Elizabeth became Queen after her father died in February 1952. By that time she was married to husband Prince Philip and the mother of two children, Prince Charles and Princess Anne, aged three and one respectively. Over the years, Prince Philip has been at the centre of various scandals, particularly during his younger years, but one scandal involving his uncle Lord Mountbatten was cleverly avoided by the Queen in 1948. So what happened?

Who is Lord Mountbatten?

Lord Mountbatten, born Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Mountbatten was a British Royal Navy officer and statesman, as well as an uncle to Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and second cousin once removed of Queen Elizabeth II.

During the Second World War, he was Supreme Allied Commander, South East Asia Command, the last Viceroy of India and the first Governor-General of independent India.

In 1979, Lord Mountbatten, his grandson Nicholas, and two others were killed by a bomb set by members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, hidden aboard his fishing boat in Mullaghmore, County Sligo, Ireland.

What happened with the alleged Lord Mountbatten Labour plot?

In a new biography about Lord Mountbatten, historian Andrew Lownie reveals the full extent of Mountbatten involvement in the plot.

The 1968 plot was designed to replace Prime Minister Harold Wilson, from the Labour Party, with a coalition government to bring the country together – during what Mountbatten and the conspirators regarded as a time of national crisis.

According to the biography called The Mountbattens: Their Lives and Loves by Andrew Lownie, the Queen was required to intervene to persuade Mountbatten to sever his connection with the plotters rather than acting against Mr Wilson, his Cabinet and Parliament.

The plot came about during a period of industrial unrest, social upheaval and economic decline.

At the time, several demonstrations were taking place in central London to protest against the Vietnam War, student occupations and increased trade union militancy.

Industrialist and chairman of publishing company IPC, Cecil King, began to gather senior figures who wanted to enact change.

He believed Wilson should be replaced by a ‘national government’ led by the likes of the pre-war fascist leader Oswald Mosley or a figure of the stature of Lord Mountbatten, who had overseen the withdrawal of Britain from newly independent India in 1947 and had recently retired as Chief of the Defence Staff.

In April 1968, the editorial director of the Daily Mail Hugh Cudlipp told Mr King that Lord Mountbatten had told him: “Important people, leaders of industry and others, approach me increasingly saying something must be done.

“Of course, I agree we can’t go on like this. But I am 67, and I’m a relative of the Queen. This is a job for younger men.

“Perhaps there should be something like the Emergency Committee I ran in India.”

A month later, Lord Mountbatten gathered Mr King, Mr Cudlipp and scientist and senior government adviser Sir Solly Zuckerman at his home to discuss the Wilson government.

Mr Cudlipp said Sir Solly was somewhat opposed to a possible coup, saying : “This is rank treachery. All this talk of machine guns at street corners is appalling.”

Lord Mountbatten reportedly agreed with Sir Solly and later wrote in his diary that it was “dangerous nonsense”.

According to Mr Lownie’s book, the plot deeped when a number of diary notes from Mr King’s diary were exposed which “gave a rather different account” of what Lord Mountbatten said.

Mr King wrote after Sir Solly left the meeting Lord Mountbatten told him “morale in the armed forces had never been so low” and that the Queen “is desperately worried over the whole situation”.

According to Mr King, Mountbatten “asked if I thought there was anything he should do”.

A diary entry from Sir Soll has also unearthed cruicial insight into Lord Mountbatten’s involvement in the plot.

His note read: “All I hope is that Dickie [Mountbatten] did not go beyond what we had agreed.

“The fact of the matter is – as Hugh Cudlipp knows only too well – that Dickie was really intrigued by Cecil King’s suggestion that he should become the boss man of a ‘government’.”

According to Mr King, Mountbatten “asked if I thought there was anything he should do”.

A diary entry from Sir Soll has also unearthed cruicial insight into Lord Mountbatten’s involvement in the plot.

His note read: “All I hope is that Dickie [Mountbatten] did not go beyond what we had agreed.

“The fact of the matter is – as Hugh Cudlipp knows only too well – that Dickie was really intrigued by Cecil King’s suggestion that he should become the boss man of a ‘government’.”

“Harold and I used to stand in the State Room at Number 10 and work out where they would put the guns.”

Lord Mountbatten had long held political ambitions: hoping one day to fill the role of prime minister himself.

During a long conversation with Sir Solly Zuckerman in June 1946, he discussed what his post-war role might be and even suggested that he should by rights have been able to take the top job itself.

Mr Zuckerman later wrote in his memoirs: “The one job that he felt that he could have done was that of Prime Minister, but that office had been closed down to him because of his royal connections.

“He talked as if there was nothing he could not do.”

Mr Zuckerman later provided more evidence of Lord Mountbatten’s political ambitions, writing in his book Six Men Out of the Ordinary: “Dickie was immensely worried, and I was not surprised when he again said that with all his political experience, he might have made a better job of leading the country than had Attlee [the first Labour Prime Minister, elected in a landslide in 1945].”

Despite Lord Mountbatten’s alleged passion for this plot, for changes in government and his own political future, what reportedly appears to have stopped him laughing his plan was the influence of the Crown.

In the biography, historian and scriptwriter Alex von Tunzelmann says: “It was not Solly Zuckerman who talked Mountbatten out of staging a coup and making himself President of Britain. It was the Queen herself.”

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