When royal secrets are divulged, the stakes may be sharper than a frost-nipped penis. In 1975, the leader of the Australian Labor Party, a man named Gough Whitlam, lost his job as Australian prime minister. Whitlam was not sacked by the voters. Instead, he was dismissed from office by Sir John Kerr, governor-general of Australia and representative of the late Queen.
Had the Commonwealth’s hereditary monarch, unelected and unaccountable, sensationally interfered in the workings of democracy? Buckingham Palace always denied that the Queen had meddled in any way: William Heseltine, her Australian deputy private secretary, stated on the record that “the Palace was in a state of total ignorance” before Kerr took his decision, a decision in which he was nonetheless justified as an expert in parliamentary governance and independent diplomat.
Thanks to a dogged fight by an investigative historian, we now know this to be entirely untrue. She has also shown that one of the great royal scandals waiting in the wings is the monarchy’s attempt to control our public archives.
In 2016, Jennifer Hocking decided to find out the truth. To do this, she had to take the National Archives of Australia – and effectively the Palace machine – to court. Hocking sought access to official correspondence on the Whitlam dismissal, which the law requires the Palace must release 20 years after the events in question. But the establishment insisted that these records covered “personal” matters involving the Royal Family, which would mean they were exempt. The National Archives of Australia, backed by the Crown, spent AUS $1.7m of public money on the court battle to block Hocking’s research.
After two defeats in lower courts, Hocking finally won on appeal. “We cannot see how the correspondence could appropriately be described, however ‘loosely’, as ‘private or personal records’”, the judgement stated. Indeed not. It covered the direct intervention of Queen Elizabeth II’s office in the workings of Australian democracy.
Charles, now our King, even got involved as the 27-year-old Prince of Wales. He wrote to Kerr shortly afterwards to reiterate his personal support for the decision: “What you did… was right and the courageous thing to do.” For two months before the dismissal, through their private secretaries, the Queen and Charles had advised the governor-general on his constitutional powers over Whitlam, encouraging intervention. It is risible to suggest that these letters ever deserved the privacy protections written into law for our royals’ “personal” love letters or family squabbles.
Yet as most modern historians have discovered, the Royal Family routinely invokes “privacy” protections to safeguard constitutional secrets. The freedom of expression organisation Index on Censorship, of which I am the deputy chair, has this week released a new investigation into the ways in which the Royal Family still attempts to censor British history.
The monarch, the heir and the second-in-line to the throne are all exempt from the 2000 Freedom of Information Act, just as the monarch is exempt from the 2010 Equality Act, from most forms of taxation and from criminal or civil prosecution. This exemption was introduced during the 10-year campaign by The Guardian journalist Rob Evans to gain access to Prince Charles’s letters lobbying government, now known as the “black spider memos”. (The interventions, when they were finally published, were radical – they included Charles requesting changes to the way the Iraq War was being fought, which would have been explosive if it had hit the news at the time it was penned in 2004.)
Until then, the Royal Family got round requests another way: journalists and historians seeking access to documents would regularly find that their requests were denied on the basis of Sections 40 and 41 in the legislation, which protect the “personal data of individuals”. Even if, in some cases, they had evidence that the correspondence tackled state matters. Again, official records pertaining to the royal political involvement seemed to be being retroactively reclassified as “private”.
Most of the researchers investigating constitutional issues are not focused on the sorts of revelations we’ve lately been treated to in Prince Harry’s memoir – which is not to pretend, po-faced, that none of the people Index on Censorship spoke to for their investigation enjoy a juicy family feud. Who doesn’t? Yet as the historian Anna Whitelock pointed out at the report’s launch on Wednesday, it is important to distinguish between the academic study of “monarchy” – a constitutional institution – and of “the Royal Family”, a collection of individuals.
Prince Harry’s very public divorce from the Royal Family does raise questions about how much the monarchy will be able to keep a lid on its secrets. But I suspect that the bigger historical pressure is just around the corner – the growing demand for full independence by the King’s Caribbean dominions, the new focus of historians on British culpability for colonialism, and the passionate demand for restitution and reparations by some black Brits are likely to lead to a rise in requests for archival material that covers the House of Windsor’s personal involvement in Commonwealth history. That – and not Prince Harry – may be the perfect storm.
As those of us who have done primary historical research know all too well, it is impossible to find treasure in an archive unless you make friends with the archivist. Public archives are supposedly catalogued – sometimes by scholars who do brilliant work – but in the case of the royals, as the historian Philip Murphy told Index, the law governing privacy is redefined so often that archives rarely get around to reclassifying and releasing material before the goalposts shift again.
If you want help getting around the Royal Family’s personal archives, the Royal Archives at Windsor, good luck to you. Historians who have written critically of the royals or found compromising material in the past report all manner of mysterious obstacles put in the way of their return, including being told that there simply aren’t enough desks in the building for them to visit.
Index on Censorship is campaigning to #EndRoyalSecrecy. The ascension of a new King is a chance for the Royal Family to do something differently. Institutions which have moved towards a culture of accountability – even those with mistakes in their past – often find that their openness is rewarded with renewed popularity.
The alternative? We all keep wondering what the House of Windsor is so determined to hide.
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