David Hencke reports on the long-running battle of historian Andrew Lownie against the Government over the release of documents which were bought on behalf of the public for millions of pounds by Southampton University
The hidden hand of the Royal Family is behind the Government’s determination to stop the publication of some of the diaries of Lord Mountbatten, which were bought on behalf of the nation for £2.8 million by Southampton University in 2010, Byline Times can reveal.
The dispute over the publication of the historical documents between the historian and author Andrew Lownie – who wrote a 2019 biography of the controversial figure and his wife – and the Cabinet Office will come to a head at a tribunal before the Information Commissioner in November.
The Government has already spent vast sums of money appealing against the documents’ release to the public – but neither the Cabinet Office nor Southampton University will disclose the full cost to the taxpayer. Southampton has already used £43,000 to hire a QC, but has said that it does not know how much its internal legal department has spent. Meanwhile, Lownie has put £250,000 of his own savings into the ongoing battle.
Lord Louis Mountbatten was the maternal uncle of Prince Philip and a second cousin of the Queen. He served as the last Viceroy of India and was in charge in the colony ahead of its independence and partition. The open relationship of Lord Mountbatten and his wife, Edwina, has been widely documented – as has her affair with India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.
The fight to secure the release of all of their diaries and correspondence started when Lownie began researching his 2019 book, The Mountbattens: Their Lives and Loves. When Southampton University said that it could not provide him with access to the documents he requested – which he knew to be part of the documents the institution had bought from the Broadlands Archive in 2010 – he took his case to the Information Commissioner, Elizabeth Denham.
But, despite winning the case and the documents being approved for publication, at every stage the Cabinet Office has blocked this. The Government has also – unusually – not revealed the text of a ministerial direction which was given to Southampton University, stating that some of Lord Mountbatten’s documents must be kept secret unless permission is given for publication by the Government.
Behind the opposing parties and the back-and-forth information judgments, however, is the shadowy role of the Royal Household, representing the Queen and the Royal Family, intent on keeping the contents of some of Lord Mountbatten’s diaries a secret.
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The dispute over the diaries relates to the interpretation of the original 1969 undertaking, inherited by Southampton University, by Lord Mountbatten not to allow the public release of the papers until they had been vetted.
The Cabinet Office has taken this to mean all of his papers and diaries. But the Information Commissioner interpreted this to mean only the official papers in his various roles in government, which he had kept separate from the diaries.
The undertaking specifically states that the documents should not be released “without the express permission of the Prime Minister of the day through the Cabinet Secretary”. But this explanation – given by current Cabinet Office Ministers Chloe Smith and Julia Lopez in reply to questions from MPs on the subject – has been blown apart by an issue that arose during Margaret Thatcher’s time in Downing Street in 1985, when she was preparing to hand over the ownership of some of the Mountbatten documents to Southampton University.
Thatcher wanted to ensure that the university did not make them only available to scholars – but to the general public. However, Cabinet Office and Downing Street documents show that, while she was nominally in charge, the Royal Household was in fact pulling the strings.
A handwritten note on one document states: “Prime Minister. I wonder if Sir Robert Armstrong [the then Cabinet Secretary] should ensure that the Royal Family have no objection. Subject to that, agree this loan?”
Thatcher was adamant that the public should have access to the documents and wrote in her own handwriting: “I shall not move anything to Southampton unless it can be properly available to the public.”
It took another four years before the loan agreement was implemented.
More evidence of royal influence came a number of years