Sedition in the Establishment?

More startling suggestions about men at the top

This nest of Oxbridge spies, this den of Establishment traitors as well, if Fleet Street is to be believed. Two weeks ago, Britons were stunned by accusations in the Daily Mail that the late Sir Roger Hollis, chief of M15, British counterintelligence, before his retirement in 1965, was himself a Soviet spy.

Last week the Sunday Times produced a different sort of shocker, and the featured players were no less stunning: the late Earl Mountbatten of Burma, cousin of Queen Elizabeth and onetime Admiral of the Fleet; and Cecil King, now 80, former chairman of the International Publishing Corporation, Britain's largest press empire. The Sunday Times revived the story of a 1968 meeting between the two, first told by Lord Hugh Cudlipp, who was then deputy chairman of I.P.C. According to Cudlipp's 1976 autobiography, King had sought the assistance of Lord Mountbatten to mount a military coup against the faltering Labor government of then Prime Minister Harold Wilson.

According to the Sunday Times 's story, another former M15 head, Sir Martin Furnival Jones, had conducted a security investigation of this alleged plot and found that the conspirators were "civil servants and military" and "a pretty loony crew."

The paper then quoted Lady Falkender, who as Marcia Williams was Wilson's private secretary, as calling Mountbatten a 'prime mover" in the plot.

The idea of the imperious King as a coup maker sounded farfetched, but there was no dispute that a meeting had taken place. King had appeared at Mountbatten's Belgravia flat accompanied by Cudlipp. Sir Solly Zuckerman, a friend of Mountbatten's, was also present when King suggested that Mountbatten head a new government after the fall of Wilson. Snapped Zuckerman: "This is treachery. I will have nothing to do with it." Then he stormed out of the room.

Retired and living in Dublin, King insisted last week that it was he who had been summoned by Mountbatten, who introduced the idea of countering the Wilson government and quizzed King about how it could be done. Said King: "I told him the time might come when he had a role to play." King last week denied, however, that a coup was ever discussed.

Mountbatten, of course, is dead, killed by the I.R.A. in August 1979. Wilson labeled the allegation of Mountbatten's involvement in a plot "an unwarranted slur."

Indeed, in an exclusive interview with TIME'S Frank Melville in 1978, Mountbatten had given a version of the encounter that tallied with the account in Cudlipp's book. Said Mountbatten: "Cecil King came to see me, at his own request, and said would I take over the country, to which my retort was to kick him out. I asked Mr. King to leave, and he left with Cudlipp 20 seconds after Zuckerman.

King was a man filled with folie de grandeur, saying 'I can fix it.' I said, 'This is rank treason. Out.' " As it happened, King himself soon became the victim of a coup of sorts. Two days after the Mountbatten meeting, he personally penned a vitriolic anti-Wilson editorial in the Daily Mirror, an I.P.C. paper. The company's board of directors was so incensed that King was fired and Cudlipp installed as chairman.

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