Mountbatten’s daughter dies

COUNTESS Mountbatten of Burma, pictured, who survived the IRA bomb that killed her father and one of her sons, has died at the age of 93.

Patricia Mountbatten was the Duke of Edinburgh’s first cousin and Prince Charles’s godmother.

Her father Earl Mountbatten, son Nicholas Knatchbull, 14, and mother-inlaw the Dowager Lady Brabourne were all murdered by the IRA in 1979 when their boat was blown up off the coast of Sligo.

The countess, then known as Lady Brabourne, suffered serious injuries. Her husband Lord Brabourne and Nicholas’s twin brother Timothy also survived the blast.

She needed 120 stitches to her face, which she wryly referred to in later years as ‘my IRA facelift’.

In an interview, she described the IRA killers as ‘inhuman’ but said she had learnt to live with what happened. ‘If you are bitter, it consumes you,’ she added.