Queen Elizabeth II’s personal letters and diaries should be preserved in full in the National Archives, a leading academic has said.
Paul Whybrew, a retired footman and one of the late queen’s closest aides, has been appointed to sort through her private papers before they are transferred to the royal archive in Windsor, according to the Mail on Sunday.
The decision to assign Whybrew with the momentous task of filing through the documents has been criticised by academics and campaigners.
Scot Peterson, a researcher at the University of Oxford who specialises in constitutional matters, said he shared the concerns that someone without adequate training might get rid of things that should be preserved.
“I’ll go one step further and say I think it’s important to just preserve everything, and it should probably just be given to the National Archives,” Peterson said, “with the idea that all royal papers are subject to a 100-year embargo. Once 100 years has passed, it seems to me there isn’t very much reason to withhold things that were even scandalous at the time.”
Peterson said that therefore all documents – regardless of whether a historian or academic believed them to be important or not – should be preserved as the royal family was a public institution in the UK.
Credit: theguardian.com
