It only makes them more eager...
If you have a section of the archive which is held back or marked 'highly secret' 'closed until the crack o'doom' etc. And of course if stuff is Not There it excites slavering conspiracy theories...
(Will cop to in one early job of mine being given the job of looking through a series of files which had been given such a high security classification by a former member of the Department in question that they were talking about 'these cannot be be made available for centuries!!!' and really, even less than 50 years down the line at the time one did not quite see that this was going to be the dynamite they supposed.)
But anyway, there is a hoohah about the Mountbatten papers at the University of Southampton: University of Southampton spends ‘hundreds of thousands’ on legal battle preventing access due to government veto: Andrew Lownie, the author of a 2019 book about the Mountbattens, has been fighting unsuccessfully since 2017 for their correspondence and diaries to be released. This is despite freedom of information (FoI) requests and an order by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) that the material be released. The university has said it was directed by the government to keep a small number of the papers private until told otherwise. “They’ve spent hundreds of thousands of pounds and brought in two top QCs, and this fight has been going on for four years so I can only imagine there’s something [interesting] there otherwise why would they bother?” said Lownie.
I do wonder what it can be. The immediate supposition is that it must be matters of high diplomacy and national interest, but maybe not. While the sex lives of Lord and Lady Mountbatten are not exactly a state secret: that article mentions that 'Lady Mountbatten had a close relationship with the Indian leader Jawarhalal Nehru' (I think one is permitted a 'nudge, wink' there, really), and the Wikipedia article's section on His Lordship's sexuality gives one to wonder how he had time and energy for other leisure interests, maybe there was some scandal factor?
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