Monica Harding

I want to speak about transparency and accountability in public life and how the system we find ourselves in has been maintained and got us to where we are. In the early noughties, I was working overseas with the British Council, as I have said. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor visited us as part of his role as a UK trade envoy. Before his arrival, senior staff in both the embassy and the British Council were rolling their eyes—his reputation preceded him. I was told that it was a “containment” exercise, that overseas missions feared putting him out there in case he said something inappropriate, that he was arrogant and that he was not on top of his brief. Rather than looking forward to his visits as an opportunity to promote Britain, it was instead thought that he would do damage. Moreover, there were rumours about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor—that he refused to stay in the ambassador’s residence, that he would only stay in the Four Seasons or similar top-end hotels, and that he took an ironing board with him when he went overseas. That was a euphemism for a massage table. That was all well known among many officials. It even inspired the BBC TV programme “Ambassadors” in 2013, a couple of years after Andrew was forced to relinquish his role as trade envoy. It seems that this was known about in the diplomatic circles that I experienced way back at the start of the noughties, and yet Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor enjoyed another 10 years as a trade envoy. Yet when I questioned why this was allowed to happen, I was met with a shrug. “Everyone knows,” they said. As I have said, Andrew came to an exhibition I had put on about Dolly the sheep. At the time, it was the pinnacle of British innovation, and we were rightly proud of it as an example of UK scientific excellence. One of my team was a young Japanese woman who worked for the British Government as a member of British Council staff. Her job—we paid her—was to promote the UK. She showed the then prince around with some Japanese dignitaries. “Dolly the sheep,” he sneered, “It’s rubbish. Frankenstein sheep”. My team member was deflated and did not understand why this representative of the British state diminished what she was rightly proud of. The talk of Andrew and what he was like came to my own dinner table. My late father-in-law, an air vice-marshal in the RAF, was at a dinner with Mountbatten-Windsor on an overseas trip in the 1990s. He said, in front of many foreign military and diplomatic seniors, “No need for a Royal Air Force”. My father-in-law said nothing, and that was the problem. People could not because of his privileged position. My father-in-law raised it with the Chief of the Air Staff and was told it would be raised with the Palace. What happened next? Who knows? Did diplomats raise the concern to their seniors and to the very top from early on? Did the Palace do its own internal investigation? If they did, was it shared with the Department for Business and Trade? Where did these concerns all go? In doing so, did they—the system—unwittingly or wittingly support protection or cover-up, because of “the way things were done” or because of deference? That is the point of this debate. Some officials knew, or the system seemed to know, but the system seemingly failed to do anything about it for 10 years because of privilege and deference.