{"id":200,"date":"2023-06-07T12:10:11","date_gmt":"2023-06-07T12:10:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/tdby\/?p=200"},"modified":"2023-06-07T12:10:11","modified_gmt":"2023-06-07T12:10:11","slug":"nicko-henderson-dickie-mountbatten-and-europe-it-was-forty-four-years-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/tdby\/2023\/06\/07\/nicko-henderson-dickie-mountbatten-and-europe-it-was-forty-four-years-today\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Nicko’ Henderson, ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten and Europe – it was forty-four years today…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mountbatten, Cold War and Empire, 1945-79<\/em> and the paperback edition of its prequel, Mountbatten Apprentice War Lord<\/em> were both published at the tail end of last year.\u00a0 There was so much that I couldn’t include in the second volume, including the following:<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 A headline in that week\u2019s issue of the Economist<\/em> surely caught his eye: \u2018Britain\u2019s decline; its causes and consequences.\u2019\u00a0 It was a leaked valedictory despatch, drafted at the start of the year by the retiring Ambassador in Paris, Sir Nicholas Henderson.\u00a0 Labour\u2019s Foreign Secretary, David Owen, chose not to circulate Henderson\u2019s highly unorthodox farewell letter.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Whitehall officials fretted over Fleet Street rumours of a decidedly undiplomatic commentary on Britain\u2019s place in the world as seen from the perspective of 35 Rue de Faubourg Saint-Honor\u00e9.\u00a0 Once it was known the Economist<\/em> had a copy of Henderson\u2019s despatch the editor Andrew Knight rejected a Foreign Office request to withhold publication.\u00a0 Yet the absence of ministerial protest was striking, nowhere more so than in Downing Street.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It proved a brilliant appointment, confirming a distinguished and eventful career to be anything but over.\u00a0 Mountbatten always maintained he was more of a New Statesman<\/em> man, but the aper\u00e7us of Amis, Barnes and Hitchens could scarcely compete with Henderson\u2019s incendiary prose.\u00a0 Here, the Economist<\/em> declared, was a document \u2018so unusually forthright and timely, particularly in its middle and concluding passages on British policy in Europe, under governments of every stripe,\u2019 that full disclosure was a public duty.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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\u2019s 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.\u00a0 Mountbatten easily adjusted to his new political masters, as did Henderson, who soon found himself working for Eden\u2019s successor, Ernie Bevin.\u00a0 A year later Mountbatten resumed his naval career, while Henderson regularised his position by belatedly joining the Diplomatic Service.\u00a0 By the early \u2019sixties 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.\u00a0 The two men shared the same working environment, and \u2013 as confirmed in June 1979 \u2013 they shared similar views on Britain\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Similarly, Mountbatten had been the driving force behind Polaris, the United Kingdom\u2019s submarine-based second-generation deterrence force; while at the same time bemoaning nuclear proliferation and questioning the fundamental principles that underpinned NATO\u2019s nuclear strategy.<\/p>\n

Henderson summarised how the United Kingdom was seen by its continental partners and trading rivals three decades on from western Europe\u2019s first hesitant steps towards reconstruction and revival.\u00a0 His evidence-based indictment of strategic misthinking and economic mismanagement was rooted in comparative data, and an insider\u2019s knowledge of how successive governments had reacted to the speed of recovery in West Germany and the transformation in French manufacturing industry.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 France\u2019s colonial travails and political instability masked a process of modernisation, urbanisation and accelerated growth: for all the drama of de Gaulle\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s urgent endeavour to rebuild the \u2018special relationship\u2019 and to tap into American nuclear technology.\u00a0 He of course was at the heart of those efforts to re-establish and exploit longstanding trans-Atlantic personal and institutional relationships.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Henderson\u2019s Rhine posting gave him a birds-eye view of the Christian Democrats\u2019 wirtschaftswunder<\/em> at its height, but Mountbatten enjoyed an insider\u2019s perspective on Adenauer\u2019s insistence that West Germany\u2019s geopolitical rehabilitation demanded a firm industrial and commercial foundation.<\/p>\n

A communications specialist and a wartime patron of operational research, Mountbatten\u2019s honorary fellowship of the Royal Society recognised an active engagement with applied science and engineering.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Fostering high-tech enterprise was a passion before, and most especially after, Mountbatten\u2019s retirement as CDS in July 1965.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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 \u2019forties and ask why they believed the Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund<\/em> to be an ideal model for West Germany but not the UK.\u00a0 After decades of dealing with dockyard workers and civil service unions Mountbatten could only agree.\u00a0 Unsurprisingly, he had a paternalistic view of trade unions, with a healthy respect born out of wartime experience.\u00a0 As the much-mythologised captain of the much-mythologised Kelly<\/em>, Mountbatten never stinted in his praise of Tyneside shipbuilders and of lower deck conscripts fresh from the shopfloor.<\/p>\n

Anticipating the EEC\u2019s transition into the European Union, Henderson interpreted closer economic integration as the means of improving productivity and of increasing domestic R and D.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 British banking had much to learn from its German counterpart, not least in the interface between finance and industry.\u00a0 Medium-size businesses required the same level of financial support enjoyed by their mittelstand<\/em> counterparts both sides of the Rhine.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Plus \u00e7a change<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s Commissariat G\u00e9n\u00e9ral du Plan<\/em>.\u00a0 While endorsing Henderson\u2019s narrative of relative decline, Conservative admirers of Hayek like Sir Keith Joseph dismissed France\u2019s postwar planning initiative as dirigiste<\/em> and a distortion of the free market.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Sir Nicholas acknowledged all of this, but he saw salvation in the embrace of a communaut\u00e9<\/em> mentality from which leading left-wingers inside the Cabinet, notably Michael Foot and Tony Benn, instinctively recoiled.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Nor Lord Louis, digesting the Economist<\/em> scoop in his Broadlands breakfast room.\u00a0 If always a realist when dealing with NATO colleagues, by instinct Mountbatten was a European \u2013 unsurprisingly so given his family background.\u00a0 Henderson contrasted his principled insistence on pointing out the unpalatable with the Berlin Embassy\u2019s \u2018tailored reporting\u2019 at the height of Appeasement.\u00a0 Such sentiments doubtless resonated with Mountbatten, fiercely proud of his credentials as an anti-appeaser. \u00a0Concluding on a positive note, Henderson maintained that it was not too late to fire the British people, \u2018with a sense of national will such as others have found these past years.\u00a0 For the benefit of ourselves and of Europe\u2026\u2019 \u00a0\u00a0Here for Mountbatten was a familiar call to arms.<\/p>\n

Never a nuclear fetishist, Mountbatten shared Henderson\u2019s belief that an independent deterrence was a comfort blanket, disguising harsh geopolitical reality and a myriad of national ills.\u00a0 Nor, as India\u2019s last Viceroy and a supporter of decolonisation across south-east Asia, was Mountbatten an imperial nostalgist.\u00a0 Like Henderson, he saw the accelerated withdrawal from empire initiated by Macmillan as signalling a fundamental reappraisal of the UK\u2019s status within the Commonwealth, its role and standing within the Western Alliance, and its relationship with continental Europe.\u00a0 Macmillan commissioned just such a reappraisal, in the process trying and failing to join the Common Market.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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\u2019s cabinet colleagues.<\/p>\n

Nicko Henderson lived thirty years longer than Dickie Mountbatten \u2013 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.\u00a0 He noted, doubtless with disdain, a mounting Euroscepticism inside the Conservative Party.\u00a0 Yet never, even in his darkest moments, could he have envisaged his country out of the EU and strategically bankrupt.\u00a0 Similarly, were Mountbatten still alive he would question the concept of \u2018Global Britain\u2019 and the notion of an \u2018Anglosphere\u2019, while at the same time lamenting the toxic legacy of Brexit.\u00a0 Both Henderson and Mountbatten shared a keen sense of crisis, but four decades on the vision revealed in the Economist<\/em> contrasts starkly with harsh reality.\u00a0 Neither man could ever have anticipated England\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0 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 … <\/p>\n

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