A royal inquiry into the broadcast of footage of the seven-year-old future Queen giving a Nazi salute is focusing on whether the clip was leaked during preparations for one of Buckingham Palace’s own public exhibitions.
Palace aides are examining the role of the British Film Institute and the Royal Collection Trust which last summer staged an exhibition on royal childhood featuring private clips of the Queen at play. It helped raise £8.7m to be spent on the upkeep of palaces and the royal art collection.
The Sun obtained and broadcast 17 seconds of footage of the Queen playing with her sister Margaret on the lawn at Balmoral, before raising her arm in a Nazi salute. That clip did not feature in the exhibition. The newspaper’s source demanded £500,000, the Guardian understands, but was paid closer to £30,000.
The publication of the footage sparked angry claims from the Queen’s supporters that her privacy had been breached. But critics said that argument was undermined by the fact the Royal Collection Trust, chaired by Prince Charles, chose to display other private footage of her as a child.
“When they think some charming pictures of the Queen’s childhood give a positive message, then they are happy,” said Mark Almond, professor of modern history at Oxford University. “But if there is something they don’t want put out they are awkward about it.”
The BFI, which holds the national film archive in underground stores in Gaydon in Warwickshire, and at Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, confirmed it was investigating.
“There is royal material within the collection, but that’s all we are saying,” a spokesman said. “The BFI is investigating what may have happened.”
As the hunt for the source of the leak gathered pace on Monday, Michael Cole, a spokesman for the former Harrods owner, Mohamed Al Fayed, said the footage was not among a cache of royal memorabilia he auctioned off in 1998.
The makers of an upcoming Channel 4 documentary, Prince Philip: the Plot to Make a King, which explores the royal family’s links with members of the Third Reich, also said they had not accessed the royal archive during the making of the film.
Richard Sanders, the maker of the Blakeway productions film, said his team used archive footage from various places but “none of it owned by the royals”.
The documentary, due to be aired on 30 July, examines the tensions that surfaced when the Queen first fell in love with her future husband. It reveals the extent to which the royal and political elite disliked Philip for his German connections and ferociously ambitious uncle, Lord Mountbatten.
The leak of the footage prompted a row about how far royal archives – both historic and more recent – should be controlled by the royal family.
Karina Urbach, a senior research fellow at the Institute of Historical Research at London University, said it was wrong that historians are denied open access to royal archives.
“I find it scandalous that 80 years after the events running up to the second world war we still have no direct access to the opinions of senior members of the royal family,” she said. “If we want to understand foreign policy in the runup to world war two we need to see the files, and these files are not given to us.”
But Robert Lacey, the Queen’s biographer, said there should be “no absolute right of access to what at the end of the day are family archives”.
He said: “The royal family is entitled to the same protection of their family privacy as anyone else”.
