The fight to secure the release of all of their diaries and correspondence started when Lownie began researching his 2019 book, The Mountbattens: Their Lives and Loves. The open relationship of Lord Mountbatten and his wife, Edwina, has been widely documented – as has her affair with India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. He served as the last Viceroy of India and was in charge in the colony ahead of its independence and partition. Lord Louis Mountbatten was the maternal uncle of Prince Philip and a second cousin of the Queen. Meanwhile, Lownie has put £250,000 of his own savings into the ongoing battle. Southampton has already used £43,000 to hire a QC, but has said that it does not know how much its internal legal department has spent. The Government has already spent vast sums of money appealing against the documents’ release to the public – but neither the Cabinet Office nor Southampton University will disclose the full cost to the taxpayer.
The dispute over the publication of the historical documents between the historian and author Andrew Lownie – who wrote a 2019 biography of the controversial figure and his wife – and the Cabinet Office will come to a head at a tribunal before the Information Commissioner in November.
The hidden hand of the Royal Family is behind the Government’s determination to stop the publication of some of the diaries of Lord Mountbatten, which were bought on behalf of the nation for £2.8 million by Southampton University in 2010, Byline Times can reveal.
0 kommentar(er)
