It seems unbelievable that one human being could have touched history at so many points

taken prisoner. Certainly, Mountbatten was full of contradictions.

He revelled in his status, but this vanity was triggered by insecurity. He was seen by his enemies as an intellectually limited poseur, yet he often worked 18-hour days in wartime.

PARTLY German, he sometimes seemed a Teutonic outsider, yet he transformed himself into the ultimate establishment man. Though a member of the traditionalist Royal Family, he was progressive in his political views, prompting Lord Beaverbrook, the then owner of the Daily Express, to describe him as “a menace to the Empire”.

But his instinctive radicalism did not prevent him from shamefully flirting in his retirement with an insane plot, dreamt up by the newspaper magnate Cecil King, to overthrow the Labour government of Harold Wilson in 1968 at a time of industrial unrest and replace it with a coalition.

He was, however, quickly brought to his senses by the Queen and an adviser, who rightly described the conspiracy as “rank

treachery”. Mountbatten’s contradictions extended to his exotic private life too. Like Queen Victoria, King George V tried to establish the Royal Family as the national symbol of domestic harmony and restraint.

But Mountbatten’s own marriage to Edwina was the very opposite. Buttressed by a fortune worth £300million in today’s money, she was both capricious and promiscuous, indulging in an exhausting catalogue of affairs almost from the moment she became his wife, despite producing two daughters with him.

Among her many lovers were the conductor Sir Malcolm Sargent, the Hollywood star Lawrence Gray and the circulation manager of the Daily Express, dashing ex-Cavalry officer Mike Wardell. As Lownie points out, she also had a penchant for men of colour. The black singer Paul Robeson was another alleged consort, as was the pianist Leslie “Hutch” Hutchinson.

But politically, her most important affair was with Jawaharlal Nehru, the leader of Indian nationalism and the first prime minister of the country after independence.

Her closeness to Nehru helped speed the process of freedom, but it also led to allegations from Muslim politicians that the Viceregal Lodge under the Mountbattens was biased towards the Hindus, a resentment that fanned the flames of communal violence that accompanied the end of British rule in the sub-continent.

Mountbatten, whose generous nature showed a remarkable degree of tolerance towards Edwina, had his own female lovers, such as Yola Letellier, the glamorous wife of a French newspaper tycoon, and Janey Lindsay, a beautiful staff officer who served under his command when he was in SouthEast Asia during the war.

But his erotic enthusiasms may not have been confined to the opposite sex. For decades, rumours about Mountbatten’s bisexuality fuelled society gossip and led to hints in the press. The entertainer Noel Coward, a friend of Mountbatten’s, thought it “beyond doubt” he had male lovers, while there were also allegations of youths visiting Mountbatten’s London home, and of assignations with guardsmen in St James’s Park.

Lownie provides new evidence to back these claims, such as the testimony from Mountbatten’s driver about visits to an upmarket gay brothel, as well as declassified FBI files which state that Mountbatten was “known to be homosexual”.

More tellingly, the book carries an interview with a man who says that he was Mountbatten’s lover during the last eight years of his life. “He was perfectly relaxed about our relationship,” he explains.

During those years, Mountbatten was a widower, Edwina having died during a trip to Borneo in 1960. Mountbatten’s own demise 19 years later was far more horribly dramatic. But, whatever his flaws and controversies, he had lived life to the fullest.