Peter Jukes and Hardeep Matharu explore the real threats to history – emanating not from ‘wokeists’ intent on rewriting the past but an establishment elite regularly burying inconvenient truths to maintain Britain’s mythic narratives
He seems embedded at the heart of the British establishment. His house nestles in the Georgian backstreets behind Parliament, close to the precincts of Westminster Abbey and the network of right-wing libertarian think tanks on Tufton Street. His father was a judge and the portrait of his wife’s grandfather, General Sir Archibald Ritchie, who led the 26th Brigade in the 9th (Scottish) Division at the Battle of the Somme, stares out imperiously above his desk.
But literary agent and historian Andrew Lownie now finds himself on the wrong side of Britain’s official history. He has become a rebel against a system which, in his eyes, consistently and deliberately censors and distorts our national past.
While the last decade or so of online propaganda wars have exposed the ‘information operations’ of digital data firms and state-sponsored cyber warriors, Lownie is fighting – at huge personal expense – against a more insidious form of manipulation: that of our fusty national archives.
This November will see the culmination of his campaign to have the letters of the late Lord Louis Mountbatten released in their entirety. To do so, he has conscripted the help of the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), more readily associated with data protection investigations, such as tabloid privacy intrusions in 2013 or the harvesting of millions of Facebook profiles by Cambridge Analytica in 2016.
Now, Lownie is relying on the ICO to uphold its decision ordering the documents in question to be published – and to dismiss the action by the Cabinet Office and Southampton University which have both been vigorously fighting against their release.
From phone and computer hacking, to the hacking of history – Lownie is blowing the whistle on the way history actually is being suppressed in Britain. And how this distortion leads all the way up the corridors of power into the heart of the monarchy itself.
Radicalised
“My father was a judge. I trusted all the institutions. That’s why I wasn’t a natural rebel,” Lownie told Byline Times. “I assumed civil servants told the truth – I didn’t think politicians did, but I thought civil servants did and that their briefings were perhaps economical with the truth but that they were true – that they weren’t outright lies, which I now see time and time again.”
Lownie’s first encounter with official censorship and suppression began more than six years ago when he was researching his book on the famous double agent and spy Guy Burgess. He found gaps in the official archives and started filing Freedom of Information requests to get access to the missing material. But these were met with constant evasion and delay, and he began to take the Government to information tribunals over the refusal of departments to release the material.
He soon concluded that officials were deliberately “suppressing information” and found himself at the sharp end of “a huge battle between historians and the Government to release stuff which legally they should release”.
One example of official repression, Lownie says, was in relation to a vetting file for someone he suspected was part of the Cambridge spy ring, but who had been allowed to continue to work into the 1970s. The Foreign Office claimed the file could not be released for national security reasons, because it revealed details of the vetting process – even though the department publicly lists the details of the vetting process on its own website. It then claimed that it could not release the file because the son of the alleged spy would be shattered by the revelation – a selective use of the privacy rule, since it soon released the details about another spy in Prague, whose son was a public figure.
Lownie’s book, Stalin’s Englishman: The Lives of Guy Burgess, was due to be published in October 2015. The Foreign Office refused to give him early access to the 300 or so Burgess files it held – which were eventually publicly released two weeks before his book was published. To his shock and fury, Lownie discovered the department had let other historians have access to them six months beforehand.
“There was a rule for those, like the BBC, who either they trusted or were cosy with – and there were rules for historians who weren’t part of the circle,” Lownie says.
Having not been a rebel before, the experience of the Burgess book “radicalised” him. “If you’re going to have trust and transparency in Government,” Lownie argues, “they’ve got to behave openly and I’ve just found them more and more deceitful.”
To Lownie, the selective release of documents to a cartel of preferred historians is as controlling and dangerous as the client journalism of the lobby briefing system – where the lure of access often invites acquiescence via ‘government sources’. He refers to other “tame” historians and journalists who are “completely fed stuff by the intelligence services” because they are seen as “a safe pair of hands who will do their bidding”.
“My argument is that I’m independent, I’m not prepared to pay the price,” says Lownie.
But, for his next book, Lownie would pay a very steep price indeed. Sinking a quarter of a million pounds of his own savings into a battle between historian and state, Lownie was to find out just how determined the powers that be were to keep the entirety of the diaries of the Queen’s cousin and the last Viceroy of British India buried.
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Deception Mounts
Along with foreign relations and issues related to ‘national security’, getting information on the royals is always an uphill struggle, according to Andrew Lownie, as they are exempt from Freedom of Information laws. There are also the courtiers, the men in grey suits, doing their bidding – ensuring blushes are spared and providing access to those willing to author the past in a favourable light.
Just what this involves was revealed to Lownie when he started researching his 2019 book, The Mountbattens: Their Lives and Loves.
Having requested access to diaries and correspondence he knew to be in the possession of Southampton University’s archives on Lord Mountbatten and his wife Edwina, he was told that this would not be possible. Challenging this at information tribunals over the course of fo