"There is no statesmanship or generosity in Congress," Wavell lamented in his diary early in 1947, concluding that the Cabinet Mission Plan was effectively dead. What he called his own "Breakdown Plan" proposed that the Raj should "withdraw from India in our own method and in our own time", using force if necessary to maintain order. But the Attlee government decreed otherwise and summarily replaced Wavell with another far more glamorous soldier-statesman. Earl Mountbatten of Burma came armed with the aura of his recent military victories against Japan, his royal lineage and his "progressive" politics, which were expected to win over Indian nationalists. In what Churchill called "a premature, hurried scuttle", Attlee announced that, regardless of a political settlement, Britain would quit India by June 1948.

Both Attlee's deadline and his choice of the man to implement it proved disastrous. Mountbatten's vanity was legendary. A military colleague described him as the "most talented self-publicist among the senior British commanders", so flattered by Noël Coward's portrayal of himself in a war film that he watched it 12 times. Mountbatten's chief concern on the eve of his departure for India was what he should wear on arrival. "They're all a bit left-wing, aren't they?" he asked one India expert. "Hadn't I better land in ordinary day clothes?" He was delighted to be told: "No, no, you are the last viceroy. You are a royal. You must wear your grandest uniform and all your decorations and be met in full panoply and with all the works."

Mountbatten's official biographer, Philip Ziegler, concedes that his style of diplomacy included "a degree of manipulation, even chicanery" that his predecessors would have found inconceivable. On one such occasion, he told his dismayed civil servants: "I know what you're thinking. Wavell would never have done it. Well, I'm not Wavell, and I will!" Attlee had given him far more freedom than Wavell to act on his own initiative, and he used it to announce that he would dramatically bring forward the British departure to August 15, 1947 and transfer power to two new successor states carved out of Hindu and Muslim majority areas. "The date I chose came out of the blue," he later boasted. "I chose it in reply to a question. I was determined to show I was master of the whole event." He was even more cavalier about this momentous decision at a public reception on the eve of partition: "He drew a childish simile by saying that the best way to teach a youngster to cycle was to take him to the top of a hill, put him on the seat and then push him down the hill. By the time he arrived on the flat ground below he would have learnt to cycle."

While rushing through partition before the security forces were ready for it, Mountbatten made little attempt to explore the alternatives. In his first meeting with the new viceroy, Gandhi suggested that the existing interim government led by Nehru should be dismissed and Jinnah invited to form a new one, choosing whom he wished. "I asked ‘What would Mr Jinnah say to such a proposal?'" Mountbatten noted in his record of the conversation. "The reply was ‘If you tell him I am the author he will reply ‘Wily Gandhi'." Surprisingly, the viceroy made no attempt to follow up Gandhi's wily offer, which might well have changed the course of history by offering Jinnah an honourable retreat from partition.

A major reason for Mountbatten's failure to conciliate Jinnah was his all-too-obvious intimacy with Nehru. Widely rumoured at the time, and confirmed by the memoirs of his daughter, Mountbatten willingly facilitated a romance between his beautiful, wealthy and very independent wife Edwina and the handsome Congress prime minister. "She and Jawahar Lal are so sweet together," he wrote to his elder daughter. "They really dote on each other. Pammy (his younger daughter) and I are doing everything we can to be tactful and helpful." While his daughter saw this as "a happy threesome", the bazaar gossip was less charitable. "Break open Rama's heart, you will find Sita written on it," chanted Hindu extremists. "Break open Nehru's heart, you will find Lady Mountbatten written on it." According to one account, a handful of incriminating love letters between Nehru and Edwina found their way to Jinnah, who chivalrously decided that "Caesar's wife must be above suspicion" and returned them.  The most appropriate epitaph on the Raj was provided by the Punjabi official who declared: "You British believe in fair play. You have left India in the same condition of chaos as you found it."