What is inside the buried Mountbatten diaries?

Censored extracts from diaries

Censored extracts from diaries and personal letters of a key
figure close to the Queen and the late Prince Philip may soon be
made public following a four-year battle between the Cabinet Office
and a historian.

More than four decades have passed since the death of Louis
Mountbatten, yet his diaries “remain so incendiary in the eyes of
the government” that the authorities have gone to “extraordinary
lengths” to keep them hidden from public view, said The Telegraph^[1].

But Andrew Lownie, who has written a biography of Mountbatten^[2], argued at
a tribunal hearing this week that 120 redacted references
in the diaries should be made public.

Compromising content?

Mountbatten, the Queen’s cousin and uncle to the Duke of
Edinburgh, was murdered in an IRA
bombing ^[3]in 1975. In 2011, his
family sold his diaries for £2.8m in lieu of death duties to
the University of Southampton. 

Most of the diary contents are available for viewing at the
university, but certain passages have been redacted as a result of
Cabinet Office intervention. 

In 2019, the Information Commissioner ruled that all documents
should be released into the public domain, after historian
Lownie launched his bid for unfettered access. But the
decision was appealed by the Cabinet Office,
which “argues that the information is too sensitive to be
released and that the dignity of the Queen could be compromised”,
said The Times^[4].

Roger Smethurst, head of knowledge and information management at
the Cabinet Office, told an appeal hearing in London this week
that UK relations with other states could be “compromised” if
some details were released.  

Many of the redacted passages are thought to discuss
Mountbatten’s relationship with the Royal Family, but the most
sensitive passages are likely to deal with his role in the
partition of India, which he oversaw in his role as
viceroy. 

In 2011, Professor Chris Woolgar, the now retired chief
archivist for Southampton University, wrote to the Cabinet Office
advising that certain parts of the diaries be redacted.

In an email, he wrote: “I don’t believe these should be
available to researchers, possibly from as far back as the
mid-1930s, given their many references to the Royal Family (which I
can spot).”

The Cabinet Office replied: “We really do think we should keep
these closed, given the Royal material which you have already
spotted… also the material concerning India and Pakistan is, in
some cases, still sensitive from this period.” 

The intervention resulted in a ten-year ban on the release of
the sensitive sections.

In 2017, however, Lownie, a fellow of the Royal Historical
Society, requested access to the material for his biography,
The Mountbattens: Their Lives and Loves, “which he
eventually published two years later”, said The Telegraph. The
refusal of the request triggered the ongoing information
tribunal.

The tribunal is also considering the release of personal
correspondence, from both Mountbatten and his wife, Edwina.

In 2019, the Information Commission ordered the release of
letters from Lady Mountbatten to Jawaharlal Nehru, the leader of
the Indian independence movement, and the first prime minister of
an independent India.

They wrote to each other regularly from 1947 up until her death
in 1960 – “an important period of British-Indian history”,
said The Hindu^[5]. These letters were
also censored after the Cabinet Office objected, amid rumours that
the pair had an affair. 

Lownie told the tribunal this week that “my view is that
information of still greater importance to a complete and accurate
historical record is likely to lie within the withheld archival
material”. 

The historian has also claimed that the diaries could contain
evidence of Lord Mountbatten’s alleged bisexuality. Such claims
have been “denied by official biographers”, but the historian told
the tribunal that “he had uncovered supporting evidence, including
information in his FBI file,” The Times^[6] reported.

Other redacted sections “are understood to relate to Lord
Mountbatten’s sexual preferences, fetish for women in riding
boots”, said The Telegraph. 

The Cabinet Office is estimated to have spent close to £300,000
of public money fighting the case. A spokesperson said the
department count not “comment further whilst legal proceedings are
ongoing”.