It is easy to laugh at Mountbatten’s obsession with decorating himself and with his fussing over protocol. But these trivialities were prerequisites for the job. A large portion of the viceroy’s responsibilities had to do with awarding honors, remembering faces, seating people appropriately at parties, writing correct letters and invitations, remembering how to address the divorced wife of the second son of an earl after she had remarried a sea captain, and so on. In all of these matters, Mountbatten’s skills were peerless. But the key to perfect protocol is knowing when to break it, and
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