Scimitars on Whitehall - A British coup d'état[{locked}]

[James G]

This is a short story written by Forcon and James G: a truly joint effort.
We avoid current politics on purpose.



Scimitars on Whitehall


One


Cecilia Hawtrey entered politics aged forty. She was a divorced mother of two and a successful businesswoman who ran for a seat in the House of Commons. A few years beforehand, her husband at the time had tried to do the same thing. He’d fought as a candidate in a by-election but failed to make it with the voters. She’d thought then she could do better. After a divorce and desire in her to do something else with her life, Cecilia began her entry into the political field. She manoeuvred her way into consideration for a candidacy at the next general election. She chose the opposition though which she had contacts back from her ex-husband’s failed effort. Her local constituency, Weston-on-Sea, had an MP standing down at the coming election and she aimed to be chosen as the prospective parliamentary candidate. It didn’t work. Cecilia wasn’t chosen: someone else took the candidacy for that safe seat. However, the attempt brought her to the attention of the party in a neighbouring constituency. Eastbury was a somewhat marginal held by the party in government. Seeing her speak at a charity event, Cecilia was then approached by the chairman of the Eastbury party machine and convinced to run there. The party’s central office cleared her though considered her having a low chance of success. It would be good experience for another run elsewhere, she was told, at a later date. Cecilia was determined to prove them wrong. The election was called and Cecilia began campaigning. Things weren’t going that well but then fate intervened. The incumbent MP was shaken by revelations from his past – financial impropriety which had been long hidden – and everything changed. There was national party support and Cecilia suddenly found herself winning more and more voters over. On election day things looked remarkably close but she couldn’t be sure she’d win out. However, when the count came in the early hours and she was declared the winner. A few hundred votes out of tens of thousands had won the day for her. Cecilia Hawtrey, MP for Eastbury it now was.

Politics wasn’t about ideology for Cecilia. It wasn’t about helping people nor defending values. It was about power. She could talk the talk and walk the walk when it came to telling people what they wanted to hear but she had her own motives. In Parliament, Cecilia found herself soon on a select committee. Her party had won office but not secured a majority. There was a confidence & supply agreement with a small party that ensured they were in government. The prime minister wanted fresh faces in influential places to gain his party visibility ahead of what he anticipated to be another election not that long down the road. Cecilia jumped in with two feet to her committee role. She was on the television and the radio. Her committee was involved in one of the key political events of the moment and she shone through. Elsewhere, she followed the party line. Westminster life for Cecilia wasn’t all that she thought it would be though. Cecilia sought more than she had. Patience, she was told, would bring rewards. She had to wait. A year passed and there was a reshuffle in government among junior minister roles. Cecilia wasn’t on the list for promotion at first but when one MP declined a role, the party bigwigs decided that she might be just what they needed. She left her committee behind and was in one of the ministries. That agreement with the smaller party fell apart due internal issues within it leading to a leadership crisis. There was going to have to be another general election, less than a year and a half after the last one. Cecilia turned her once marginal seat into a safe seat. She won there by more than nine thousand votes the second time around.

The Prime Minister had visited her constituency during the election campaign. Voters in Eastbury hadn’t been so sure of him but he was impressed with Cecilia. She was just the type of figure he wanted in his government. Her background, media savvy and loyalty to the party all went down well with him. Against the advice of several colleagues who weren’t so sure, when the Prime Minister formed a new government, holding a comfortable majority this time around, he brought Cecilia into it. No longer was she a junior minister but now a senior one in the Cabinet. She now felt the taste of power. It was something that she enjoyed. Junior ministers and civil servants were bossed around. Journalists were befriended and used for her purposes. He went on official trips abroad and was treated as important. There was an issue though with her ex-husband. She had reverted to her maiden name of Hawtrey from her married name of Neville. That had been a very wise decision. Some of the business dealings which Neville associated himself with wouldn’t have gone down well with voters and the media. Of course, the two of them being once married was brought up occasionally in the public sphere but they were divorced. It was non-governmental intelligence work and military contracting that her ex-husband was involved in now. Cecilia had no personal objection at all to this but others did.

A couple of years passed. Cecilia’s meteoric rise into government had seen her not really go any higher. She stayed in her Cabinet job despite another reshuffle which saw other senior ministers move around. She coveted a higher role, one of the great offices of state, but that was beyond her at this time. The Prime Minister seemed to have found a new favourite and he himself showed no sign of going anywhere else. She wanted something new, a bigger challenge than what she’d already overcome. To impose her will somewhere was what was in her heart. It was unfulfilled and it hurt. Because of the children, Cecilia had contact with her former spouse. He’d remarried – someone half his age who he embarrassed himself with – but their own split had been amicable back when it had occurred. He offered Cecilia something. Neville didn’t ask for anything in return but she knew that there would be a quid pro quo for this with him aiming to call in the debt sometime in the future. It broke the rules of the ministerial code, even the law, to not report what she was offered let alone accept it like she did. Cecilia did so though. It was confidential information on a Cabinet college of hers. Using it, Cecilia was behind a Cabinet reshuffle following public revelations of her fellow politician’s sexual dalliances. She knew that getting what she wanted from all of this was in no way certain, not at all, but doing nothing when her career was as stagnated as it was could no longer do. The gamble paid off. Cecilia had wanted the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer but she’d been dreaming too big there. In four years, no one goes from new MP to the Treasury. She went to the Home Office though, being told afterwards that she got there instead of the Ministry of Defence – which she would have hated – when the first choice for the new Home Secretary opted to leave the Cabinet and retire to the backbenches instead. Cecilia could never imagine doing anything like that. Walking away from power was something she believed she would never do. There was power at the Home Office and a real taste of it Cecilia got.

Neville tried to call in the debt she owed him. Cecilia didn’t want to pay, especially not in the form he was asking. The time wasn’t right. She was under more observation than before and it was a time of too many whistle-blowers and leakers. She told him that next year might be a better time but to aid his business interests from the Home Office at a time like this would see certain exposure. A month went by. Neville didn’t re-raise the issue during that time. She was approached though by someone else, one of his business contacts. Neville had an international operation – he’d bought a controlling stake in that multi-national rather than building it up – and there had been a warning by a civil servant within the Home Office over the security risk that some of her ex-husband’s associates posed. Cecilia had nodded seriously and then pulled a face when the timeserver had left her office. When approached, Cecilia regretted not taking heed. She was unprepared for the blackmail which came. Neville was a front for others. She was entangled in someone else’s schemes. They had evidence on what she had done to get where she was in addition to knowing some of the questionable practices she herself had been involved in with her own business dealings long before she became an MP. No open threats were made but it was made clear she needed to accede to the wishes of those who were holding this over her. There was also the promise made to her as a sweetener to advance her career even further than she had brought it to. Cecilia did what was asked of her.

Private security contacts for domestic purposes and military assistance again by the private sector gained her support. None of this was done in the name of that company which her former spouse purported to run. There was already a passage through Parliament of such a bill on this note and the Prime Minister was behind it. What Cecilia was doing though was aiding it in behind-the-scenes manners. She cut down internal Home Office opposition from civil servants and then from the Security Service (MI-5) as well. Being blackmailed made her uncomfortable on a personal note yet there were benefits. There was money. It went elsewhere in the world and held in complicated trusts, but it was there. Cecilia got used to the situation that she was in. Still, if there was a way out of this, she aimed to find it. Who knew what else would be asked of her in the future? Another year passed. Cecilia had a private meeting with the head of MI-5 was the agreed upon topic meant to be concerning anti-terrorism. He surprised her after the meeting where he spoke privately with her and she understood that everything else discussed was just a façade to hide the real reason. The Director-General and she weren’t always on the best terms but he acted as if their personal history didn’t matter. He warned her about her ex-husband. He’d got himself involved with the foreign intelligence arm of another government – that being Russia – and was exposing himself to blackmail if he wasn’t careful. She needed to be wise to this, Cecilia was told. Ah. The pieces fell into place. Cecilia realised she was in the sticky stuff and needed a way out of this!

That bill went through the Commons. It was decried by opponents but still carried the day. There were other parts to it too away from what Cecilia’s ex-husband’s company would benefit from. This came from her own department where there was a shake-up to do with national security affairs. As Home Secretary, Cecilia sought to have them implemented as soon as possible. This allowed for her to get wind of the Norchester Plot. There was an Islamic extremist terror cell planning to assassinate the Prime Minister and it was based it of that town in the north of the country. Her first reaction was, naturally, to see it stopped. Cecilia then had a change of heart. She intervened and, under the guise of political supervision over the operations of MI-5 and the police, thoroughly sabotaged the efforts to stop it occurring. Those terrorists based in Norchester came down to London and killed the nation’s elected leader in a suicide bombing. Cecilia came very close to having a change of heart at the last minute. She feared being caught. There was no concern in her over the human cost of what she did, just the risk to her personally of exposure. Nothing pointed back to her though. Indirectly, she got rid of the Prime Minister. The rush, the pleasure she received was fulfilling on so many levels. For one moment afterwards, what she regarded as one of weakness, she told herself that she had gone too far and this wasn’t what she’d got into politics to do. But… she pushed that aside as she ran for the top job herself. Cecilia was sure she’d make a better Prime Minister than the man who’d just died and it would get that monkey off her back which was those seeking to control her.

Cecilia hadn’t planned through how she would then get into Downing Street. She had been acting instinct when seeing how she hoped to be her predecessor slain. Her thinking had been that there would be an emergency party leadership race and it would be done in a hurry. Cecilia thought she had a good shot at winning that. Alas, things got difficult. The Deputy Prime Minister (a position with no constitutional role) took over because the nation needed a leader, even a temporary one. He wanted to stay in that role. Others in cabinet disagreed, Cecilia among them. The terror attack had occurred within the Central Lobby of the Houses of Parliament, the very heart of democracy. The effects politically here saw a feeling among politicians, from the government and the opposition parties both, that this was something where the ‘usual’ reaction wouldn’t do. Cecilia saw the opportunity there and took it. She joined with those who didn’t think that the new PM should be there and business could continue as normal. She worked with backbenchers from her own party as well as the opposition’s front bench: if things had turned out differently several years beforehand, she’d be with them in the other party. Cecilia led the effort to force a Government of National Unity (GNU) at a time to bring the country together in the face of terror. It was a bandwagon she jumped on rather than started. It made her enemies but more friends. Within a week, she was in Downing Street. How long that GNU would last no one knew, but Cecilia was at the head of it. She’d made it all the way to the top. Now, how to stay here?

[James G]

Two

With Mrs. Hawtrey now in Downing Street, a harsh response came from the government with regards to the attack on British democracy which had been the Norchester Plot. The explosion which had taken place in the heart of the nation’s capital had shaken Britain to the core. There was panic on the streets and suspicion directed towards Muslims of all backgrounds. Hawtrey took the chance to gain from this. She was now the Prime Minister, the head of government for all the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Her past activities were something that she was desperate to hide, and with her now holding the nation’s highest office, it was imperative that she remain in charge less her secrets be revealed. Such a thing was sure to mean criminal prosecution as well as public humiliation and a loss of power, money, and quite possibly freedom. To a woman who was driven by power more than anything, this fate was unacceptable. Now that she was Prime Minister, Hawtrey had every intention of remaining there. She hadn’t planned an endgame to this charade, but that was a problem for later.

Now, with the Westminster bombing fresh in the minds of millions of Britons, Prime Minister Hawtrey acted. The Civil Contingencies Act 2004, a piece of legislation which had been heavily criticised when it was passed by the Labour government all those years ago, was used by Hawtrey to gain additional power within Whitehall.

The Armed Forces were central to emergency planning, and troops were deployed onto British streets in greater numbers than they had been in decades to assist the police in maintaining order and preventing further attacks. From Edinburgh to Dover, armed troops were used to secure potential terrorist targets; government buildings, train stations, airports, and others sites, were placed under military guard. Gatherings of large groups of people were restricted with this being done under the provisions of the CCA, along with the first instances of censorship of the press. While under normal circumstances, the government could impose D-Notices on information that the press was not supposed to reveal, these were not legally binding until the imposition of the CCA. Officers from SO-15, the Met’s Counter-Terrorism Command, were sent to the offices of major newspapers and television stations to ensure that information that was meant to stay secret would remain so.
The Security Service, better known as MI5, received a broad set of instructions to monitor the lives and communications of figures who might pose a threat to the government. This list of names rapidly expanded from terror suspects to people with more extreme political views, to figures in human-rights groups and then opposition Members of Parliament. Of course, there was dissent to this within MI5. The organisation’s Director-General was opposed to his service being used as a political weapon, but at present there was little choice but to comply with the orders from the Prime Minister. The orders were, under the CCA and additional emergency legislation, including some left over from the Cold War and other laws passed in the noughties, legal ones. If the individuals in question were considered to be threats to national security then they had to be surveyed as such. Chances couldn’t be taken at a time like this, when the security of Great Britain was in such grave danger! Terrorists had murdered the Prime Minister in the heart of Westminster; a soft attitude could not be justified.

A Government of National Unity was formed with opposition figures being dragged into a coalition headed by Cecilia Hawtrey. This was done through a variety of means from blackmail to bribery to simply charm. Those who could not be persuaded to join the coalition willingly were forced into it with threats of exposure of their secrets; sexual deviancies, financial impropriety, drug and alcohol use, and other information was dug up on those who Hawtrey wanted in her government. The intelligence that was dredged up here came not from Britain’s security services, but rather from the same private military and intelligence-gathering firm that Hawtrey’s former husband, Neville, held a significant stake in. The man had his fingers in many different pies and saw cooperation between himself and his ex-wife as an important financial act. Both he and his former spouse held information on each-other from the events of the past few years. Both had been involved in blackmail and bribery at various levels, and while she was Home Secretary, Hawtrey had received news from MI5 that the Neville’s organisation had been involved in dealings with Russia’s SVR intelligence service. Contracts placed here through a series of shell companies using offshore accounts saw personnel working for the PMC training members of a pro-Moscow militia in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. This was done deniably, of course, but the SVR held its own records of its dealings with Neville and the man was at risk of being blackmailed himself there.

Life in Britain changed under Hawtrey’s rule. She focused on consolidating executive power. Her own powers were vastly expanded under the Civil Contingencies Act, while the same Kompromat which had bene used to force them into partnership with Hawtrey saw members of the cabinet subdued. For the most part, her inner circle either supported the Prime Minister’s decisions with genuine conviction, or did so because they feared serious risk to their own reputations and freedoms if they dared to oppose her. However, outside of the world of politics, there was increasing dissent at what many saw as Britain falling into a dictatorship. A bill was introduced in the House of Commons that would see terrorist subjects detained without charge for as long as the security forces felt necessary. Many argued that this destroyed the right to Habeas Corpus because it allowed the government to hold people for as long as it wanted without giving them a right to fight their case in court.

Protests began within a month of Hawtrey ascending to the premiership. In London, a major demonstration took place. It was autumn and the weather was foul, and yet masses of people arrived in Trafalgar Square and St James’ Park. They were met by a hefty police presence, and an exceptionally violent one. No soldiers came to challenge the demonstrators, but police immediately engaged them with heavy-handed tactics. There were unarmed men, women, and children present, all caught in a melee of violence. Across London, the scenes were reminiscent of the Poll Tax Riots. Mounted officers on horseback and men on the ground in riot gear surrounded the protestors and cut them off into smaller groups before moving in and making mass arrests. The Metropolitan Police was informed beforehand that the terrorist threat was extremely severe and the protests might be either targets for an attack or a cover for one. Hundreds of arrests were made and dozens of people hospitalised. In the midst of this, gunshots rang out over London as two Asian men driving a van through the heart of the city were shot dead by firearms officers. No warning had been given by the SCO-19 personnel after they had surrounded the vehicle. They had simply opened fire, having been told to expect a suicide bomber. Fearing a repeat of the Norchester Plot, SCO-19 had taken no chances and had shot dead the two men in the vehicle. The whole incident was filmed by a bystander on his phone.

London was awash with violence on that fateful day. When footage of the shooting and of the exceptionally violent police response to the demonstration reached major TV channels and newspapers, they were banned from broadcasting it. The CCA prevented them from doing so legally, and the presence of police officers within the headquarters of these news organisations meant that there was a physical barrier to stop it from happening as well. However, all of this could not stop the videos and images that the government feared from being broadcasted all over social media. Such posts were shared millions of times not only by Britons but by people around the world. The result was the birth of a mass protest movement.

In London, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Glasgow, and Edinburgh, the first riots occurred. The scenes witnessed were reminiscent of those seen during the 2011 London Riots. Buildings and vehicles burned and police officers grappled with angry crowds. Public figures began to support the anti-government movement through actions taken online. Journalists found themselves arrested for reporting outside of the CCA restrictions; soldiers were deployed in greater numbers to subdue the riots. Morale problems within the Armed Forces skyrocketed as soldiers found themselves ordered to go up against their own people. This problem was particularly prevalent in the north; the issue facing the British Army here was that many regiments stationed in northern England and Scotland recruited from those very same areas. Much to the protests of the Defence Staff, the loudest voice amongst them being the Chief of Defence Staff, General Sir Richard Norrington, soldiers found themselves engaging the demonstrators. There were to be no massacres, at least, not yet. The troops were armed with their firearms, but they also carried batons and riot shields and they were well-trained enough to be restrained in using lethal force. People did die though, both from gunshots and from other violence; thirteen men and women were killed over the course of a week. Violence such as this hadn’t been seen in decades.

The chaos was only worsened by the vanishing of one Michael Sutton. The first of seven individuals to vanish in the midst of the unrest, Sutton was a well-known journalist working for the Observer. He continued to assist in the organisation of protests and spread information online after being dismissed from his day job by the police for refusing to tow the government line. Sutton disappeared three weeks into the unrest, nearly two months after the Westminster bombing. He was the first to go missing, but far from the last; celebrity figures involved in the demonstrations began vanishing in significant numbers as Britain struggled between tyranny and freedom.

[James G]

Three

History would condemn Cecilia Hawtrey as the worst Prime Minister Britain ever had. Her premiership, as short as it was, would be said to have come the closest there ever had been to destroying democracy in the country. The violence, deaths and the chaotic state which she put Britain into was blamed on her. It could be argued that she didn’t personally do everything nor was she aware of all that went on during her tenure. Yet, she was responsible, history would say, because she appointed those around her. Cecilia was also made aware over time of what was happening, of events after the fact. She made no move to put a stop to all of this. There was no excuse that could be given though to her treason. She was acting for a foreign power while in Downing Street and this was directly against the national interest. Cecilia was a traitor to Britain.

In light of the ongoing troubles, and using the added excuse of the terror threat, Parliament was temporarily shut down. Cecilia and her Cabinet ran things from Downing Street… or more correctly the COBRA rooms beneath the Cabinet Office. Decisions were taken there and laws were passed using Orders-in-Council without any sort of oversight from other parliamentarians. The media and the public knew little of what was going on. Ministers retreated from view as they dealt with the situation. Cecilia herself was surrounded by an ever-shrinking group of her fellow ministers yet an increasingly large number of outside advisers. The backgrounds of many of these were challenged by MI-5 as worrying but she overrode the civil service code due to the national emergency. The Director-General of the Security Service was eventually asked to resign. He refused. Cecilia had to resort to firing him to make him go. There were other resignations too of officials including the head of the Civil Service. The Government of National Unity was itself losing members. There were ministers quitting aplenty yet with no public announcements of those nor who it was who replaced them. Should Parliament have been recalled, other politicians were keen to call a vote of confidence in Cecilia’s premiership. She was regarded as having gone too far in what she was doing with public order in addition to the wider worries over all of those she was surrounding herself with. An attempt was made to use the courts for a judicial approach to reopen Parliament. The Civil Contingencies Act override any legal effort to rein in what was being done though.

There was another terrorist attack, one which occurred the day before Cecilia got rid of the head of MI-5 leading to her doing so. This occurred up in Scotland where that country’s First Minister was himself attending a protest march against the actions of the government in London. Scotland was at the time gripped in a series of strikes by public sector workers with the First Minister’s support. A bomb exploded at that anti-GNU rally in Glasgow. It killed dozens, including several children. There was at once evidence pointing to another Islamic terror cell. Anti-terror raids were conducted by the military as Cecilia gave them the task due to what she perceived as a failure by Police Scotland ahead of the bombing. The First Minister reacted strongly. He called the GNU and its actions illegal. Furthermore, he questioned whether this was really the work of terrorists. These comments began Cecilia’s war on social media. It was through the internet that he had made these remarks after being denied a platform through the usual media means to spread such beliefs. There had been efforts made using CCA powers to limit what was said and shown online yet those hadn’t been very effective. Those powers drawn up back in 2004 were a bit outdated when it came to how social media had grown. New measures to restrict the flow of so-called harmful false information – fake news, Cecilia told her colleagues – were brought into law. The GNU had the full powers of the state at its disposal and was able to thoroughly go after where this alleged danger to public order was coming from. Websites were shut down if they were UK-based or otherwise blocked when coming from overseas. Some innovative efforts were made by online activists to circumvent what was being done but the authorities could respond fast. There were arrests made of the most determined too, even those who tried to do all that they could to avoid being identified. In going after social media to limit opposition to the government, Cecilia shot herself in the foot. She unintentionally caused a great deal of economic damage to the nation because so much of the economy was online through those platforms. The state of the economy was already in a bad shape after public protests and terror attacks. Now things just got worse.

Cecilia and her government had people protesting in the streets against them. Those were violent protests which saw full-on rioting soon enough with looting, assaults and even deaths. The Prime Minister was hidden away from it all. She made statements from outside of 10 Downing Street to a muzzled media. Leaving Whitehall was soon not done at all. She tried everything to stop what was happening while taking no responsibility for it all. Everyone else was to blame. In her mind, everything that she did was reasonable. No longer did she have any doubt in what she was doing with a troubled conscience being a thing long of the past. This was personal now: her against everyone else. She was with her advisers most of the time. These appointees came from the outside and came to her via her ex-husband’s company. The former head of MI-5 had said that some of them were proxies of Russia; the Civil Service head had resigned at the point when military contractors (British nationals it must be said) replaced the police as close protection for the Prime Minister and then soon moved to provide security for Whitehall too. No one could see what was going on inside Cecilia’s mind. The blackmail she was facing was no longer overt and she was actually pretending to herself that she wasn’t in fact being forced to do what she certainly was. When pushed by advisers to so something, that she did. This was the most significant when it came to foreign affairs. Cecilia let the country’s allies know that under her premiership, there would be changes with Britain’s role in the world. None of these changes met with approval from other friendly governments. Sent overseas, the Foreign Secretary – not long ago a non-entity backbencher with a strong isolationist streak – was told to his face by counterparts that Russia was influencing what was happening back in Britain and that his Prime Minister was their pawn. They had evidence, they said, that Cecilia was in the pocket of Moscow. He denied that this was the case and stormed away from several encounters. Then, in quite the shocking turn of events, the Foreign Secretary didn’t return to London from Brussels. He ended up in Paris instead after sending a letter of resignation back to Downing Street. Before that letter reached Cecilia, the man’s wife & young daughter had already caught the Euro-Star to France and joined him there. The news of this was broke worldwide soon enough. Globally, the world had watched what was happening in Britain. Official comments from London were met with derision in many quarters and outrage elsewhere. Certain nations, Russia leading them, called for other countries to stay out of Britain’s internal affairs. Such remarks from Moscow came with a public statement from that former minister: he openly accused his Prime Minister of being in the pay of the Russian state.

The ex-Foreign Secretary was wise not to return home. That journalist, Sutton, was disappeared like he did was the first of many to vanish. Certain people were suddenly gone. Who were the disappeared? There were journalists like him, political figures and sometimes seemingly ordinary civilians too. Cecilia’s most fearsome opponents, those whom she wasn’t really aware of, were gotten rid of. These people were deemed dangerous by those pulling the strings around the Prime Minister which she chose not to see. There were a couple of suicides and accidental deaths – car accidents, house fires & heart attacks – too but these were those of a higher public profile where any disappearance of such people, even in the time of media restrictions, just couldn’t be hidden. With those who were snatched by masked men and taken away to ultimately unknown fates, it wasn’t just about getting rid of them and stopping them doing what they were doing in terms of organising resistance to the GNU. What was being done was called forced disappearances. That had occurred throughout history elsewhere in the world and was implemented by oppressive regimes to instil terror among opponents. When those targeted vanished, those around them would know that they were gone. There would be a worry among them that they too might be next unless they stopped what they were doing. It was physiological warfare to stop those organising protest marches and trying to get information out of all that was happening. The disappearances continued. The number reached double figures. MI-5 was under a new head subservient to Cecilia and the country’s police forces were very busy. Within each organisation, key people knew what was happening here though when it came to the kidnapping and presumed murder of many people who were opposing the destruction of Britain’s democracy. However, nothing was being done by them. The British Armed Forces became aware as well. Military intelligence staffs were involved in the fight against terror and reporting up the command chain troubling news. There was evidence that they uncovered that the Glasgow bombing wasn’t carried out by an Islamic group at all. Now there were these forced disappearances. A report was compiled, one which was firm in its pointing of where the blame lay. This went to the nation’s senior-most military officer. The Chief of the Defence Staff was provided with the evidence that the Prime Minister and her advisers were responsible for this. In addition, uniformed investigators found more information too about Cecilia’s ascension to power and how involved she was with Russia’s intelligence services. General Norrington was reliably informed that the Prime Minister had gained power illegally and was also committing treason.

[James G]

Four

Unlike in many nations, where military personnel swear allegiance to a constitution, a politician, or the people, the British Armed Forces are loyal to the Crown. For many centuries this was the case. Thus, when the Chief of Defence Staff, General Sir Richard Norrington, was presented with a reliable case that Prime Minister Hawtrey was committing treason and participating in illegal ‘enforced disappearances’ of her political opposition, the decision to act in the nation’s interest was not his alone. In a locked room of the Ministry of Defence building, Sir Norrington met with the Chiefs of Staff of the British Army, Royal Navy, and Royal Air Force. These men were briefed by Rear Admiral Thomas Atkins, the head of Defence Intelligence. A dossier was presented, one compiled by uniformed personnel working on Atkins’ staff. Conversations had been had with officials from MI5 and MI6, and personnel stationed at the British embassy in Washington DC had met with their CIA counterparts to discuss what evidence the Americans had with regards to the PM’s criminal activities. France and Germany likewise supported this effort, and so too did Canada and Australia. Hawtrey’s government was pulling Britain back from the world, and while there was a genuine interest in protecting democracy in Britain from these nations, they cared more about maintaining an alliance with a stable Britain.

The conversation which took place in the MOD was highly secretive. The room was swept for bugs and a pair of soldiers had been stationed outside the room to prevent any unwanted visitors from gaining access. Sir Norrington informed his colleagues that he sincerely believed that the Armed Forces had to act to save democracy before it was too late. The Prime Minister was a traitor and a murderer, dragging the country into dictatorship with the assistance of a hostile foreign power. Before they acted, however, the oaths of the generals, admirals, and air chief marshals dictated that they first contact the Monarch. As the head-of-state, the Armed Forces ultimately were loyal to the King. They would have to seek his permission before action could be taken. A late-night drive to Windsor Castle, which was protected now by a battalion of Welsh Guards, saw the Chiefs of Staff meet with the King. Admiral Atkins presented the King with the very same dossier that had been presented to Sir Norrington.

The King was appalled. His own duties had demanded that until evidence of outright treason was uncovered, he couldn’t act against the Prime Minister. Now, Defence Intelligence had proven that there was collaboration between Hawtrey and the Russian SVR intelligence service. The time had home, the King decided, to remove her. A plan was presented to him. Late in the night, a troop of soldiers with the 22nd Special Air Service Regiment, armed but in plain clothes, approached the leader of the resistance against Hawtrey. A high-profile MP within Hawtrey’s own party, George McDouglas had resigned from his junior cabinet posting when the new PM had come to power. He was to high profile to be ‘disappeared’ by Hawtrey’s mercenaries and so he had been allowed to live, albeit under constant threat of arrest for his ‘terrorist connections’. McDouglas was recovered from his home by the SAS and then driven covertly to Windsor Castle to join the Chiefs of Staff and the King. McDouglas was more reluctant than his military counterparts to take part in a coup, but the dossier presented by Admiral Atkins eventually shifted his views and the former Defence Minister agreed to lead a caretaker government when Hawtrey was removed.

With everything in place, the Armed Forces began to move the following day. Duty rosters were altered so that officers’ whose loyalty was in question were not to take part in the operation. Troops were already on the streets in a counter-terrorism and riot-suppression role, and so more troop movements did not cause undue alarm. The Household Cavalry Regiment with its Scimitar fighting vehicles hit the road, bound for London from Salisbury Plain. At midday, the King called Prime Minister Hawtrey and informed her that she was being asked to resign from office and hand power over to McDouglas. The Prime Minister told the King that she would not do so willingly, and coldly informed her that she was “relieved of her duties with immediate effect.”

A panicked Hawtrey refused to comply. Her own security detachment, private contractors rather than police personnel, were put on alert. GCHQ began jamming communications efforts from the PM’s officer to the public and the Armed Forces. The Royal Irish Regiment secured Heathrow Airport by helicopter; a battalion of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers cut the entrances and exits from the British capital. The plan was put into effect. The Household Cavalry Regiment linked up with the 1st Battalion, Grenadier Guards, on the outskirts of Whitehall. Together, the troops advanced into the city. Platoons were sent to occupy the Cabinet Office, the Ministry of Defence, and the BBC’s headquarters. Gunshots rang out as a company of troops moved through Horse Guards, escorted by the Scimitars of the HCR. Men ducked for cover and sought to return fire, but within Ten Downing Street, the mercenaries providing the Prime Minister’s security saw what they were up against. Watching, aghast as armoured vehicles rolled towards them, they laid down their arms. A panicking Prime Minister ordered them to fight, to buy time for her to flee – but there was nowhere to run.

All around Downing Street, soldiers and light tanks converged. A troop of Scimitars crashed through the gates of Downing Street, videos in doing so by gawking bystanders. The battalion commander led his men into the building; the guards were taken prisoner, handcuffed and dragged outside into the pouring rain, before being bundled into the back of a lorry to await their fate. Hawtrey was found in her office. An effort was made for the arrest to occur with dignity, but the Prime Minister resisted. She struggled, kicked, and punched wildly, forcing the Grenadier Guardsmen to detain her forcefully. Her allies in the Cabinet and Civil Service were singled out and detained by the Army, before all of them – over fifty men and women in total – were driven under heavy guard to the Military Corrective Training Centre in Colchester. Though this facility was not technically a prison, it was built like one, and on the military base. It was felt that the so-called ‘Glasshouse’ was an appropriate holding centre for the PM and her cronies until they could be transferred into civilian custody. Members of the Parachute Regiment, based at Colchester, stood guard around the detainees as they were moved into the MCTC’s pre-trial confinement wing.

Once this had been achieved, a coded signal was sent out to the King and McDouglas. A Gazelle helicopter of 5th Regiment, Army Air Corps, picked up McDougal from Windsor Castle and flew him to Horse Guards. He entered Downing Street. The BBC had sent a news crew to film a live broadcast by the new Prime Minister, during which he informed the country that the menace that was Cecilia Hawtrey had been dealt with and that he was assuming office as part of a caretaker government until new elections could be held. The King made a broadcast of his own, confirming that the traditional ‘kissing hands’ ceremony was complete and that McDouglas was now Britain’s head of government.

Britain had just undergone a military coup, and a justified one at that. Cecilia Hawtrey, along with many of her allies, were in military custody at Colchester. The next day, officers from the Met’s counter-terrorism command made their way to Colchester, where they formally arrested the former Prime Minister. So began a new period for Britain, with the trial of Cecilia Hawtrey.

[James G]

Five

It would be more than a year before Cecilia Hawtrey would appear in court. The wheels of justice moved at their own speed and wouldn’t be rushed. She would face many charges at the Old Bailey with multiple counts of treason, terrorism, conspiracy to murder and misconduct in a public office forming those. That time spent between her being forcibly deposed and her trial beginning saw many issues crop up with her detention and how that trial would take place. Cecilia was held for some time at that military prison in Essex. There was a wish by the new government, but also the British Armed Forces themselves, to have her transferred to civilian custody: this included too the others arrested with her. Security was an issue though should she be held in a normal prison. Several other detainees, advisers & officials, were moved to civilian custody within weeks yet there was the death of one and an accident which befell another leading to him being left in a coma. These two incidents didn’t look innocent at all. It was strongly suspected that foul play was afoot. The last thing that the government and the military wanted was to see Cecilia die before her trial. Investigations were underway into the fates which befell those two other prisoners while in the meantime, Britain’s #1 prisoner stayed in Colchester. When it came to her trial itself, the venue was easy to select but there were issues with those charges. The particulars of the legality around what she had done caused dispute in legal terms. Lawyers would argue behind closed doors while politicians would clash in public. With the latter, no one was arguing that she was innocent. The issue instead was over the desires of many to increase those charges further. In addition, there were worries among parts of the establishment of the state over the implications of Cecilia’s trial upon national security. There were things that they didn’t want to see revealed in open court. A push was made to have certain parts of her trial – but also those of others around her also being brought to trial – conducted in camera. This was a legal term meaning the opposite of what it might have seemed: ‘in secret’ would have been more apt. In the end, the desire to have the public see justice being done over rid those concerns.

When the trial started, Cecilia remained in the overall custody of the military though there was civilian involvement. Built especially for her and half a dozen other high-profile detainees was a temporary holding facility on the grounds of Wellington Barracks in the very heart of Central London. There were screened civilian personnel involved in her detention while those in uniform watched over them. Daily, she would be taken to the Old Bailey and then returned to this facility. Defending the former prime minister was a well-known campaigning KC (King’s Counsel) who acted in a pro bono fashion. He acted for Cecilia not because he believed she was innocent but in the interest of a free and fair trial. This act would bring personal animosity towards him yet in his many years as a barrister he had defended the undefendable before and faced hostility. Full cooperation was given by the Crown Prosecution Service to the defence team, as per usual, in the manner of evidence, witness lists & procedure. What wasn’t wanted by the government was for there to be allegations made that Cecilia had been denied given a fair trial. There had been comments made in certain parts of the world at the optics of Britain aiming to put its former leader in prison. Nothing could be done about that but the government was thinking more about the domestic audience. When it came to what was said overseas, much of that came from Moscow. Cecilia’s former husband was in Russia – only by luck had he been out of the country at the time his ex-wife was deposed – and he remained there. An extradition request had been made for him but the Kremlin had refused. From Britain, Russian nationals and diplomats had been deported and declared persona non grata when Cecilia’s premiership was brought to an end due to the connections between those foreigners and her regime. The diplomatic fall-out would go on for a long time with relations falling to the Chief of Mission level after each side ended up expelling ambassadors in a tit-for-tat exchange with that.

The first day of Cecilia’s trial saw the litany of charges laid against her read out in open court. At an earlier hearing, she had entered a plea of not guilty to all of these and there had been adverse comments made from her about the legality of the proceedings. There was no outburst from the defendant this time. Everything was in the hands of her KC. For several weeks the trail went on. There was media access given though a push for a televised trial by some had gotten nowhere. Yet there were few reporting restrictions on the case. It wholly dominated the news coverage for the time it was ongoing. The outcome was never in doubt. Cecilia Hawtrey was found guilty of the majority of the charges laid against her. The jury declared her innocent of one of the charges of treason – defying the instructions of the King to step down because they found this to be legally dubious – but the other treason charge, of working for Russia, was one which they found to be upheld. The terrorism and conspiracy to murder charges had each guilty verdicts delivered and so did almost all of the misconduct in public office charges apart from one of them where there was some dispute over the particulars of actual bribery. Regardless, Cecilia was guilty. After a weekend where the judge reviewed evidence, come the following Monday, the sentencing was read out. A life sentence was imposed with a whole life tariff issued due to the gravity of her crimes. An outburst came from Cecilia where she declared her innocence and called the judge, the prosecution and the new government corrupt with this trial being politically motivated: she added some nasty remarks about the members of the jury too. The judge found her in contempt of court, which became an additional charge against her. Cecilia was escorted from the dock and the judge finished the last of the proceedings without her present. There would be other trials of those who’d been with her in Downing Street and many more guilty verdicts though a few of those prosecuted would be declared not guilty, each time on technical grounds. It was Cecilia’s trial which history would remember though. Her verbal tirades would be mocked for the silliness that they contained. The judge’s words at the end, where he summed up her actions against the British people, were certain to be remembered as well.

[James G]

Six

The aftermath of the military coup that Britain had undergone was a return to democracy. However, the sudden intervention of the Monarchy into British politics was a major event, and one that saw both of the two main parties collapsing in on themselves as the country went to the polls. A wave of new blood emerged in the House of Commons, with the Social Democrats on the left and the United Party on the right. With Hawtrey imprisoned there was a desire for politics to return to more moderate positions to prevent another descent into dictatorship for Britain. The preceding series of events had been something of a wakeup call to the government and the people of Britain alike, and the desire for moderation was prevalent. Furthermore, once a new government was elected, there was a desire within both parties to rekindle Britain’s status as a major player on the international stage. The new government wished to reaffirm Britain’s membership to NATO. This was the first and most important of the new leadership’s goals. Success was met here after a meeting with the US Secretary of State and the NATO Secretary-General. It was felt by both that the United Kingdom was entering a new, more stable period following the brief flirtation with dictatorship.

NATO membership was a useful tool in preserving this and so such a thing was once again granted. Furthermore, several members of the European Community followed America and Britain in issuing trade sanctions against Russia for its espionage activities in Britain and its refusal to hand Mr Neville over for prosecution.

Additionally, members of the Commonwealth reignited their alliances with Britain. Canada, Australia, New Zealand and also smaller commonwealth members too took part in the period of healing which came after the coup, offering some diplomatic words of praise to the King and the new government as a means of preserving stability throughout Britain and their own lands as well. It was shown that the Monarchy was a major figure in British politics. With the intervention of the King, there were calls for the Monarchy to be dissolved.

This came not because people supported Hawtrey by any means, but rather because they were unnerved at the prospect of the unelected figure again involving himself in politics now that a precedent had been set. The issue was resolved with the abdication of the King and the handing of power over to a younger figure within the line of succession. This left the country largely appeased and calls for the dissolution of the Monarchy gradually silenced. This didn’t take place for nearly two years following the coup, but eventually it did silence the arguments of those in opposition.

Additionally, the role of the British Armed Forces had been forever changed. There was no question that Sir Norrington and his comrades had acted in the best interests of Britain and her people and had in doing so saved democracy. This did not, however, negate the fact the British Army had mounted a blatant coup which had removed a sitting Prime Minister from power. It had been a necessary act against evil, but the coup itself still left the Armed Forces wondering what would follow. Sir Norrington and the Chiefs of Staff resigned their commissions when the new government was elected, following new generals and admirals to lead Britain’s armed forces into the future. Britain looked outwards with the new government, returning to NATO and its overseas alliances, something which gave the military something else to focus on; troops went to Iraq and Belize in training and advisory roles and the garrisons in Bahrain, Brunei, and Singapore were expanded as well.

There were no ‘real’ wars currently being fought though and so the defining moment of the military within that decade was, of course, the coup in London.


The End