In an advance of a book to be launched this week, “The Mountbattens”, Lives & Loves”, author Andrew Lownie reveals how the Queen, in 1968, talked Lord Mountbatten out of leading a plot to overthrow the Labor government, then headed by Harold Wilson.
Thousands of government papers detailing some of the most controversial episodes in 20th-century British history have vanished after civil servants removed them from the country’s National Archives and then reported them as lost. Documents concerning the Falklands war, Northern Ireland’s Troubles and the infamous Zinoviev letter – in which MI6 officers plotted to bring about the downfall of the first Labour government - are all said to have been misplaced.