Mountbatten, Cold War and Empire, 1945-79 and the paperback edition of its prequel, Mountbatten Apprentice War Lord were both published at the tail end of last year. There was so much that I couldn’t include in the second volume, including the following:
On the first weekend in June 1979 Earl Mountbatten of Burma had no idea his life would end with sudden and brutal ferocity only two months later. A headline in that week’s issue of the Economist surely caught his eye: ‘Britain’s decline; its causes and consequences.’ It was a leaked valedictory despatch, drafted at the start of the year by the retiring Ambassador in Paris, Sir Nicholas Henderson. Labour’s Foreign Secretary, David Owen, chose not to circulate Henderson’s highly unorthodox farewell letter. However, the election of a new government saw the document enthusiastically embraced by Tory free-marketeers intent on radical change, most notably the Industry Secretary Sir Keith Joseph. Whitehall officials fretted over Fleet Street rumours of a decidedly undiplomatic commentary on Britain’s place in the world as seen from the perspective of 35 Rue de Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Once it was known the Economist had a copy of Henderson’s despatch the editor Andrew Knight rejected a Foreign Office request to withhold publication. Yet the absence of ministerial protest was striking, nowhere more so than in Downing Street. This surely was the moment when Mrs Thatcher first conceived the idea of inviting Sir Nicholas to succeed Peter Jay as the British Ambassador in Washington. It proved a brilliant appointment, confirming a distinguished and eventful career to be anything but over. Mountbatten always maintained he was more of a New Statesman man, but the aperçus of Amis, Barnes and Hitchens could scarcely compete with Henderson’s incendiary prose. Here, the Economist declared, was a document ‘so unusually forthright and timely, particularly in its middle and concluding passages on British policy in Europe, under governments of every stripe,’ that full disclosure was a public duty.
Nicko Henderson and Dickie Mountbatten, despite a twenty-year age difference, had more in common than a debonair swagger, a purposeful step in the corridors of power, a disarming presence in the salon and the gun room, an abundance of charm and a good tailor. By 1979 they would have been well acquainted, having probably met for the first time at the Potsdam conference where Henderson was acting as Anthony Eden’s assistant private secretary and Mountbatten was learning that the war with Japan would soon be over: unanticipated electoral defeat saw the Foreign Secretary and his staff head for home, while the Supreme Commander South-East Asia planned for imminent surrender and a new world order. Mountbatten easily adjusted to his new political masters, as did Henderson, who soon found himself working for Eden’s successor, Ernie Bevin. A year later Mountbatten resumed his naval career, while Henderson regularised his position by belatedly joining the Diplomatic Service. By the early ’sixties Mountbatten was Chief of the Defence Staff, while Henderson, on the cusp of ambassadorial appointments in Warsaw, Bonn and Paris, was riding high inside the Foreign Office. The two men shared the same working environment, and – as confirmed in June 1979 – they shared similar views on Britain’s global standing at the height of the Cold War: the qualified success of an Atlanticist foreign policy and an accelerated withdrawal from empire, but a demonstrable failure to acknowledge and accommodate an all too obvious dilution of power.
Nowhere had that failure been more evident than during the Suez crisis in 1956, when Mountbatten as First Sea Lord had offered Eden his resignation while at the same time ensuring the Royal Navy was fully prepared for a military operation to reclaim the Canal Zone. Similarly, Mountbatten had been the driving force behind Polaris, the United Kingdom’s submarine-based second-generation deterrence force; while at the same time bemoaning nuclear proliferation and questioning the fundamental principles that underpinned NATO’s nuclear strategy.
Henderson summarised how the United Kingdom was seen by its continental partners and trading rivals three decades on from western Europe’s first hesitant steps towards reconstruction and revival. His evidence-based indictment of strategic misthinking and economic mismanagement was rooted in comparative data, and an insider’s knowledge of how successive governments had reacted to the speed of recovery in West Germany and the transformation in French manufacturing industry. A failure to recognise the speed and significance of European integration until far too late, and a reluctance or inability to emulate the Fourth Republic in its promotion of macro-economic planning, constituted a serious underestimation of French ambition and strategic vision. France’s colonial travails and political instability masked a process of modernisation, urbanisation and accelerated growth: for all the drama of de Gaulle’s return to power and the consequent creation of a Fifth Republic, his insistence that France be able to stand alone built upon a prevailing post-Suez determination to end any dependence on American goodwill.
Fluent in the language and well connected within the French political and military elite, Mountbatten had observed a stark contrast across the Channel from the Macmillan Government’s urgent endeavour to rebuild the ‘special relationship’ and to tap into American nuclear technology. He of course was at the heart of those efforts to re-establish and exploit longstanding trans-Atlantic personal and institutional relationships. A scion of the German aristocracy, Mountbatten maintained close family ties inside the Federal Republic, consolidated from the mid-fifties by high-level NATO connections. Henderson’s Rhine posting gave him a birds-eye view of the Christian Democrats’ wirtschaftswunder at its height, but Mountbatten enjoyed an insider’s perspective on Adenauer’s insistence that West Germany’s geopolitical rehabilitation demanded a firm industrial and commercial foundation.
A communications specialist and a wartime patron of operational research, Mountbatten’s honorary fellowship of the Royal Society recognised an active engagement with applied science and engineering. He bemoaned an erosion of global influence, blaming government, the City and manufacturers for a failure to prioritise capital investment and innovation other than in the defence sector. Fostering high-tech enterprise was a passion before, and most especially after, Mountbatten’s retirement as CDS in July 1965. As founder of the National Electronics Research Council and a pioneer of subscription TV, he energetically lobbied the fledgling Ministry of Technology, his abrasive and vainglorious efforts singularly failing to impress Tony Benn. Like Henderson, Mountbatten saw the United Kingdom lagging ever further behind France and West Germany, with a major reshaping of the domestic economy long overdue. Critically, both men saw poor productivity and a flagging growth rate as a spur for embracing European competition, emulating continental working practices and radically reshaping industrial relations. Unlike Mrs Thatcher and her closest acolytes, Henderson saw no cause to humble and humiliate the trade union movement, arguing for a corporatist model of industrial co-determination and an end to outmoded restrictive practices: with corporate governance enshrined in law, British trade unionists should look back to the late ’forties and ask why they believed the Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund to be an ideal model for West Germany but not the UK. After decades of dealing with dockyard workers and civil service unions Mountbatten could only agree. Unsurprisingly, he had a paternalistic view of trade unions, with a healthy respect born out of wartime experience. As the much-mythologised captain of the much-mythologised Kelly, Mountbatten never stinted in his praise of Tyneside shipbuilders and of lower deck conscripts fresh from the shopfloor.
Anticipating the EEC’s transition into the European Union, Henderson interpreted closer economic integration as the means of improving productivity and of increasing domestic R and D. Unlike Germany or the United States, the United Kingdom had too often failed to exploit new technology and key advances in applied science: a systemic focus on short-term returns meant inadequate investment in accelerating progress from the lab or the test bed through to final production. British banking had much to learn from its German counterpart, not least in the interface between finance and industry. Medium-size businesses required the same level of financial support enjoyed by their mittelstand counterparts both sides of the Rhine. At the other end of the spectrum, large enterprises facing disproportionate investment costs should look to cross-border collaboration, as was now the norm inside the aerospace industry. An unrepentant ambassador bemoaned what now we would label British exceptionalism, dismissing the emotional crutch of wartime victory and signalling the low esteem in which the United Kingdom was now viewed by its European neighbours. Plus ça change.
Henderson highlighted obvious lessons from the Federal Republic, and from Germany prior to 1933, but he was equally insistent that much could be learnt from France; not least the immediate and longer-term impact of Monnet’s Commissariat Général du Plan. While endorsing Henderson’s narrative of relative decline, Conservative admirers of Hayek like Sir Keith Joseph dismissed France’s postwar planning initiative as dirigiste and a distortion of the free market. Yet the departing diplomat was addressing the Foreign Secretary of a party which under both Attlee and Wilson had tried and failed to establish a counterweight to the Treasury. By 1979 that failure to create a department of state powerful enough to reshape the economy was a fading memory for ministers haunted by wage-driven inflation, high energy costs, global recession and morale-sapping industrial unrest. Sir Nicholas acknowledged all of this, but he saw salvation in the embrace of a communauté mentality from which leading left-wingers inside the Cabinet, notably Michael Foot and Tony Benn, instinctively recoiled.
Not so David Owen, whose departure from the Foreign Office in May 1979 would lead in less than two years to the unequivocally pro-Europe Limehouse Declaration and a fledgling SDP. Nor Lord Louis, digesting the Economist scoop in his Broadlands breakfast room. If always a realist when dealing with NATO colleagues, by instinct Mountbatten was a European – unsurprisingly so given his family background. Henderson contrasted his principled insistence on pointing out the unpalatable with the Berlin Embassy’s ‘tailored reporting’ at the height of Appeasement. Such sentiments doubtless resonated with Mountbatten, fiercely proud of his credentials as an anti-appeaser.  Concluding on a positive note, Henderson maintained that it was not too late to fire the British people, ‘with a sense of national will such as others have found these past years. For the benefit of ourselves and of Europe…’   Here for Mountbatten was a familiar call to arms.
Never a nuclear fetishist, Mountbatten shared Henderson’s belief that an independent deterrence was a comfort blanket, disguising harsh geopolitical reality and a myriad of national ills. Nor, as India’s last Viceroy and a supporter of decolonisation across south-east Asia, was Mountbatten an imperial nostalgist. Like Henderson, he saw the accelerated withdrawal from empire initiated by Macmillan as signalling a fundamental reappraisal of the UK’s status within the Commonwealth, its role and standing within the Western Alliance, and its relationship with continental Europe. Macmillan commissioned just such a reappraisal, in the process trying and failing to join the Common Market. For Henderson and for Mountbatten a belated entry into the EEC had signally failed to facilitate the UK redefining its place in the non-Soviet world, repairing its frayed social fabric, and rebooting its economy in a manner comparable to France and Germany after 1945. Yet in his valedictory despatch Henderson was emphatic that it was by no means too late: the nation could still have its Year Zero, and doubtless this is what appealed to the driest of Mrs Thatcher’s cabinet colleagues.
Nicko Henderson lived thirty years longer than Dickie Mountbatten – long enough to witness a transformation in the British economy he neither envisaged nor desired, most evidently the prioritising of the service sector over manufacturing. He noted, doubtless with disdain, a mounting Euroscepticism inside the Conservative Party. Yet never, even in his darkest moments, could he have envisaged his country out of the EU and strategically bankrupt. Similarly, were Mountbatten still alive he would question the concept of ‘Global Britain’ and the notion of an ‘Anglosphere’, while at the same time lamenting the toxic legacy of Brexit. Both Henderson and Mountbatten shared a keen sense of crisis, but four decades on the vision revealed in the Economist contrasts starkly with harsh reality. Neither man could ever have anticipated England’s lingering ambivalence towards Europe providing ambitious, sometimes unscrupulous, politicians with the means of transcending deep division and securing an exceptional degree of power and influence.
