40 years after his assassination, was Lord Mountbatten a national hero, a philandering glory hunter. . . or both?
DOWN the ages, the Royal Family has included a host of extraordinary personalities. But few have been more striking or colourful than Lord Louis Mountbatten, the late uncle of Queen Elizabeth. A man of titanic ambition and charisma, he presided over an astonishing variety of roles in our public life, often with sensational controversy.
As one obituary noted, “it seemed almost unbelievable that one human being could have touched the history of our century at so many points”.
Mountbatten was not only a war-winning Allied commander, the last Viceroy of India, a head of the Royal Navy and Chief of the Defence Staff, but also the leader of countless civic organisations and an influential mentor to successive generations of royalty.
Indeed, the modern monarchy is partly his creation. His volcanic energy could also be seen in his unconventional private life, in which his marriage to the wealthy aristocrat Edwina Ashley was characterised by exuberant infidelities on both sides.
“Edwina and I spent all our married lives getting into other people’s beds,” he once confessed.
According to a compelling new biography by the historian Andrew Lownie, the beds included those of his male, as well as female, lovers, for Mountbatten was never one to be hidebound by the orthodox.
It is exactly 40 years today since his remarkable life was brought to a cruel end by the Provisional IRA. On August 27, 1979, while holidaying at his family home in County Sligo on the coast of Ireland, his fishing boat Shadow V was blown up by a bomb made of 50 pounds of gelignite.
He was killed almost instantly, along with three of his passengers, two of them children. The news of the assassination sent shockwaves around the world.
If the IRA thought they had pulled off a propaganda coup with this deadly attack, they were deluded. There was widespread revulsion at the atrocity, and as a result the campaign by the British and
Irish security forces against the terrorists was dramatically intensified.
The outpouring of national grief reflected both horror at the crime and the profound respect in which Mountbatten was held.
More than 1,400 relatives and dignitaries, led by the Queen, attended his meticulously organised state funeral at Westminster Abbey.
Yet in the years that have followed, there have been deep questions about his legacy, as Lownie outlines in his superbly researched book.
Mountbatten was widely hailed for the breadth of his achievements, especially his wartime victory in Burma against Japan, his overseeing of
Leo McKinstry
MENTOR: With Prince Charles, 5. Above left: with wife Edwina and right with the Queen the independence of India, and his promotion of the marriage between Elizabeth and Philip.
But his many critics argue that his record does not stand up to real scrutiny.They maintain he was an over-promoted glory hunter, who owed his position to his royal connections and his gift for self-serving propaganda. “The glamour boy is just that. He doesn’t wear well, and I begin to wonder if he knows his stuff,” said the US Commander Joe Stilwell. Churchill’s own aide Hastings Ismay felt there was “an undue amount of ego in his cosmos”. Mountbatten’s sense of deter