes once enough years have passed.

One former student, however, offered an explanation that was considerably less charitable.

— Want my opinion? Merlin spent a thousand years looking for King Arthur and finally decided this one would have to do.

— (Former Hogwarts student)

A ridiculous remark.

It was also, inconveniently, one I encountered often enough—sometimes word-for-word, sometimes merely the same idea rearranged—that I began to wonder whether repetition was meant as emphasis, or simply as habit. Either possibility is, in its own way, revealing.

Perhaps it says less about Arthur Pendragon than it does about Merlin.

Or perhaps people are simply comforted by the notion that even the most inconvenient legends can be reduced, at least occasionally, to something personal and recognisably flawed.

One detail, however, surfaced with monotonous consistency across all accounts.

To almost everyone else, Merlin remains what history insists upon: the greatest wizard of his age, an immortal figure whose reputation had already begun to harden into myth while most kingdoms were still arguing over their borders.

Arthur, by contrast, never appears especially impressed.

One former Ministry employee laughed when describing what he claimed was a familiar scene.

— Everyone else remembers they're speaking to Merlin. Arthur remembers he's speaking to Merlin. That's not quite the same thing.

— (Former Ministry employee)

Another witness was rather more colourful.

— Greatest wizard in history. Thousand years old. People practically whisper when he walks into the room. Arthur tells him he's late, hands him another stack of paperwork, and complains he forgot to bring lunch. Honestly, I still can't decide whether it's bravery or complete stupidity.

— (Former government adviser)

Curiously, no one seemed particularly surprised by Merlin's reaction.

He simply accepted it.

That, more than anything else, struck me as unusual.

Legends generally expect reverence.

Merlin, for reasons known only to himself, appears perfectly content to settle for Arthur Pendragon.

The pattern did not disappear after Hogwarts.

If anything, adulthood merely replaced castle corridors with Cabinet rooms.

Take the habit a former Ministry official pointed out – once you’d seen it, you couldn’t unsee it. When a difficult question landed, Arthur didn’t panic or bluff; he just looked for Merlin. Sometimes only a glance across the room, but always there, always steadying. After that, I started noticing it everywhere.

The pause was brief.

The glance almost imperceptible.

Then Arthur would answer, as though the hesitation had never existed.

Long friendships develop habits that outsiders rarely notice until someone points them out.

Whether this particular habit reflects confidence, trust, familiarity, or something considerably harder to define is a judgement I shall happily leave to my readers.

Part III: The Sorcerer’s Shadow – Merlin’s Grip on Power

By this point, some readers may reasonably be asking why so many threads in this account keep circling back to Merlin.

It is a fair question.

Officially, Merlin serves as one of the PM’s advisers.

An adviser.

A title so broad it is almost designed to conceal meaning. Governments distribute it with enthusiasm, applying it equally to those who shape policy and those who sit quietly in meetings, contribute nothing of record, and somehow survive every reshuffle.

Merlin, according to everyone I spoke to, does not sit comfortably in either category.

Over the course of this investigation, I interviewed former Ministry officials, civil servants, members of Arthur Pendragon’s staff, and one private secretary who looked as though sleep had become a theoretical concept rather than a practical experience.

They disagreed on almost everything that could be disagreed upon.

Policy, priorities, temperament, even basic recollections of who said what in key meetings—none of it remained stable across accounts.

Yet on one point there was a striking consistency.

Merlin Emrys.

His name appeared so frequently, and in such unremarkable contexts, that it gradually stopped being introduced with emphasis. It was no longer treated as an exception or a curiosity.

Instead, it became something closer to infrastructure—assumed, ever-present, rarely examined. Or perhaps that's too grand a word. Let's just say it was like the department kettle. Always there. Nobody thanked it.

Like Cabinet minutes that no one reads but everyone relies on. Or the kettle in a department kitchen that somehow never breaks, regardless of use or neglect.

One former Downing Street aide described a routine that eventually ceased attracting notice.

— Before the big speeches, Arthur would disappear for a minute with Merlin. Never long. They'd have a quiet word, then Arthur would walk straight out and face the cameras as though he'd been born doing it.

— (Former Downing Street aide)

No one I interviewed claimed Merlin wrote Arthur's speeches.

No one suggested he made decisions on Arthur's behalf.

Oddly enough, nobody seemed interested in making accusations that dramatic.

Instead, they described something far more ordinary.

Arthur wanted Merlin nearby.

One senior civil servant shrugged when I asked whether this struck him as unusual.

— After a few years? Not really. If Merlin wasn't there, people noticed.

— (Senior civil servant)

That answer lingered with me.

Governments grow accustomed to all sorts of peculiar habits. Most begin as exceptions before quietly becoming routine.

Arthur's reliance on Merlin appears to have followed much the same pattern.

Several officials independently described the same small gestures: a glance across a crowded meeting room, the slightest nod, a conversation that somehow continued without either man saying very much aloud.

One Ministry liaison smiled when I asked whether the stories had been exaggerated.

— Oh, they barely had to speak. You'd think the meeting was over, then Arthur would catch Merlin's eye and somehow the conversation wasn't finished after all.

— (Ministry liaison officer)

There is nothing especially mysterious about that.

People who have worked together for years often develop a kind of shorthand.

Married couples do it.

Also the auror partners.

The difference, perhaps, is that very few of those relationships have survived from adolescence into government while one participant quietly accumulated a millennium of life experience.

Another member of Arthur's staff offered an observation I heard echoed more than once.

— Arthur listens to everyone. Ministers. Economists. Generals. Foreign leaders. Then he'll ask Merlin what he thinks. It's not that Merlin makes the decision. Arthur just seems to trust him to notice whatever everyone else overlooked.

— (Senior government adviser)

That may be the simplest explanation of all.

There remained, however, one peculiarity that never quite fitted anywhere else.

For generations, scholars have complained that locating Merlin is almost impossible. Entire academic careers have disappeared into that pursuit. Historians reconstruct fragments of his life from letters, rumours, and second-hand accounts, only for Merlin to vanish again just as the trail begins to make sense.

Arthur Pendragon appears never to have been troubled by what most political leaders would describe as logistical inconvenience.

State visits, diplomatic summits, Ministry receptions, and even those occasions formally classified as national emergencies all seem to share one quiet constant: wherever Arthur is present, Merlin has a tendency to appear as well, often without any clearly documented arrival, invitation, or procedural necessity recorded by staff.

One former member of the PM's security detail remembered an overseas summit that caused considerable frustration.

— Security couldn't find Merlin nowhere. We checked the conference rooms, corridors, an' even the roof. Turns out 'e was sittin' in the PM's room, drinkin' a cuppa, while Arthur finished readin' the briefin' papers.

— (Former security officer)

The witness was careful to emphasise that Merlin was not, in any formal sense, directing officials or obstructing government business.

He was simply present.

It is, on paper, an almost banal observation. Yet it is precisely that banality which makes it difficult to treat as incidental. Ordinary explanations tend to lose their authority when they are repeated too often in contexts that are anything but ordinary.

Friendship accounts for part of it. Habit probably accounts for more.

Still, there reaches a point at which repetition begins to resemble pattern rather than coincidence, and a journalist is left wondering whether the word ‘accident’ is still doing the necessary work, or whether it has quietly stopped being sufficient.

Part IV: The Friendship That Refuses to Behave Like One

By this point, I had stopped expecting anyone to agree on anything.

A refreshing development, in its own way. Or deeply unhelpful, depending on whether one enjoys facts.

Nobody agreed on what Merlin and Arthur Pendragon actually were to one another.

And certainly not in any way that satisfied official explanations.

The approved version remains reassuringly simple.

They are friends.

Old friends, we are told, as though the word itself were sufficient to explain centuries of proximity, political entanglement, and the occasional collapse of entire governments.

Yet the more people I spoke to, the less useful that word became.

Friendship, it turns out, is an elastic concept when applied to men who have spent their lives refusing to behave in conventional ways.

One former Hogwarts professor, when pressed on the matter, paused for a long time before answering.

— They werena inseparable in the way people imagine. But if something mattered—really mattered—then somehow they always ended up in the same place.

— (Former Hogwarts professor)

That is not, strictly speaking, an answer.

It is, however, the sort of observation people make when they have given up trying to categorise what they have seen.

Several former students described something far more mundane.

Arguments.

Frequent ones.

— They argued about everything. Quidditch. Homework. Whether Merlin was cheating at chess. Then five minutes later they’d walk off together like nothing had happened.

— (Former Hogwarts student)

It is difficult to maintain hostility in the face of routine.

Another recalled:

— Most people have conversations. Those two had debates. Loud ones. Usually in corridors. Then they’d just… stop, and carry on as if it had never happened.

— (Former Hogwarts student)

What interested me was not the arguments themselves, but the absence of residue.

No grudges.No lingering tension.

No political fallout, even when both men later found themselves in positions where grudges would have been entirely justified.

Instead, there were smaller details.

The sort that people do not think to mention until someone asks the right question.

Books carried without comment.

Schedules quietly recovered.

Meetings interrupted by the arrival of information that had not been publicly available a moment earlier.

One former prefect recalled:

— Merlin always seemed to notice things first. Not in a dramatic way. 

— (Former Hogwarts prefect)

A deceptively simple observation.

Another, more candid, offered something rather less restrained.

— Everyone else sees Merlin and remembers they’re standing in front of a legend. Arthur just looks at him like he’s late for something.

— (Former Ministry employee)

That, I should stress, is not how most people behave around a wizard whose name has outlived several kingdoms.

To almost everyone else, Merlin remains what history insists he is: a figure of myth and history so old the boundary between the two no longer matters.

Arthur Pendragon appears entirely unaffected by this.

It is difficult to decide which is more unusual: Merlin’s lack of reaction, or the fact that no one else seems surprised by it anymore.

A former Ministry adviser put it rather more sharply.

— The rest of us meet Merlin. Arthur just meets Merlin.

— (Senior government adviser)

There is a difference in tone there, if not in words.

And then there is the more uncomfortable interpretation, the one that tends to appear only after several interviews have been compared and the laughter has worn off.

One former Hogwarts student, when asked to clarify what exactly Merlin saw in Arthur Pendragon, hesitated before offering the following:
— Ah... you ask me? Merlin spent a thousand years—such long time—waiting for King Arthur to come back. Then he saw this one and decided it would do. You know, the same name, and his appearance matches the legendary descriptions of King Arthur.
— (Former Hogwarts student)

It was the third time I had heard those words—or some version of them—in as many weeks. By then, I had stopped calling it a coincidence. 

Another source was even less charitable.

— The rest of the world sees Merlin, immortal legend, greatest wizard who ever lived. Arthur sees a man who forgot his cloak. 

— (Former Ministry official)

Whether that is affection, tolerance, or something more complicated is not immediately clear.

What is clear is the imbalance in perception.

One man is a living legend.

The other behaves as though that fact is largely irrelevant.

And legends, for all their power, are not generally treated with such casual indifference unless someone has decided they are no longer impressed by them. That, perhaps, — oh, who am I trying to fool?—is the most interesting detail of all.

Part V: Conclusions the Reader Is Entirely Free to Draw

And so we arrive where every investigation of any interest eventually ends: not with certainty, but with disagreement.

Some readers may find this disappointing. I suspect many officials would prefer it otherwise. The press, naturally, adjusts quickly.The facts rarely feel obliged to arrange themselves into a comfortable narrative simply because someone has asked politely.

There are, at least, a few points on which everyone appears to agree.

Arthur Pendragon is one of the most successful political leaders modern Britain has produced. Elections have been won. Crises have been managed. Alliances have held. Whatever one thinks of his government, it has proved rather more stable than many of his critics once predicted.

Those outcomes belong to Arthur alone.

No reasonable interpretation of events should suggest otherwise.

The difficulty begins only when one asks how such outcomes were achieved.

The official explanation is, on the surface, unremarkable. A young man of impulsive temperament matured into a capable statesman through experience and responsibility. It is a familiar story, and not an impossible one. Politics has produced stranger transformations.

We are also told that Merlin is nothing more than an adviser.

A trusted one, certainly.

An unusually constant presence, perhaps.

But still an adviser.

The sort of explanation that works best when repeated quickly, without interruption.

It is that they are incomplete.

Throughout this investigation I encountered disagreement on almost everything: dates, interpretations, motives, even basic recollections of shared events.

And yet one pattern refused to break.

Nobody I talked to had a good answer — not really. They'd just mumble something vague. And surprise? Forget it. It was like they'd already accepted it as normal, which I found odd in itself.

That, in itself, is usually worth noting.

The more extravagant theories—the ones that circulate in certain corners of the wizarding world, usually after midnight and several glasses of firewhisky—find no support in anything I uncovered. I found no document proving that Merlin governs Britain in secret. No confession. No memo ordering Arthur to act against his will.

What I did find, however, was a trail. Not evidence—not the kind that would survive cross-examination in a Wizengamot courtroom. But a trail. A pattern of presence. A habit of proximity. And a growing body of testimony from people who had watched both men for years and quietly concluded that something about their arrangement did not quite add up.

Proof? No. But it’s more than enough to make you wonder – and in my line of work, that’s usually where the real story begins.

And yet, Pendragon often seeks Merlin's opinion before making those decisions.
He might ask directly. Or he might just glance across the room.
Other times it's so subtle that you'd have to watch them for years to even notice.

There's a difference, of course, between influence and confidence—and it's not always easy to tell them apart.
Maybe Arthur really is everything his supporters think he is.
Maybe Merlin is simply an old friend who's outlasted centuries.
Both could be true. Neither quite covers it.

Postscript

So. Just as this piece was being rushed to the printers — well, no, that's not quite right, is it?

A source — you know the type, lurking in the Archives — slipped me a file. Off the record, of course. Obviously.

And yes, it is the one I asked for. The very one.

You would think that would be satisfying.

But not.

According to a second inspection — and I would very much like to know who ordered it, and why the first inspection was deemed insufficient — the voting machines did, in fact, show something.

Not Floo residue.

The report's exact phrasing is worth quoting: "Residual enchantment detected. Concentration non-actionable. No further investigation recommended."

Stop and think about that. If it really was harmless – truly not worth a second glance – why did someone order a fresh inspection? And more to the point, why did the margin carry the phrase “Recommend not to be archived”? In Ministry speak, that’s not a footnote; it’s a scream.

The official response, naturally, is denial. Calm. Polished. Entirely unconvincing.

Arthur Pendragon, meanwhile, has been behind that grand desk for three days now. Not appearing. Not commenting. 

Which, in my experience, is the Ministry equivalent of screaming.

The official response, naturally, is denial. Calm. Polished. Entirely unconvincing.

Arthur Pendragon, meanwhile, has been hiding behind that grand desk of his for three days now. Three days! Which, in political terms, is either business as usual or a full-blown panic — and I know which one I'm betting on.

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