Thatcher backed efforts to open Mountbatten diaries to public

Historian’s legal battle to gain access to archives reveals former PM’s intervention in wrangle

MARGARET THATCHER wanted a family archive of Lord and Lady Mountbatten, including his personal diaries, to be fully open to the public, it has emerged during a costly legal battle over their release.

Andrew Lownie, an historian, has spent £250,000 on legal action to get access to the diaries and private correspondence between Mountbatten and his wife Edwina, which are part of an archive which is kept at the University of Southampton and was saved for the nation in 2011 after a £2.85million fundraising campaign.

The freedom of information case is ongoing and is likely to cost taxpayers tens of thousands of pounds, but many of the Mountbatten diaries have now been released after questions in Parliament over the controversy. Mr Lownie is calling for full disclosure of all the requested documents.

It has now emerged that 1980s Downing Street records lodged in the legal case show Thatcher wanted to ensure any of the Mountbatten papers transferred to Southampton would be open to the public.

A handwritten note from the prime minister in July 1985 says: “I should not move anything to Southampton unless it can be properly available to the public.” The archive was transferred to the university between the late 1980s and 2010.

According to a dossier of emails submitted in the case, the Cabinet Office only decided in September 2011 that the diaries should be closed after a university academic spotted “references to the Royal family” and alerted the government.

It was proposed the papers should be closed for a decade and that the Royal Household and the Foreign Office should review the personal papers before any publication.

Lownie, author of a 2019 biography of the Mountbattens, said: “The Cabinet Office blocked publication without any justification because of this culture of deference to the Royal family. These papers have been bought with public funds and we are entitled to see them.”

He said the Downing Street papers showed any government veto over the Mountbatten archive only concerned official papers and the intention was that any papers held by the university would be for public access.

The Information Commissioner’s Office, the freedom of information watchdog, ruled in December 2019 that the diaries covering the period 1920 to 1968 and the couple’s correspondence should be released to Lownie, but the University of Southampton, backed by the Cabinet Office, appealed.

Mr Lownie has now raised more than £50,000 on the fundraising website CrowdJustice to fight the appeal. He said he hoped the university and the Cabinet Office would “now see sense” and drop the appeal against the ICO ruling.

Mountbatten was a confidant to the Royal family, providing counsel to Prince Charles when he was a young man, and served as the last viceroy of India. He was assassinated by the IRA by a bomb planted on his fishing boat in Co Sligo in Ireland in August 1979.

Mountbatten and his wife both had affairs during their marriage and it was speculated that the Cabinet Office might have ordered the veto to protect the couple’s private lives. The diaries also cover Indian partition in August 1947 overseen by Mountbatten and the violent aftermath in which up to two million people were killed. The Mountbatten diaries for 1947 are yet to be released.

The Cabinet Office has said Lord Mountbatten accepted his diaries could not be put into the public domain without first being vetted. A spokesman declined to provide the legal costs of the case to date and said it was inappropriate to comment while legal proceedings were ongoing.