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By Invitation Only: Lord Mountbatten, Prince Philip, and the Attempt to Create a Commonwealth ‘Bilderberg Group’ 1964-66

https://omnilogos.com/by-invitation-only-lord-mountbatten-prince-philip-and-attempt-to-create-commonwealth-bilderberg-group-1964-66/

Philip Murphy. Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History. Volume 33, Issue 2, May 2005.

This article examines the attempt between 1964 and 1966 to create new conference for the Commonwealth modelled on the secretive Euro-American Bilderberg group, and considers the roles of Earl Mountbatten of Burma and the Duke of Edinburgh in the venture. This was the only major initiative on the structure of the Commonwealth to originate with the government of Harold Wilson during its first term in office. Consideration of the scheme was suspended as a result of Rhodesian UDI and was never reopened. Although short-lived, the Bilderberg initiative offers important insights into a number of issues. It suggests that the original Bilderberg group had assumed a considerable importance to senior figures in the Labour Party by 1964. It also illustrates the distinct ambivalence with which members of the British elite viewed the changing nature of the Commonwealth, and points to a desire among some of them to recreate the atmosphere of a more exclusive ‘club’. Above all it sheds light upon the highly idiosyncratic negotiating style of Lord Mountbatten, and suggests a desire on the part of Prince Philip to establish for himself a fully independent role within the Commonwealth.

The Commonwealth Bilderberg scheme of the mid-1960s is a largely forgotten initiative. There is no mention of it in Philip Ziegler’s official biography of Lord Mountbatten and even J.D.B. Miller’s exhaustive survey of political developments in the Commonwealth from 1953 to 1969 fails to make reference to it. There are two principal reasons for this neglect. First, the scheme was never put into operation. Second, negotiations about it were carried on between Commonwealth governments on a secret and informal basis. No public policy statements were ever made, and indeed, even officials at the British Commonwealth Relations Office eventually became somewhat confused as to the origins of the initiative. There is a brief reference to the plan in Mountbatten’s published diaries. Yet only since the release of papers in the National Archives has it been possible to offer a full account of this episode.

For all its obscurity, however, the Commonwealth Bilderberg initiative has at least one claim to a place in the history books. W. David McIntyre has described 1965 as ‘the watershed in the evolution of the modern Commonwealth’, in particular because of the creation that year of the Commonwealth Secretariat. Yet of all the schemes for the political reconstruction of the Commonwealth then under consideration or in the process of being created, the Bilderberg initiative was the only one to originate with the Wilson government itself. There are other reasons to take an interest in this plan. It tells us a considerable amount about the attitudes of senior Labour politicians towards the original Bilderberg group, about the British approach to the development of the Commonwealth, and about the somewhat idiosyncratic negotiating style of Lord Mountbatten. It also points to the difficulties of the British royal family in constructing a role for themselves within the ‘new’ Commonwealth.

I

Before considering the plans for the creation of a Bilderberg-style conference for the Commonwealth, it is necessary to say something about the Bilderberg group itself. The group has become something of a magnet for conspiracy theorists. Indeed, as Jon Ronsen and Hugh Wilford have both recently noted, the conviction that the Bilderberg group secretly runs the world is one that unites a wide spectrum of opinion on the political fringes. The truth is probably more prosaic, although no less intriguing. The Bilderberg group takes its name from the hotel near Arnhem where its first conference took place in May 1954. It still meets annually, in a different location each year, bringing together high-level politicians, industrialists, financiers, trades unionists and academics from Europe and the United States. At least latterly, it has become the habit of the group to prepare a press release naming the participants, the venue and the subjects to be discussed. Otherwise, the group conducts its meetings in conditions of the strictest secrecy. Delegates are instructed not to speak to the press during meetings, or subsequently to reveal either the nature of the discussions or the views of their fellow participants. The justification for this is that delegates should be able to express their views with a candour that would not be possible in a public forum. Conferences take place over three days, allowing for the detailed discussion of a small number of predetermined topics. The group does not pass resolutions or make policy. Delegates participate in a private rather than an official capacity, and the principal purpose of meetings is to foster greater understanding between them. The veteran Labour politician, Denis Healey, describes the Bilderberg conferences as the ‘most valuable’ of the various international meetings he attended while in Opposition. Their importance lay, he claims, in fostering understanding among a diverse range of participants: ‘Nothing is more likely to produce understanding than the sort of personal contact which involves people not just as officials or representatives, but also as human beings.’ In particular, he notes that the contacts he had made in the financial world at Bilderberg meetings proved useful after he became chancellor of the exchequer in the 1970s.

Bilderberg consists of a fixed membership, which co-ordinates the activities of the group through a steering committee formally convened in 1956, and an advisory committee established three years later. Delegates from outside the group’s ‘core’ membership are invited to attend particular conferences. Hence there is always a mixture of permanent and temporary members. From 1954 until his resignation in 1976 following his involvement in the financial scandal concerning the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, the meetings were chaired by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, who personally invited all the delegates. Bernhard’s position as the consort of Queen Juliana made him particularly useful to the group. As the biographer of Bilderberg’s founder noted, ‘As a royal prince he naturally takes precedence without arousing anyone’s envy. He is politically impartial, while the fact that he represents a small country is also reassuring.’

The group’s links with the Anglo-American intelligence community have aroused suspicions among commentators of a variety of political hues. These links date back to Bilderberg’s very origins. Its founding father was Dr Joseph Retinger, who had served in the Polish government-in-exile during the Second World War, and worked alongside the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) liaising with the Polish resistance. In 1946 Retinger founded the European League for Economic Co-operation (ELEC) along with Paul van Zeeland, the head of CEPAG, the Belgian post-war planning organisation. As Valerie Aubourg notes, van Zeeland and many other prominent members of the League were also to play a role in the establishment of Bilderberg. The League’s practice of ‘discreet discussions in small circles, relying on personal contacts among elites, generally free-trade orientated’, was to set the pattern for the later organisation. From 1948 to 1951 Retinger also acted as secretary-general of the European Movement, an organisation campaigning for a federalised Europe, which received CIA subsidies via the American Committee on United Europe (ACUE). In May 1952, concerned at the rise of anti-Americanism in Europe, Retinger and the Dutch chairman of Unilever, Paul Rykens, approached Prince Bernhard with a plan for a high-level Euro-American meeting to discuss this issue. Points raised during subsequent consultations with European political leaders were synthesised by Retinger into a paper on European criticisms of American policy. This was passed by Bernhard to his friend, the head of the CIA, Walter Bedell Smith. In December, Retinger and his erstwhile collaborator, van Zeeland, visited the United States and held talks with Bedell Smith, and with Allen Dulles, who was shortly to succeed him as head of the CIA. Ironically, however, given the reputation Bilderberg subsequently gained as a creature of United States intelligence, the Americans were slow to react to this initiative. This may be, as Wilford suggests, because Retinger was suspected by the Americans of being a ‘British secret agent’. Smith passed the matter on to Charles D. Jackson, who had served during the war as deputy chief of psychological warfare for the Allied Forces and was to act as President Eisenhower’s principal adviser in this field. He in turn passed it to a Detroit industrialist named John S. Coleman who had recently become chairman of the United States Committee for a National Trade Policy. It was not until November 1953 that the Americans made their formal response to Retinger’s original paper, and not until March 1954 that invitations to the first conference were despatched. The conference in May was judged a success by leading participants from the United States, particularly in tackling head-on European mistrust of McCarthyism. Yet it was only after further sustained lobbying by the European originators of Bilderberg that the Americans agreed that there should be subsequent conferences.

On the British side, members of the intelligence community played a prominent role in the establishment and early years of Bilderberg. Shortly after his first approach to Bernhard in May 1952, Retinger recruited to the project his old friend Colin Gubbins, the former head of SOE. He also recruited the Labour frontbencher, Hugh Gaitskell, who had served during the war in the psychological warfare unit, the Political Warfare Executive (PWE). Other British participants in early Bilderberg meetings included Victor Cavendish Bentinck, wartime chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, Sefton Delmer, the legendary black propaganda expert, and the MPs and former MI6 officers H. Montgomery Hyde and C.M. Woodhouse.

Again, this is not to say that Bilderberg was simply an instrument of the Anglo-American intelligence community. The initial meeting of the group in 1954 appears to have been subsidised by the CIA. Subsequent conferences, however, were financed by donations from corporations and from well-established private American institutions such as the Ford and Rockefeller foundations. Furthermore, as Wilford notes, there is little evidence that European delegates to Bilderberg simply played the tunes demanded by their American paymasters. American funding had only been obtained after intensive lobbying by the Europeans themselves. American delegates were surprised by the assertiveness with which members of the British Labour Party challenged United States policy in the course of Bilderberg meetings. Ultimately, Aubourg is probably correct in suggesting that ‘The intelligence community was certainly important for the creation of the Bilderberg group, but more in terms of milieux, personal contacts and shared values than political initiative or funding.’ It served, in effect, as a ready-made international network into which Retinger and others could tap to further their own agendas.

The group quickly established a reputation with the British Conservative government as a useful means of seeking to exert discreet influence. Among Retinger’s wide circle of friends was Harold Macmillan. In February 1957, shortly after becoming prime minister in the wake of the Anglo-American breach over the Suez Crisis, Macmillan expressly asked his lord chancellor, Lord Kilmuir, to accept an invitation from Prince Bernhard to a Bilderberg meeting on St Simon’s Island in the United States. Kilmuir too was an ‘old friend’ of Retinger, an association dating from his work with the European Movement. Kilmuir took the opportunity to defend the Suez adventure in front of the American delegates, and to suggest that they ‘might consider stopping using “colonialism” as a term of abuse of Britain’.

Yet, certainly during first five years of its existence, the Conservative ‘core’ members of the Bilderberg group—principally Lord Boothby, Reginald Maudling and Sir Frederick Bennett—were less senior within their party than were their Labour counterparts. Gaitskell was a founder member of the group and of its steering committee. When he stepped down from the committee in 1958, his wing of the party continued to be represented by Denis Healey, Labour’s principal international strategist, who had already been co-opted onto the steering committee in 1956, and who also later joined the advisory committee. Other prominent Labour politicians like Douglas Jay, Alf Robens, James Callaghan and George Brown attended individual meetings. They were mainly from the right of the party, although attempts appear to have been made to invite some of Gaitskell’s rivals from the party’s left wing. Bilderberg’s particular importance to Labour, and specifically to its Gaitskellite faction, can probably be explained, as Wilford suggests, by the fact that it provided its leaders with international contacts they would not otherwise have enjoyed. Bilderberg meetings also served to reinforce the Atlanticist direction in which Gaitskell was seeking to lead the party. Additionally, Wilford argues, Bilderberg may have appealed to ‘a Gaitskellite penchant for secrecy and elitism’. Harold Wilson, who became Labour leader following Gaitskell’s death in 1963, and who was firmly outside the Gaitskellite wing of the party, receives little mention in the Bilderberg-related literature. Indeed, it seems likely that he did not actually attend any of its conferences before becoming prime minister for the first time. Yet his involvement in the Commonwealth Bilderberg scheme suggests that he had been persuaded of the importance and utility of the Bilderberg model by 1964.

II

The Wilson government came to power in October 1964 at a time of considerable change and uncertainty in Commonwealth affairs. Rapid decolonisation had changed the nature of the Commonwealth from a small and exclusive club to a mini-United Nations. Meanwhile, the threat that an illegal declaration of independence by the European settler government of Southern Rhodesia might open up bitter divisions between Commonwealth states hung heavily in the air. The previous May, the Conservative prime minister, Alec Douglas-Home, had told his Canadian, Australian and New Zealand counterparts that a ‘critical moment’ had been reached for the future of the Commonwealth. He claimed, ‘It is changing very rapidly; and one is bound to add, in all frankness, that some of its younger Members are not the easiest of associates.’ Despite these reservations, the Douglas-Home government was keen to be able to demonstrate that the Commonwealth remained ‘a significant and dynamic force in world affairs’. To this end it submitted a set of proposals to the 1964 Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Meeting aimed at encouraging economic development and technical and educational co-operation. These ideas were, as McIntyre notes, ‘overtaken’ by a rival set of proposals sponsored by Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Milton Obote of Uganda and Eric Williams of Trinidad, for what became the Commonwealth Secretariat. Nevertheless, one element of the British proposals—for a Commonwealth Foundation intended ‘to administer a fund for increasing interchanges between Commonwealth organisations in professional fields’—came into existence in 1966.

The idea of a Commonwealth Secretariat was not particularly welcomed by the British Commonwealth Relations Office and in particular by its permanent under-secretary, Sir Saville Garner. Nevertheless, Garner believed that, rather than opposing the proposal, Britain should seek to shape its development so far as possible in its own interests. This became, in effect, the main strand of British policy towards the Commonwealth in the early months of the Wilson government. Specifically, British officials sought to keep the Secretariat away from defence policy, and to ensure that it could not deal with ‘colonial questions’ without Britain’s prior agreement. As the Cabinet secretary, Burke Trend, pointed out, this was considered vital ‘if the Secretariat is not to prove a potential embarrassment to us in connection with Southern Rhodesia’.

It was in this climate that the Wilson government launched the only original proposal of its own for the structure of the Commonwealth during its first period in office: an unofficial conference modelled on the Bilderberg group. The idea has to be seen as part of a far broader school of thought within British political circles in the early 1960s, which maintained that the Commonwealth could best be revitalised through cultural and professional exchanges on an organised but unofficial basis. The Commonwealth Foundation became perhaps the most tangible expression of that thinking. A variety of private organisations also provided the opportunity for Commonwealth-related discussions. One of these was the Ditchley Foundation, established in 1958 with the aim of promoting Anglo-American relations through informal discussions between politicians, businessmen and journalists. Ditchley organised conferences on tropical Africa in 1962, on the future of the Commonwealth in 1964 and on Central and Southern Africa in 1965. Prince Philip had already made his own contribution to this network of groups with the creation of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Study Conference on the Human Problems of Industrial Communities within the Commonwealth and Empire. This body arose from a meeting of industrialists and trades unionists convened by Prince Philip in July 1954. The first conference was held in Oxford two years later, its stated aim being ‘to conduct a practical study of the human aspects of industrialization and in particular those factors which make for satisfaction, efficiency and understanding, both inside industrial organisations and in everyday relations between industry and the community around it’. The founding conference brought together 280 men and women from across the Commonwealth, mostly between 25 and 45 years of age. By the mid-1960s, the Duke of Edinburgh’s Study Conferences had become a regular feature.

The origins of the project for a Commonwealth Bilderberg group were, as the Commonwealth Relations Office later admitted, ‘rather obscure’. Proper discussion of the scheme within Whitehall only began in April 1965, when a set of proposals, drafted jointly by Lord Mountbatten (then chief of the defence staff), and Prince Philip, were forwarded to Downing Street by the Prince. Yet as Mountbatten saw fit to remind Wilson in October 1965, the initiative itself had come, not long after the 1964 general election, from the prime minister himself and from his secretary of state for defence, Denis Healey. Mountbatten claimed that,

The first I knew of this matter was within a few weeks of your becoming Prime Minister, when Mr Healey told me you had a proposal to make for me to take on some form of Commonwealth work after my retirement from active service; and you subsequently told me yourself at the Chequers [Weekend Defence] Conference on 21st November 1964 what you had in mind in regard to what we now call the Windsor Conferences.

Although, as we shall see, Mountbatten was not the most reliable of witnesses, this particular claim was independently checked and verified by officials at the Commonwealth Relations Office.

On 1 December 1964, presumably at Healey’s instigation, Mountbatten held a meeting in London with Bilderberg’s honorary secretary general for Europe, E.H. van der Beugel. Van der Beugel appears to have briefed Mountbatten on the organisation and financing of Bilderberg. Not long after that meeting, Wilson made his first approach to a Commonwealth leader about the scheme. During Wilson’s talks on 9 December with the Canadian prime minister, Lester Pearson (who was himself a Bilderberg veteran), ‘There was a brief discussion of the possibility of establishing a Commonwealth movement analogous to the Bilderberg Foundation, which both UK and Canadian Ministers thought might deserve further consideration.’

In January 1965 Healey wrote to van der Beugel to arrange for Mountbatten and Prince Philip to be invited to that year’s Bilderberg conference. Healey presumably wished to allow Mountbatten and Prince Philip to observe Prince Bernhard’s style of chairing Bilderberg meetings. Having been told by Healey that this invitation was on its way, Mountbatten arranged a lunch with Wilson and Prince Philip to discuss the matter further. This took place on 27 January. Immediately after this meeting, Prince Philip wrote to Mountbatten suggesting that the scheme needed a full-time secretary, and proposing the name of a Canadian, Gordon Hawkins, who had organised one of the Prince’s earlier Study Conferences. In a further preliminary attempt to canvas Commonwealth opinion, Mountbatten raised the issue of a Commonwealth Bilderberg group during talks with the Australian prime minister, Sir Robert Menzies, in early March 1965.

Both Mountbatten and Prince Philip attended the Bilderberg conference held at the Hotel Villa d’Esté near Como in Italy from 2 to 4 April 1965. Retinger already knew Prince Philip, having been provided with an introduction to him by Prince Bernhard in the mid-1950s. This, however, seems to have been Philip’s first visit to a Bilderberg conference. Rather surprisingly perhaps, in the light of Bilderberg’s reputation for secrecy, the attendance of both Mountbatten and Prince Philip at the Como conference, and of the Prince at the 1967 Bilderberg conference, held at St John’s College, Cambridge, were reported in advance in The Times. Indeed, a paparazzi-style photograph of the delegates at Como appeared in the Italian newspaper, Il Giorno, with Prince Philip identified by name. During the conference itself, Mountbatten and Prince Philip discussed the idea of a Commonwealth Bilderberg with Healey and appear to have obtained his approval for their plans.

Four days after the conference closed, the Prince despatched a brief and rather crudely typed paper to Wilson, setting out the conclusions he and Mountbatten had reached. In a hand-written covering note, Philip noted that the enclosed document was ‘on the subject of Commonwealth Conferences which we discussed at Dickie’s lunch’. The paper itself noted that Philip and Mountbatten had been ‘invited to look into the possibility of arranging a series of relatively unofficial and informal Commonwealth Conferences with the purpose of discussing subjects of general interest to the Commonwealth as a whole’. They claimed to have based their suggestions on experience gained at a variety of conferences including the Unison Commonwealth defence conferences, Prince Philip’s own Study Conferences on industrial issues, ‘and most recently upon the Bilderberg Atlantic Alliance Conferences’. Their proposals mirrored the organisation of the Bilderberg conferences in a number of respects. They stipulated that the number of delegates at the new conference should not exceed 60, and that each country should be invited to send between one and six representatives. There should be a mixture of permanent and invited members, and the meetings should last about three days. As for their location, the first one or two should be held in the United Kingdom. Thereafter, they might be held elsewhere. Two particular aspects of their proposals attracted instant criticism from officials: the stipulation that the meetings would have to be financed out of public funds, and the suggestion that the committee responsible for organising the conferences should be composed of Commonwealth high commissioners in London or their representatives.

Mountbatten moved quickly to try to obtain the prime minister’s approval for the proposals. He saw Wilson on the morning of 13 April and later that day wrote to him noting, ‘You have had Prince Philip’s letter and I am glad you agree with it in principle.’ Whatever Wilson’s reactions may have been, however, there were considerable reservations elsewhere in Whitehall. The involvement of two members of the Royal Family meant that officials had to tread rather carefully when discussing the plans. Nevertheless, the deputy Cabinet secretary, Philip Rogers, managed to make his feelings perfectly clear. He expressed his surprise that ‘two such eminent (and, more important, intellectually distinguished) persons’ should have produced what he described as a ‘quite extraordinarily woolly’ document. In general terms, Rogers felt that the proposals failed to make clear precisely what contribution the conferences could make, or how they would relate to other Commonwealth institutions. In particular, he confessed that the idea of Commonwealth high commissioners organising the conferences ‘fills me with horror when I think of some previous discussions that I have attended of bodies so constituted’. Rogers’s negative reaction does not, however, appear to have significantly diminished Wilson’s enthusiasm for the scheme. In a discussion with the Cabinet secretary, Burke Trend, Wilson suggested that, in the light of his experience of the Bilderberg meetings, Healey might have useful ideas on how the new Commonwealth conference could be organised and financed.

The initial reaction of the Commonwealth Relations Office was almost as cautious as that of Rogers. It was felt unlikely that Commonwealth states would react favourably to the idea that they make a financial contribution to the scheme. More generally, the Commonwealth Relations Office feared that, with proposals already afoot to create a Commonwealth Secretariat and a Commonwealth Foundation, this was the wrong time to confront heads of government with proposals for a new body. Indeed, the Commonwealth Relations Office itself seemed to have difficulty in keeping track of the proliferation of Commonwealth-related bodies. Of Prince Philip’s existing Study Conferences on industrial affairs, one official noted, ‘we seem to be quite extraordinarily uninformed about these’.

The Commonwealth Relations Office’s formal response to the Cabinet Office reiterated its doubts about the timing of the proposals and the likely willingness of Commonwealth governments to bear the cost. The involvement of Prince Philip, and Mountbatten’s suggestion that the new Bilderberg-style gatherings might be named the ‘Windsor Conferences’, had attracted the critical attention of the British high commissioner in Canada, Sir Henry Lintott. The Commonwealth Relations Office incorporated the gist of Lintott’s comments into its response to the Cabinet Office:

There is a suspicion on the part of some of the newer members that Britain still in some ways tries to run the Commonwealth. This makes for suspicion of any new ideas which we may put forward, and resentment of anything which might be regarded as a tightening of the apron strings. From this point of view, we need to be careful not to appear to be giving too much encouragement to what might be described as Anglocentricity.

The Commonwealth Relations Office suggested that this problem might be diminished if the initiative for the scheme could appear to come from elsewhere in the Commonwealth, and if the first meeting could take place outside the United Kingdom.

A working party was convened to consider the proposals for both the Commonwealth Bilderberg group and the Commonwealth Foundation. This brought together officials from the Commonwealth Relations Office, the Foreign Office, the Colonial Office, the Treasury and the Overseas Development Ministry. Participants at its first meeting on 14 May were asked to ‘examine the [Bilderberg] project with a view to taking it further’. Some concern was expressed about the name ‘Bilderberg’ itself. It was suggested that this should be avoided since it ‘had been identified by the Russians as a “cold war” institution and would, therefore, not be acceptable to some Commonwealth countries’. It was also thought important, when choosing topics to be discussed by the new group, ‘to avoid matters of dispute, such as Kashmir or Southern Rhodesia’. Members of the working group were worried that the ‘unofficial’ character of the delegations to the new conference might be difficult to achieve in the case of some of the smaller and newer Commonwealth countries, since it was possible that ‘the only suitable people would be employed by the Governments in one way or another’. The problems of involving Commonwealth high commissioners and of financing the new body were also discussed.

By this stage, Mountbatten himself had already begun to canvas opinion among some of the newer members of the Commonwealth. He had been despatched by Wilson on a Commonwealth tour (one that embraced Canada, Malta, Nigeria, India, Jamaica and Trinidad) to discuss voluntary measures to restrict immigration to the United Kingdom. He took the opportunity of these talks to raise the issue of the Bilderberg scheme. On 13 May, for example, he discussed the idea with the Nigerian prime minister, Sir Abu Bakar Tafawa Balewa. According to the record of the meeting sent to London by the British high commissioner in Lagos, the encounter between Mountbatten and Balewa does not appear to have been a great success. The Nigerian premier took particular exception to the idea that some of the delegates from his country might be drawn from opposition parties. Forwarding the record of this meeting to Trend, Rogers noted, with an unmistakable air of schadenfreude, ‘This does not seem to me one of the more adroit performances of Lord M[ountbatten]!’

The meeting with Balewa did, however, force Mountbatten to produce a more elaborate rationale for his Commonwealth Bilderberg proposals than he had hitherto done. Balewa had asked for more details of the scheme, and a short paper was quickly drawn up by Mountbatten’s personal assistant, Ronald Brockman, in consultation with Mountbatten himself. Perhaps due to the speed of its production, the document (entitled ‘A New Type of Commonwealth Conference’) is neither particularly lucid, nor indeed grammatical. Explaining the need for the new body, the paper asserted that,

Political decisions of the magnitude which have taken place in the Commonwealth in recent years are rarely understood by the public. It is, therefore, not surprising that the policies of many emerging Commonwealth countries have been misunderstood by elements in other Commonwealth countries. Others, while not denying the necessity and desirability of the continuation of the British Commonwealth of Nations, doubted whether the proper means of collaboration were being applied in the changing circumstances. Objections based on nationalistic and isolationistic sentiments have been voiced and at times there has been a feeling of uneasiness among some Commonwealth countries.

Here, as elsewhere in the document, the prose is so tortured and evasive as to be virtually unintelligible. Yet it is difficult not to conclude from it that there was ‘a feeling of uneasiness’ in the minds of Mountbatten and Brockman themselves at the way in which rapid decolonisation had disrupted the comfortable structures of the pre-war Commonwealth and handed power to colonial agitators. The sense that the Commonwealth prime ministers’ meeting had now become a forum in which British representatives would be ritually harangued is apparent from the paper’s justification for the private and unofficial nature of the Bilderberg-style conference: ‘The same confidential surroundings remove any incentive to make personal propaganda; the danger of interminable speeches for the sake of publicity would not exist in Commonwealth meetings of this type.’ It seems rather unlikely that this thinly disguised attack on the rhetorical style of some Commonwealth leaders did much to advance Mountbatten’s case. Indeed, Prince Philip quite reasonably criticised the inelegance and negative tone of the document, suggesting that it could not possibly have come from the hand of Mountbatten himself. Both of the passages quoted above were removed from the much-revised version of ‘A New Type of Commonwealth Conference’, which was subsequently given wider distribution among Commonwealth leaders.

Back in London, on 21 May, Wilson, Trend, Garner and the Commonwealth secretary, Arthur Bottomley, met to discuss the progress of the Commonwealth Bilderberg project. They agreed that the idea should be raised informally during the forthcoming conference of Commonwealth prime ministers, but that it should not be placed on the agenda. They also discussed the financing of the scheme, and it was decided that Bottomley would explore the possibility of the Imperial Relations Trust contributing to the costs. The idea of using private donors to finance the venture (just as the Bilderberg group itself was financed) promised a way of meeting potential criticisms from Commonwealth governments that the conference would be a financial burden, or that it was merely an extension of the British government. The Imperial Relations Trust, of which Bottomley was himself a trustee, had been established in 1937 in the wake of the Abdication Crisis. It had been endowed with an anonymous gift of £250,000 from the Anglo-South African financier and businessman, Sir Henry Strakosch, and worked to promote educational and cultural links between Britain, the ‘old’ Dominions and India. It therefore seemed a promising first port of call. Four days later, Bottomley held an informal meeting with Sir Geoffrey Gibbs, the chairman of the Trust. Gibbs appeared enthusiastic about the idea of a Commonwealth Bilderberg group, and a figure of £10,000 was suggested as the annual contribution the Trust might be prepared to make.

III

This, in a sense, marked the high point of the fortunes of the scheme. Trend was able to forward a progress report to Downing Street on 1 June, stating that the project had ‘begun to take shape on very satisfactory lines’. Trend noted that the scheme had altered somewhat as a result of the recent inter-departmental discussions, and he was keen that Wilson should establish whether it was still something Prince Philip ‘would be willing to become publicly identified with’ (Mountbatten had not yet returned from his Commonwealth tour and was therefore not available for comment). The revised plan diverged in two important respects from the original proposals submitted by Mountbatten and Philip in April. First, Trend’s report reflected the government’s confidence that, rather than relying on government funding, the main expenses of the conferences could be met ‘primarily from unofficial sources’. This would make it clear that ‘it was independent of government and was under no form of official control’. Secondly, the idea that Commonwealth high commissioners might be involved in the organisation of the conferences had been quietly dropped. Instead, responsibility would rest with something more akin to the ‘permanent’ membership of the original Bilderberg group, namely ‘some broadly representative committee, consisting of non-official individuals who, although they would not be directly representative of individual Commonwealth countries, would be able to bring to their task a considerable knowledge and experience of Commonwealth affairs’. This body would have Mountbatten as its executive director, while Philip would act as President of the conference as a whole. Trend’s report also confirmed that the conference was likely to become known as the ‘Windsor meetings’.

On his return from his Commonwealth mission, Mountbatten sought to add to the atmosphere of optimism surrounding the scheme. On 3 June, he told Garner confidently that,

Every Prime Minister to whom I have spoken had received this idea enthusiastically, although one or two of the smaller countries expressed the feeling that there were too many Commonwealth organisations holding meetings and that they were suffering from shortage [sic] of suitable persons to take part.

Some support for this positive assessment appeared to be provided by a report on a meeting between Mountbatten and Dr Eric Williams, the prime minister of Trinidad, sent by the acting British high commissioner on the island early in June. According to this record of their discussions, Williams had ‘lost no time in saying that the idea [of a Commonwealth Bilderberg group] attracted him’. He was therefore presumably not unduly swayed by Mountbatten’s subsequent assertion ‘that so far all Commonwealth Prime Ministers he had spoken to had been in favour, though some had specialised ideas of their own’. The report also, however, offered some hints that Williams’s general political attitudes might not be entirely typical of the leaders of developing Commonwealth countries. Mountbatten had suggested that big business funding of the Conferences ‘might create the wrong impression at the outset’. The acting high commissioner noted in his record of the meeting that, ‘Dr Williams made no comment on the question of sponsorship by big business. He appeals here so much to the big firms, Texaco, Shell, Tate and Lyle etc that for himself he might not exclude the possibility of tapping them for a purpose such as this.’

The atmosphere of optimism over the project carried through into a meeting between Mountbatten, Wilson and Prince Philip in Buckingham Palace on 10 June. Wilson stressed the importance of obtaining private funding for the conferences and revealed that the press baron, Lord Thomson, was also regarded as a potential donor. The paper which Brockman had drafted for the Nigerians had stressed the need to appoint ‘a full-time and well paid director or secretary’ for the scheme. At the meeting at Buckingham Palace, Mountbatten suggested that ‘a good candidate’ would be Brockman himself who was due to retire from the services at the same time as Mountbatten. In a slight change to the previous job description, Mountbatten suggested that the post would be part-time, presumably to enable Brockman to combine it with the appointment he was planning to accept with the Variety Club of Great Britain. Prince Philip made it clear that he envisaged a central role for himself within the organisation, sending out invitations to the meetings personally ‘as with Prince Bernhard and the Bilderberg meeting’. Wilson undertook to raise the matter informally with Commonwealth prime ministers when they met at Chequers on the weekend of 18–20 June. Thereafter, an attempt would be made to bring preparations forward to enable the first conference to be held in April or May 1966. Prince Philip promised to seek the Queen’s formal approval. This (or at least approval for the term ‘Windsor Meetings’) was forthcoming in advance of Wilson’s discussions with Commonwealth prime ministers later in the month.

Wilson’s informal soundings of Commonwealth leaders delivered the first significant blow to the project. A number of them proved lukewarm towards the scheme, and the Indian prime minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, was positively hostile. In a meeting with Wilson on 22 June, Shastri ‘said at once that he saw considerable difficulty in such a scheme. There were already numerous opportunities for all kinds of people in Commonwealth countries to get together and he was doubtful about the necessity or wisdom of a new arrangement.’ At Wilson’s suggestion that the proposed conference would cater to a different constituency, ‘Mr Shastri protested quite vigorously that this made no difference’.

As Sir Saville Garner noted, there seemed to be a mysterious divergence between the results of these consultations and Mountbatten’s repeated claims that there was virtually unanimous support for the idea across the Commonwealth. The mystery deepened still further when a pooling of reports from British high commissioners on Mountbatten’s discussions with heads of government (including that from Britain’s representative in Lagos) confirmed the view that there were significant reservations from a number of quarters. As one of Garner’s colleagues noted,

There seem to be two curiously contrasting assessments of Commonwealth reactions. a) Ours: (based on records from posts and reactions of certain Prime Ministers when Mr Wilson floated the suggestion at the time of the Prime Ministers’ meeting): mixed e.g. Shastri hostile, Obote and Jawara unfavourable, Pearson and Margai uncertain, only Williams at all enthusiastic. b) Earl Mountbatten’s: everybody (even including Shastri) in favour.

It was decided that the broadly negative conclusions that had emerged from Wilson’s consultations would have to be conveyed to Prince Philip. Understandably, however, officials were nervous about breaking the news. A draft letter from Wilson to the Prince was produced by Downing Street at the beginning of July. This noted that Wilson’s consultations had ‘not been too encouraging’. It recorded Shastri’s objections, suggested that there might ‘also be objections from Canada on the grounds of the “anglocentricity” of the proposals’ and pointed out that ‘Dr Williams of Trinidad was the only Prime Minister to display any real warmth’. The letter claimed that this need not be ‘an insuperable obstacle to the scheme’, and promised that efforts would continue to seek funding from non-governmental sources. Yet it concluded, ‘I am sorry to have to render so discouraging a preliminary report on what I myself always felt to be an imaginative and valuable addition to the network of Commonwealth contacts.’

Garner, although fully aware of the apparent state of opinion on this matter, felt that the draft overstated the objections of Commonwealth governments. He noted that the remark about ‘anglocentricity’ had come from the British high commissioner in Canada rather than the Canadian government. Above all, he warned Downing Street that ‘If the draft were to be shown to Lord Mountbatten in its present form I think he would blow up!’ Garner provided an alternative draft, which was approved by Downing Street and sent to the Prince on 19 June. This was far more upbeat in tone. The rather gloomy conclusion was transformed out of all recognition and the overall impression given of the consultations with Commonwealth governments was that they had been ‘mixed’ rather than ‘negative’, with reservations balanced by whole-hearted support. Hence, rather than being informed that Williams was ‘the only Prime Minister to display any real warmth’, Prince Philip was instead told that ‘On the other hand Dr. Williams of Trinidad was very enthusiastic.’ The essential message, however, remained that the scheme, if it was to proceed, would have to do so as a purely private venture funded from non-governmental sources. Wilson promised that the government would assist Mountbatten in making approaches to potential donors.

Before the letter could be despatched, Mountbatten made a further attempt to talk up the scheme’s chances of success. By that stage, however, officials were distinctly wary about taking his assessments at face value. He discussed the project with Wilson in the House of Commons on 15 July, the day of his retirement as chief of the defence staff. His account of the meeting in his diary is characteristically optimistic: ‘We agreed now that we should go ahead with Philip to be President, myself to be Chairman and Ronnie Brockman to be the Director. We decided on broad policy on what steps to take next, and that a good name would be the “Windsor Conference”‘. Yet it was far from clear that Wilson’s officials regarded anything as having been agreed. Mountbatten had sought to persuade Wilson that the Indians would be prepared to participate in the first Windsor conference. In the light of that discussion, Wilson’s private secretary, D.J. Mitchell, raised the question of whether the letter to Prince Philip should be amended. He concluded, however, that ‘Lord Mountbatten is so unreliable in his accounts of other people’s views that I suggest you should send your letter as it stands.’

Mountbatten’s reputation as an unreliable witness was further enhanced by his behaviour following this meeting. He immediately drafted a letter to Wilson claiming to be ‘much encouraged by your letter to Prince Philip which you kindly showed me’. Yet Downing Street informed Garner at the Commonwealth Relations Office that Wilson had not shown Mountbatten the letter. Garner replied: ‘I should perhaps record that Mountbatten gave me a detailed account of what purported to be the letter which he had seen (though I must confess that his account bore little relation to the draft which I sent you and consequently to the actual letter which I have now seen).’

A further blow was delivered to the proposal by the attitude of the Imperial Relations Trust. In July, Bottomley was informed by the Trust’s secretary that at its previous meeting, the trustees present had not felt able to agree to an annual grant of £10,000. She also noted that its trust deed prevented the organisation from granting assistance to the newer members of the Commonwealth. In the light of this, although discussion of the issue had formally been postponed by the Trust, there seemed little chance of it making a significant financial contribution. Indeed, when the Trust did meet again in December the trustees ‘showed no great enthusiasm in contributing to this project’.

Downing Street and the Commonwealth Relations Office agreed that Commonwealth heads of government should be informed of the current state of play with the scheme. The letter that went out to Commonwealth leaders was keen to stress that the conferences were an entirely private initiative of Prince Philip’s:

What is clear is that the scheme must be on the basis of a private idea and not connected with Governments in any way. It is the Duke’s intention to launch the proposal as a non-Governmental project and to ensure that the scheme is supported by funds provided by non-Governmental sources. In these circumstances I do not think any of us has a right to raise any objection, but I thought you would like me to let you know that the Duke of Edinburgh has decided to go ahead on this basis.

This virtually made it appear both that Commonwealth leaders were not entitled to object and that any objections they did raise might be taken as a personal affront to Prince Philip. Not surprisingly, then, most of the replies Wilson received were broadly positive. The Canadian prime minister, Lester Pearson, noted that he had himself attended Bilderberg meetings and had been ‘impressed by the value of this technique of consultation on a non-official, but influential basis’. Even given such a strong steer by Wilson, however, not all the responses were so encouraging. Echoing the objections raised by Balewa to the non-partisan nature of the national delegations, the prime minister of Sierra Leone expressed concerns that a delegate ‘might say something explosive or damaging and not in the best interests of the Government’.

It was shortly after the final replies reached London, that Mountbatten chose to remind Downing Street that it had been Wilson and Healey and not himself and Prince Philip who had been the originators of the Commonwealth Bilderberg idea. Mountbatten had become aware via Brockman that the Commonwealth Relations Office was ‘convinced that the initiative for those proposed Windsor Conferences came from me’. Perhaps conscious of the fact that his own views on the issue were treated with some scepticism among officials, and afraid that the scheme was losing momentum, Mountbatten was keen to identify it as closely as possible with the prime minister. He also wanted Wilson to take an active role, along with Bottomley, in soliciting private donations, pointing out that ‘Prince Philip and I, as members of the Royal Family, are debarred by rules laid down by the Queen from appealing for funds for any purpose.’

The deputy Cabinet secretary, Philip Rogers, who from the first had been highly sceptical about the scheme, described Mountbatten’s remarks as ‘unhelpful and indeed in their effect, if not their intent, obstructive’. In general, he was highly doubtful about the propriety of ministers making appeals of this nature, and in the specific case of the Commonwealth Bilderberg project, he thought that there was ‘sufficient objection to the proposal on the part of some Commonwealth prime ministers to make it undesirable that there should be this degree of government backing’. Given the attitude of the Imperial Relations Trust, he felt that, even with limited government financial support, there was unlikely to be sufficient money to launch even the first conference, and that it would be ‘of dubious wisdom to hold the first without knowing whether there was a prospect of a continuing series’. If, however, Rogers suggested, his views on ministers’ soliciting funds were thought to be unreasonable, the first approach should probably be made to Lord Thomson, who might be prepared to finance the entire conference. Rogers thought, from his own experience, that the Nuffield Foundation, another potential source of funds, would be prepared to offer only a fraction of the costs.

With the funding of the project still in doubt, the Rhodesian crisis broke upon the Commonwealth with Ian Smith’s illegal declaration of independence (UDI) on 11 November. This monopolised ministerial and official attentions. The Commonwealth heads of government conference in Lagos in January 1966 was dominated by the issue, with Wilson coming under fierce pressure to retreat from his earlier declaration that force would not be used against Rhodesia. The issue also provided a fresh preoccupation for Mountbatten. Following the failure of negotiations in London with Smith in October 1965, Wilson had sought royal approval for the appointment of Mountbatten as the governor of Rhodesia if the current governor, Sir Humphrey Gibbs, were to be seized by the Smith government. Five days after UDI, Wilson even raised with the Queen the idea of Mountbatten being sent on a mission to Rhodesia as her personal emissary. Although Mountbatten himself was highly enthusiastic about the plan, the Palace vetoed it, fearing that it might undermine the political neutrality of the monarch.

By the beginning of February, the Commonwealth Relations Office admitted that the Commonwealth Bilderberg scheme was ‘frankly rather in the doldrums at the moment’. Brockman was interested in exploring Canadian sources of funding, but it was felt in the Commonwealth Relations Office that an approach should not be made until a British donor had been found. Garner suggested that it would be unwise to initiate the first Windsor conference ‘until the Rhodesia problem was somehow out of the way’. Under the circumstances, there was some debate within the Commonwealth Relations Office whether to ‘clamp down’ on Mountbatten and dissuade him from seeking to make any further progress, and whether the resulting moratorium should be taken as an opportunity simply to kill off the scheme. A.A. Halliley pointed to the danger that if Mountbatten ‘were told that this project was to be put on ice he would drop it and might not be willing to take it up again if we wished to reactivate’. Halliley felt it would be a shame to allow the Rhodesian crisis to scupper the scheme and, indeed, wondered ‘whether the informal contacts which a conference of this nature would encourage might not also have useful side-effects on the nature of the problems connected with our Rhodesian difficulties and thus be a positive help in that respect also’. One of his colleagues, however, doubted whether there was real support in the Commonwealth for the Bilderberg project, questioned its likely usefulness and pointed to the continuing problems of obtaining funding. Under the circumstances, he claimed that he would be ‘well content if the result is that the whole idea withers away’. In the event, the Commonwealth Relations Office decided to proceed on the basis that the project had merely been postponed and that, if the Rhodesian problem could be solved, the first conference might go ahead at some time in 1967. They were relieved to learn from Brockman that Prince Philip was already thinking along these lines. Yet the Rhodesian crisis was not solved, and the whole project did indeed quietly ‘wither away’.

IV

Like many imaginative initiatives that never quite worked, the Commonwealth Bilderberg scheme has almost been entirely forgotten. Yet it deserves at least a brief mention in the history of the development of the Commonwealth since it was the only original idea on Commonwealth organisation to emerge from the Wilson administration of 1964–66. That Wilson and Healey chose Bilderberg as their model for a new series of Commonwealth conferences tends to confirm how important and useful this body had become to senior Labour politicians. It also points to a fairly widespread sense of disillusionment with the newly expanded Commonwealth among the British political class, and to a sense that Commonwealth prime ministers’ or heads of government meetings had turned into a forum for sterile expressions of anti-Western rhetoric.

The secretive nature of the Bilderberg model promised a way of encouraging a genuine dialogue, by freeing Commonwealth leaders from the need to express themselves in terms that would be acceptable to their supporters at home. In the process it also promised to restore something of the atmosphere of an exclusive club that had characterised pre-war Commonwealth prime ministers’ meetings. On a personal level, the idea offered a great deal to the two individuals chosen to promote it: for Mountbatten, a major project to occupy his time following his retirement as chief of the defence staff in 1965; for Prince Philip, the chance to forge a significant international role in his own right. For both men, and particularly Philip, the figure of Prince Bernhard was clearly something of an inspiration: an apparently unique case of a senior member of a European royal family in the post-war era who had managed to establish himself as a power-broker on the global stage. It was hardly surprising that the chance of replicating the Bilderberg structure in a Commonwealth context proved so appealing to them.

The Bilderberg group itself conspicuously refrained from extending invitations to delegates from Third World countries. This probably owed something to the prejudices of some of its members about the nature of the developing world. One anonymous member told The Times journalist, Caroline Moorehead, in 1977, ‘We are looking for like-thinking and comparable people.’ Yet whether the essentially non-official ethos of Bilderberg could have been adapted to the needs of the ‘new’ Commonwealth is open to doubt. The lack of non-governmental business or professional elites in a number of Commonwealth countries would no doubt have made it difficult to recruit delegates from outside governing circles. Moreover, the leaders of some states had already made clear their apprehension at the prospect of opposition politicians being invited to meetings. Officials at the Commonwealth Relations Office may also have been correct that ‘Windsor conferences’ chaired by the Queen’s consort would have been regarded by other members of the Commonwealth as a means of enhancing British influence. The affair serves as a further illustration of the difficulties faced by the British royal family in reinforcing their image as Commonwealth figureheads at a time of changing attitudes towards the Imperial/Commonwealth connection.

Nevertheless, it is also possible to be critical of the caution British officials displayed towards the whole venture. The issue of the Windsor conferences serves to illustrate—if further illustration were necessary—the stultifying impact the Rhodesian crisis exercised on British thinking about the Commonwealth. Yet it also suggests that, to some extent, the problem was self-reinforcing. There was clearly some force behind what one might describe as the ‘minority view’ within the Commonwealth Relations Office: that informal and unofficial discussions of Rhodesia in a forum like the Windsor conference might have served to take some of the heat out of the issue. The Bilderberg group itself did not shy away from controversial issues, as can be seen from its discussion of McCarthyism in 1954 and of the Suez Crisis in early 1957. Indeed, it saw its role as being to tackle head-on those questions that seemed likely to poison Anglo-American relations. The ‘majority view’ within the Commonwealth Relations Office owed much to a more general tendency in British policy to keep the new Commonwealth out of discussions of the Rhodesian crisis. The issue of Rhodesia also clearly provided those officials who had always been hostile towards the Windsor scheme with a welcome pretext for shelving it. The other factor that effectively wrecked the scheme was that of funding. The British government’s own reluctance to put a significant sum of public money behind the scheme was all too typical of the attitude of successive British governments towards Commonwealth-related initiatives. Yet the history of the Commonwealth Bilderberg proposals also points to Britain’s lack of well-funded American-style private foundations, capable of funding ventures likely to enhance informal British influence in the Commonwealth and the wider world. The episode provides further evidence for the view that the Britain was poorly placed to play a significant role in the international ‘culture wars’ of the post-war era.

Finally, this brief history of Commonwealth Bilderberg group scheme has much to tell us about the working methods of Mountbatten himself. In retrospect it is difficult not to feel that these proved somewhat self-defeating. In his letter to Wilson on 16 July 1965, Mountbatten quoted the prime minister as having said that ‘nothing succeeds like success’. This was very much Mountbatten’s own motto throughout the affair. His method of pushing the scheme forward was to have informal talks with A, and then to tell B that A was fully behind the scheme. Having convinced B that the matter already had unstoppable momentum, he would next tell C that A and B were fully in support—and so on. No doubt this had proved successful in the past. In this case, however, British officials had been pessimistic from the start about the likely reaction of Commonwealth leaders to the scheme, and were therefore on the lookout for any reactions that might contradict Mountbatten’s rosy picture of unanimous support. As the volume of this contradictory evidence mounted, Mountbatten’s own credibility and, by extension, that of the scheme itself, tended to be undermined. In the process, a valuable opportunity may have been lost to make a contribution to dialogue across the Commonwealth. And, at the very least, the existence of two Bilderberg groups would certainly have confused the conspiracy theorists.
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