A Very British Coup
Could This Be Why We Are Disarmed?
While US President Donald Trump tries to negotiate with Vladimir Putin to bring an end to the war in Ukraine, our wooden puppet of a Prime Minister, Kier Starmer, dresses in combat gear and poses with British troops pledging to put them on the ground in Ukraine ‘to keep the peace’ after the war.
We can only look on in astonishment. Quite how he thinks British troops in Ukraine will be acceptable to the Russians is beyond most thinking folk. As far as they are concerned, this war has been all about keeping NATO forces out of Ukraine, so they are hardly likely to agree to their deployment as ‘peacekeepers’. Besides, with the continuing Channel coast invasion, the last thing we British really want is a few thousand of our boys and girls being sent 1,200 miles to the East when they might actually be more use to us at home.
It is yet another facet of the general madness surrounding us. Most people will stay wedded to whatever version of bread and circuses is their preference, staying wrapped in little bubbles of contentment, believing the government to be governing in their best interests. There might be the odd old soldier who, in despair at the state of the nation he served, will slope off to his study with a decanter of whisky and a firearm not turned in when possession of the same was made illegal. There will also be a fair number of people among the dissident population who quietly dream of an Armed Forces coup removing Keir Starmer and his gang from their offices in Whitehall. I think this is not even remotely likely.
I say that because in the comments on freespeechbacklash.com in Daily Gossip, the idea had been mentioned. Someone recalled that it had been rumoured in the 1960s or 70s but they couldn’t remember any details. I could, vaguely, and said so stating that the figurehead of the putsch and temporary replacement Prime Minister was to have been none other than Prince Phillip’s uncle, the Earl Mountbatten of Burma. I didn’t realise it at the time, but this bore some echoes of the Business Plot against US President Franklyn D Roosevelt in the 1930s which I wrote about here.
I thought no more about it but then up popped the latest podcast from the excellent Mark Felton Productions entitled Operation Clockwork Orange - Secret Military Coup Against British Prime Minister. Watch and listen to it for 20 minutes or so then read on.
That was fascinating, wasn’t it? In 1968 I was in my penultimate year at school, and I had just decided that I would attempt to follow in my father’s footsteps and join the Royal Air Force as a pilot. Fast forward to 1974 - 75 and I had graduated from university, been through basic officer and flying training at RAF College, Cranwell and was an embryo fighter pilot on the point of joining my first squadron.
Rumours of a possible coup against the Wilson government had percolated down to our crew rooms and it was a topic I remember discussing. Opinions were divided as I recall but I was firmly in the camp that would have supported one. Communist infiltration of the trades unions and the Labour Party was pretty much common knowledge, and I was anti-Marxist even back then. My time at university had given birth to that, going up as I did in 1969, the year after the student take-over of the Sorbonne in Paris. That sort of behaviour was very fashionable at Aberdeen University at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s. Che Guevara was a hero. The late Sir Roger Scruton, who had been in Paris in 1968, later wrote that whatever it was the students stood for, he didn’t stand with them. I had felt the same in Aberdeen.
To the putative plot: The instigator of the ’secret meeting’ in May 1968, Cecil Harmsworth King, is interesting. Here is the director of a tabloid newspaper aimed at the working classes who is also on the board of the Bank of England. He has close ties with MI5, MI6 and the CIA. Given what we now know about the origins of the CIA, what it got (gets) up to and what sort of people really control it, could there not have been some American input beyond the information passed by James Angleton? Was Angleton’s allegation about Harold Wilson even true?
King certainly moved with the elites. Born in England in 1901 but brought up in Ireland, he was educated at Winchester and Oxford. His uncles were the press barons Alfred Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe, creator of the Daily Mirror, and Harold Harmsworth, Viscount Rothermere, who purchased the Mirror from his brother. According to someone who knew King, Geoffrey Goodman, "He believed he was born to rule, an image of himself which never departed."
Nepotism gained him a position and rapid promotion in one of his uncle’s newspapers and he was in the boardroom in his 30s. There he met and sponsored Hugh Cudlipp, the third man at the secret meeting, whom he elevated to editor at the age of 23, the youngest man ever to gain a senior editorship. Together they transformed the Daily Mirror, which previously had a history of supporting both Mussolini and Hitler, into a left-wing newspaper aimed at the British working class. They built it into the worlds’ largest selling daily which reached a record circulation of over 5,200,000 in1967.
By 1963, King chaired the International Publishing Corporation (IPC), then the biggest publishing empire in the world, which in addition to the Mirror had some two hundred other papers and magazines (1963–1968). His influence on British public life was enormous. He believed that the Mirror’s criticism of Winston Churchill's government had caused that government's collapse after the war. and operated the left-wing propaganda magazine Encounter via IPC from 1964.
The picture of a man who thought himself born to rule and who thought he had the power and influence to topple governments is complete. Through the left-wing slant of his publications, we see also the attempt to manipulate and control the masses for the benefit of the elite. Did he have connections to the Fabian Society, which I have also written about? It’s hard to say and I have found no evidence, but it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility. There’s nothing new in any of that and it is in tune with the documented activities of certain American elites in their support for the Bolsheviks, Mussolini and Hitler from World War One through to World War Two.
It may also be appropriate at this stage to put King into a global context. His seat on the Board of the Bank of England would have made him at least aware of international financial arrangements with the American Federal Reserve and the Bank for International Settlements. It was at this time that plans for the gradual move towards a Technocratic One World Government were being brought to fruition: The Club of Rome, Trilateral Commission and the European Management Forum (the future World Economic Forum) were soon to be created by the Rockefellers. They would have their man, Henry Kissinger, installed as Richard Nixon’s National Security Adviser from 1969 and Secretary of State from 1973. A Britain in political turmoil would have suited their aims.
Forty or so MI5/MI6 officers are thought to have been involved, but Hugh Cudlipp and Sir Solly Zuckerman seem to have been relatively blameless and were possibly there just to be advisors and order takers. Cudlipp was Chairman of the Mirror Group, so his role would have been to be useful in PR and propaganda for an attempted coup. He went on to be Chairman of IPC after King was sacked by the board in the wake of the affair. Zuckerman, whose field was zoology, was a scientific adviser, a role he filled for the Wilson government. Although he had served with distinction in the RAF in operational research in World War 2, he was influential in the cancellation of the TSR2 when Mountbatten, also a TSR2 opponent, was Chief of the Defence Staff.
Which neatly brings us back to Earl Mountbatten of Burma, Prince Louis of Battenberg as he was born, the son of a former First Sea Lord also Prince Louis, the Godson of Queen Victoria and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. Why was he chosen to be a possible leader to replace Wilson? Apart from being the recent Chief of the Defence Staff, he had a public profile as the Supreme Allied Commander, South-East Asia during the war, as the last Viceroy of India and as a close member of the Royal Family.
It was he who had arranged the visit of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth to Dartmouth Royal Naval College on 22 July 1939, taking care to include the young Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret in the invitation, but assigning his nephew, Cadet Prince Philip of Greece, to keep them entertained while their parents toured the college. Thus began the assisting of Prince Phillip in his wooing of the future Queen Elizabeth II. There’s nothing wrong or unusual in that. It has gone on among the royal and ruling classes since the dawn of history; there have always been ambitious courtiers trying to get their genes into the Royal bloodline.
Uncle Dickie, as he was known in the ‘Firm’, was a bit colourful. As far as his military service is concerned, he was known as the ‘Master of Disaster’ for having a penchant for driving ships he was commanding into stationary inanimate objects. By his own admission, he and Edwina, Lady Mountbatten spent their entire marriage getting in and out of other people’s beds, virtually from the start. Neither was he fussy about whether his paramour was a man or a woman, and he was thought to have a predilection for young boys. None of this stopped him rising rapidly to high command; it’s tempting to say that was simply because of who he was.
During his rise to Supreme Allied Commander as an acting Admiral, he planned the St. Nazare raid and also the disastrous Dieppe Raid. After the Japanese surrender, there was a little known and somewhat shameful episode. The Japanese had conquered Vietnam and throughout the war, the allies had supplied weapons to the nationalist rebels led by Ho Chi Minh. They also promised the former French colony its independence. After victory, Ho proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, but Britain had determined (possibly under American direction?) that France could keep its colony, so a task force was sent to re-install French government.
An Indian division under General Douglas Gracey took control of the country and war re-ignited. With insufficient troops, Gracey was told by Mountbatten to re-arm the defeated Japanese to fight Ho and the Vietminh. Idiotic and unconscionable though it would seem today, that is what happened, so it could be said with some justification that Britain, through Mountbatten, had some responsibility for the Vietnam War. Harold Wilson kept Britain out of it, but you can understand why the Americans had wanted Britain to be involved.
As far as his Viceregency of India is concerned, we know that he was given a virtually impossible task and timescale by the post-war Attlee government to effect India’s independence so he can’t be held solely responsible for the mass movement of millions of people and murderous attacks that took place on the partition of the country and creation of two Pakistans.
He also had a strong influence on the upbringing of the future King Charles III, as a ‘honorary grandfather’ and later as a mentor. He even went so far as to try to arrange a marriage between Charles and his grand-daughter, Amanda Knatchbull. That didn’t work out. Charles did get around to a proposal, but she refused him.
In 1969, after the ‘Secret Meeting’, a television documentary, a 12-part mini-series titled The Life and Times of Lord Mountbatten, was broadcast in which he told his own story, displaying no small amount of narcissism. It was possibly prompted by The Valiant Years, a 26-part series about Winston Churchill, narrated by Richard Burton as Churchill, which had been broadcast in 1960-61 and which I recall watching when I was a boy. The Mountbatten series and the Churchill series are available to view on YouTube, the latter from episode 3 onwards.
Mountbatten’s sexual behaviour was certainly known to the security services on both sides of the Atlantic, so there must have been some concern. Since Cecil King had close affiliations with them, he would probably have known too. He might have reasoned that this would make Mountbatten manipulable if he were to agree to attempt the removal of Harold Wilson, manipulable enough to leave the real decision making to “intelligent and capable men”. Men such as himself.
Another person who would have had an inkling is, of course, Queen Elizabeth II herself. As Mark Felton says, she warned him to have nothing to do with the plot calling it ‘rank treachery’ and she would have known Mountbatten would have been vulnerable to blackmail into the bargain.
Cecil King’s one big weakness was that he obviously did not understand the British Constitution and he didn’t appreciate how any attempted removal of an elected government with a member of the Royal Family involved would be seen in the country. It would have undermined the Queen herself and thrown the Monarchy into a crisis from which it might not have recovered.
As the plotting continued in MI5 after 1968 and at a high level of the Armed Forces, the Brian Crozier discussions with senior Army officers on ‘the benefits of a military coup’ would have kept matters simmering nicely. The other aspect of the story are the two former army officers, General Sir Walter Walker and Colonel David Stirling. They both were very much in favour of creating volunteer organisations, in effect private armies, which would be available to intervene directly in a crisis if needed. Given that this was only a few years after the ending of national service, there were still large numbers of men who had some military experience. Given also that there was a considerable number of privately held firearms it would not have been a difficult thing to do.
Harold Wilson would have been in no doubt about the ability of the military and security services to remove a government which they considered incompetent or revolutionary. He would have shared his fears with political allies within the Labour Party and the Fabian Society. It is tempting to think this might have been an inflection point at which the run-down of Britain’s Armed Forces commenced, especially the Army. However, the data available for historic troop numbers and defence expenditure does not really show that. Between 1970 and 1990, while the Army fell from 256,000 to 222,000 including reservists; defence expenditure fluctuated around 5% of GDP, falling to just over 4% at the end of the Cold War. The fluctuations can be explained by economic recessions and variations in the economic growth rate. If the amount spent was held and GDP were to fall, the proportion spent on defence would go up and vice versa. The real drop came in the 1990s, after the first Gulf War, during the silly decade of believing in ‘The End of History’.
A more likely scenario is changing attitudes among the succeeding generations of recruits to the Armed Forces, Security Services and Police. As the ‘old guard’ with experience of WW2, Korean War, Kenya, Suez, Malaya and other conflicts retired, they were progressively replaced by generations with a political outlook and attitudes framed by education, both state and private, that has been changed by decades of Marxist influence. I often wonder, if I were to visit a military establishment today, how the young servicemen and women would seem to me compared to those I served with through the1970s and 1980s.
The concept of private militias would be well documented in MI5 and as the personnel changed there too, political influence would have been brought to bear. Perhaps a decision had been made to do something about it and it is here that I think George aka John Galt is onto something with this essay on Hungerford and Dunblane. While it is obvious and understandable to think that the British public has been disarmed to prepare the ground for what is being done to it now by the Marxist globalists, I think it is more likely that the real catalyst is something that might have occurred much closer to home. Something like a possible coup d’état.
I don’t think the state actively organised the Hungerford and Dunblane shootings, but there cannot be any doubt that it could have prevented them and, having failed to prevent them, used them to remove first, high-powered rifles, and second, pistols from private hands. There is something very fishy about the Dunblane shooting. Why else would there have been ‘D’ notices issued at the time and why else would Lord Cullen, who conducted the enquiry, have sealed evidence for 100 years?
I haven’t yet read Peter Wright’s ‘Spycatcher’ but it will be joining my book stack soon. I’m looking forward to it.
Of much more interest would be the Broadlands Archives. In 2011, the University of Southampton, in lieu of death duties, bought all of the Mountbatten’s letters and diaries for £2.8 million. They were to be made available to scholars, historians and the general public. And then the Cabinet Office stepped in. The eminent and historian and author Andrew Lownie, mentioned in the podcast, fought for four years, spending £250,000 of his own money, to get them free from censorship.
To those who hold fanciful notions about our Armed Forces suddenly waking up and leading a putsch against our current Marxist regime in Westminter, I say please don’t hold your breath. It isn’t going to happen. As well as being drastically reduced in size and capability, they have been thoroughly feminised, brain-washed, subverted and they are controlled by the civil servants in the Ministry of Defence.
Pedestrian crossings on bases painted in the ‘Pride’ rainbow compete with male soldiers on parade wearing make-up and discrimination against white men for pilot selection for the crassest example of the wokery which is now endemic. The Deputy Chief of the General Staff, Lieutenant General Dame Sharon Nesmith is typical of the disease which infects them. You can read about her here. She and her ilk are never likely to have anything to do with a coup.
One final thought: Considering how MI5 and MI6 operate and how dirty and duplicitous is the game they play, one wonders if they had anything at all to do with the murder by IRA bomb of Mountbatten and other family and friends on 27th August 1979.