'This material was bought by the university to be made available, and it failed to do so – and I think that is a shameful thing,' he said. Mr Lownie accused Southampton University of ignoring him and his lawyers in their quest to gain access to the material, believing they 'could get away with it'. 'I'm afraid the Cabinet Office have not been honest to MPs, and I completely stand by that,' he said. While he has now forced the release of the vast majority of the material, around one per cent remains under wraps.Īs the appeal hearing got under way on Monday, Mr Lownie accused the Cabinet Office of lying to MPs by claiming that undertakings given by Mountbatten in 1969 about publication of the archive referred to his private musings rather than his official papers. In 2019, the Information Commissioner found in his favour and ordered the release of the entire collection of 4,500 boxes of documents and photographs – known as the Broadlands Archive archive – but the Cabinet Office appealed and has continued to block access to certain passages in the diaries, some of which date back to the 1930s. Mr Lownie has spent four years fighting the Cabinet Office and the University of Southampton, which bought the archive in 2010 using £2.8 million of public money, for full sight of the documents. He said the documents were 'crucial' to biographers and historians but that the case had also raised 'very important issues of transparency and abuse of power'. The Cabinet Office lied to MPs in an attempt to keep Earl Mountbatten's private letters and diaries out of the public eye, a tribunal was told on Monday.Īndrew Lownie, the author and historian battling to gain unrestricted access to the archive, said it was 'shameful' that it had not been made available to the public in its entirety, 11 years after it was saved for the nation.

The mountbattens andrew lownie