Lownie also depicts Edwina in a surprisingly favourable light. Insiders joked about how long it would be in any conversation before Mountbatten referred to ‘my niece, the Queen’ (she was by blood his second cousin once removed). Born in 1900, he was a great-grandson of Queen Victoria, an uncle of Prince Philip, whose dynastic prospects he advanced, and eventually ‘honorary grandfather’ to Prince Charles, who was alone in thinking him ‘incredibly honest’. This glittering career, as Lownie shows, owed much to Mountbatten’s ruthless exploitation of his royal connections. He pays tribute to Mountbatten’s extraordinary drive, energy and talent for public relations, which led to his appointment as chief of combined operations and supreme commander in Southeast Asia during the war, his subsequent appointments as last viceroy and first governor-general of India and finally, achieving a life-time’s ambition, as First Sea Lord. It is vivid, well balanced and often sympathetic. Field Marshal Templer once told him, ‘Dickie, you’re so crooked that if you swallowed a nail, you’d shit a corkscrew!’īy dint of prodigious research, Lownie has stripped away the accretions of fable and fiction to give us an unvarnished double portrait.

The naval historian Stephen Roskill warned that Mountbatten’s testimony should never be relied on unless it was supported by independent evidence. Anthony Eden called him a congenital liar.

Her husband was a prolific myth-maker, presenting himself in person, print and film as a peerless national hero.

Edwina was quite untrustworthy, doctoring her own diary and perjuring herself in court over her liaison with a black man, believed to be Paul Robeson. Many of the Mountbattens’ papers are still under wraps, held variously by the family, the government and the Royal Archives. The official biographies of Lord Louis Mountbatten (known as ‘Dickie’) and his wife, Edwina, written respectively by Philip Ziegler and Janet Morgan, are admirable and authoritative but also discreet and emollient, leaving ample scope for this more candid life of the famous couple by Andrew Lownie.

Andrew lownie the mountbattens