Your report on the latest release of classified files from the National Archives refers to a letter from Cecil Harmsworth King dismissing reports that he, Lord Mountbatten and Hugh Cudlipp had planned to overthrow Harold Wilson’s government (Alleged plotter wrote talk of Wilson ‘coup’ was nonsense, UK archives show, 19 July).
I suggest that a more reliable source for evidence of King’s perfidy is Cudlipp’s gripping autobiography Walking on the Water. In it, Cudlipp, a talented journalist who succeeded King as chairman of the Daily Mirror Group, relates that King plotted an “emergency government” to overthrow Harold Wilson.
Cudlipp met Mountbatten at the latter’s Broadlands home and then arranged a meeting between King and Mountbatten on 8 May 1968 at the peer’s London residence.
King asked Mountbatten if he would “agree to be the titular head of a new administration”. Mountbatten turned to his friend Sir Solly Zuckerman, who he had wisely brought along, and asked: “What do you think?” Zuckerman rose from his chair, reports Cudlipp, and replied: “This is rank treachery … I’m a public servant and will have nothing to do with it. Nor should you, Dickie.”
He quotes Mountbatten as saying that so far as he was concerned that sort of role was “simply not on”. Had Mountbatten agreed, the armed forces would have had a difficult choice given that their oath of allegiance is to the Queen, not the country.
It’s a story that was told to me decades ago by Frank Rogers, who went on to become chairman of Hollinger, which owned the Telegraph. He was Cudlipp’s “bag carrier” at the time. All evidence is that King was a very sinister cove indeed.
Brian Basham
Crowhurst, East Sussex
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