Page 32 Daily Mail, Monday, August 19, 2019
Viceroy: With Edwina in IndiaMentor: Lord Mountbatten with a young Prince CharlesMountbatten ‘had
lust for young boys’
claimed FBI f iles
LORD Mountbatten was By David Wilkes
‘a homosexual with a per-
version for young boys’,
secret FBI files claim.
The US security service
began its dossier on the
Queen’s cousin because of
allegations about his sexuality,
according to a biography of
the war hero and statesman.
The first file was opened in 1944
after society hostess Elizabeth de
la Poer Beresford, Baroness
Decies, told them Lord Mount-
batten – a mentor to Prince
Charles and the Duke of Edin-
burgh’s uncle – was considered a
person ‘of extremely low morals’.
The FBI file said: ‘She statedthat Lord Louis Mountbatten
was known to be a homosexual
with a perversion for young boys.
In Lady Decies’ opinion he is
unfit to direct any sort of
military operations.’
The information was recorded
after Lord Mountbatten became
Supreme Allied Commander in
South East Asia and came to
light in research by AndrewLownie for his biography of Lord
Mountbatten and his wife Edwina.
The Lady Decies FBI file was
signed by EE Conroy, head of the
New York field office, who wrote
that she ‘appears to have no special
motive in making the above state-
ments’ and ‘apparently’ had been in
intimate contact with various mem-
bers of European royalty.
Lord Mountbatten, the last vice-
roy of India, was assassinated aged
79 by the IRA in 1979.
Rumours have long circulated he
may have been bisexual because of
his friendships with homosexuals,
including Noel Coward.
Lord Mountbatten’s official biog-
rapher Philip Ziegler has previously
dismissed the rumours, saying: ‘SexThe author claimed one file from
1956 was destroyed as recently as
May 2017 after he started making
Freedom of Information requests.
The book concentrates on his
public career but has a chapter
entitled Rumours. This includes an
interview with Ron Perks, Lord
Mountbatten’s driver on Malta in
1948, who tells how he was asked to
take him to a male brothel called
the Red House near Rabat.
Mr Lownie has also interviewed an
unnamed man 40 years younger
than Lord Mountbatten who claims
he was his lover for the final eight
years of his life. ‘I saw him at least
once a month, sometimes for a chat,
sometimes for more,’ he said.
Yesterday Mr Lownie, a former fel-
low of Churchill College, Cambridge,
and a fellow of the Royal Historical
Society, said: ‘The Rumours chap-
ter is 4,000 words in a book of
120,000 and I leave the reader to
draw their own conclusions from
the evidence presented.’‘Rubbish – men
weren’t his thing’By Eleanor Harding
Education EditorA GCSE pupil was disqualified for
‘obscene racial comments’ after
an examiner labelled her vegetar-
ian views ‘Islamophobic’.
Abigail Ward, 16, was punished
for expressing her disapproval of
halal meat during a religious stud-
ies exam – because she objects to
animals being slaughtered.
But despite her views being
widely held by the rest of the veg-
etarian community, she was told
they were ‘racist’ and amounted
to a ‘malpractice offence’.
It was only after her school, Gil-
dredge House in Eastbourne,
appealed to exam board OCR that
the decision was overturned.
Abigail’s mother, Layla Ward, a
36-year-old nurse, told The Sun-
day Telegraph the examiner had
been ‘over-zealous and
over-righteous’.
She added: ‘Abigail is
an animal lover and a very strict
vegetarian. It made me angry –
when asked a question in theexam, you can’t even express your
feelings. It’s great that it has been
overturned but it should never
have happened.’
The disqualification was over
Abigail’s comment in her June
exam paper that halal butchery
was ‘absolutely disgusting’.
OCR originally said she must be
penalised ‘due to obscene racial
comments being made through-
out an exam paper’.
However, the school wrote to the
exam board, explaining that the
comment related to her being a
vegetarian, and objected to ani-
mals being killed.
They added the reference was
not made in relation to Muslims,
and there were no other com-
ments in the paper that could be
construed as racist.
OCR has apologised to Abigail and
her family.Vi WithEd i i I diatten with a young Prince CharlesGirl, 16, labelled racist
for criticising halal
meat in religion exam
itself was not a matter of great
importance to him... To suggest
that such a man was actively homo-
sexual seems to [fly] in the face of
the evidence [and] everything we
understand about his character.’
Brian Hoey, another Lord Mount-
batten biographer, has said such
stories were ‘rubbish... men and
boys weren’t his thing at all’.
In his book The Mountbattens:
Their Lives and Loves, published
today, Mr Lownie tells how the FBI
kept the files over three decades,
with interest peaking around the
Suez crisis in 1956.
It is not known if the British gov-
ernment received the information.
Homosexual acts were illegal here
until 1967. Lady Mountbatten, who
had several extra-marital affairs,
died in 1960.
Many of the FBI files, only parts of
which have been released in heavily
redacted form, remain closed or
were destroyed, Mr Lownie said.