Ministers waging a bitter battle over royal diaries and letters may be trying to cover up an affair of Prince Philip’s, a historian claims.
Author Andrew Lownie estimates the Government has spent around £2 million trying to stop him seeing all the archive left by Philip’s uncle Lord Mountbatten and his wife.
Mr Lownie says he has already spent £460,000 in legal fees since trying to prise secrets concealed in the 30,000 pages. The Mountbatten family sold the papers to Southampton University in 2011 for £2.8million, most of which came from lottery funding.
Dr Lownie, 60, used freedom of information laws to try to get access to them for a book on the Mountbattens, backed by the information commissioner.
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