[tcolvin]

Page 510 of 'Double Standards';
"In chapter 15 we saw that when the Foreign Office finally released its files relating to Hess's flight in 1992, Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd kept one back on the grounds that it contained 'records which still pose a risk to national security', and we asked what risk a fifty-year-old file could possibly pose to modern Britain. Since the first edition, we have been informed by a senior Foreign Office source with access to this file what really lies behind Hurd's curious statement. The 'file' is in fact a box of several individual files, each of which contains a single sheet of paper stating that the contents have been transferred 'on permanent loan' to the Royal Archives in Windsor Castle.
Obviously we have not been able to verify this for ourselves, but if true it has enormous implications. Unlike government records, the release of material in the Royal Archives at Windsor is not covered by Public Records legislation, but can be made public only on the personal instructions of the Queen. What better way to keep compromising information out of the public domain, and to prevent any future government from releasing it?..........
Our informant also tells us that the documents missing from the Foreign Office files are kept in a special section of the Windsor Archives, together with other docments relating to the activities of the Royal Family during WWII, such as the letters retrieved from Germany by Anthony Blunt in 1945. These include letters written by the Dukes of Windsor and Kent .... to Hess, Goering and von Papen, and their replies, together with letters to the Dukes from Hitler, written on his gold-embossed notepaper - and even Christmas greetings from him!.
We have no way of verifying what our informant told us because the other source of information, the Foreign Office files, are also resolutely closed to the public. The very existence of such carefully cultivated black holes for compromising material is nothing less than a scandal in today's allegedly open and democratic society. Those in power who pour scorn on 'conspiracy theories' have a very simple means at their disposal for killing them off for good; open the files...."

Gradually the effects of Picknett's books (including 'Friendly Fire' and 'War of the Windsors') seem to be having a small but noticeable effect on the 'reputable' historians. A case in point is Sir Max Hastings' new book on Churchill being serialised in the Daily Mail. Yesterday he wrote this about Churchill-FDR relations;
"The key to understanding it is to strip aside the rhetoric of the two leaders and acknowledge that it rested, as relations between states always do, upon perceptions of national interest.

As for the individual personalities involved, there was some genuine sentiment on Churchill's side, but none on Roosevelt's.

The U.S. President had always viewed himself as the senior partner. He paid scant attention to British claims that for years before the U.S. joined the war Britain had played the nobler part, pouring forth blood and enduring bombardment in a lone struggle for freedom.

He paid only lip service to the collective gratitude owed by the democracies to Britain for single-handedly standing up to Hitler.

Churchill liked to assert that, far from owing a huge cash debt to the U.S. when the war was over, Britain should be recognised as a creditor for its lone defence of freedom in 1940-41. This was never plausible.

Polls showed that most Americans - 70 per cent - were implacable in their belief that at the end of the war the British should repay the billions they had received from the U.S. in Lend-Lease supplies. They stuck to the notion that Britain was a wealthy nation. They failed to grasp the extent of her financial exhaustion.

In fact, Roosevelt felt scant sympathy for his transatlantic ally. He had visited Britain several times as a young man, but never revealed much liking for the country."


Tony