Princess Diana’s biographer is worried that the late Queen’s private letters could be burnt by royal aides before a historian is able to look at her papers to write her official biography.
More than a year on from Her Late Majesty’s demise, no announcement has been made about which historian will be gifted the job of writing the official account of her life.
Earlier this year it emerged that King Charles had assigned loyal Palace aide Paul Whybrew with the job of sorting through the Queen’s private papers before they were repositioned to the Royal archive at Windsor.
However, Andrew Morton, the author of the revelation-filled 1992 work Diana: Her True Story, voiced his fears that the Queen’s papers would be filleted to remove any material that the Royal Family didn’t want to become public knowledge.
Speaking to the Scandal Mongers podcast, he said he was ‘enormously’ concerned that aides might be ‘burning the letters’ and added that ‘an awful lot’ could be ‘disguised’ and ‘camouflaged’.
He noted how Princess Diana’s mother Frances Shand Kydd and her sister Sarah burnt much of her correspondence after her death in a car crash in 1997.
Mr Morton told fellow historians Andrew Lownie and Phil Craig that they have two major biographies about to be commissioned. One on Prince Philip and one on Her Majesty The Queen.
So, which one will be chosen? Well, they don’t know. And who’s going through the archives, that would seemingly be the Queen’s footman, Paul Whybrew, Tall Paul.
He said that it concerned him enormously. Are they going to be burning the letters like Princess Margaret did with the Queen Mother’s correspondence?
He said, like the Spencer family did. Like Sarah McCorquodale and Frances Shand Kydd with Diana’s correspondence. They even burnt the ink jotters that she had.
He also questioned whether the Royal Family should be permitted to control access to the Queen’s papers.
He asked if it should be left to the family. Clearly, they would argue that it’s their mother and it was their property, so the letters would be her copyright. He said it was a pretty seductive argument.
He added that they wear different hats. They wear the privacy hat when it’s about shielding correspondence and memos and so on, and then they wear the public hat when it’s about cost.
He said that the quicker the Queen’s biography was commissioned the better because the people who were her friends were all dying. It was as simple as that.
Over the years the Royal Family have been supported by the taxpayer’s money via their gilded lives, and because of that we the people deserve to know what is in those papers.
Some might say that the Queen worked all her life for our country and that she did an excellent job.
Some would also say that they’re not supported by taxpayers’ money at all. So, how did all the Royals over the centuries attain their wealth? Well, it’s simple, war and taxes from the peasants. Then some extremely clever investing. When you’re a Royal you give up your privacy because the public wants to know everything, and so they should.
Royal papers are a record of our history and the history of our country and they should be available. You just can’t be a Royal and private, they have to choose.
They are servants to the public and must uphold the highest standards and if it’s believed that hasn’t been the case, then their papers should be available to the people.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 