Ever since the advent of mass democracy in Britain in 1918, mainstream politics has been coloured by fears of devious plots at the heart of power. One side detects the hidden hand of bankers, tycoons, and democracy-hating generals. The other shudders at the thought of shadowy infiltrators in the civil service, the media and the unions.<\/p>\n
Conspiracy thinking has tended to be stronger on the left, which has spent much more time out of power than in it.<\/p>\n
Labour in the 1930s<\/h3>\n
In 1931, the Labour Party<\/a> was in office for only the second time, with no majority, as unemployment soared towards 3 million. As the benefits bill forced up borrowing, confidence slumped, and investors hurried to sell sterling. Labour chancellor Philip Snowden (seen above, right<\/em>) feared uncontrollable inflation.<\/p>\n The government desperately needed to reduce spending and secure a loan from American banks. This, Snowden insisted, meant cutting unemployment benefit. Late on Sunday 23 August, at a crunch cabinet meeting, nine Labour ministers refused. Snowden and prime minister Ramsay MacDonald broke away, abandoning Labour to form a new emergency \u201cnational government\u201d dominated by Conservatives<\/a>.<\/p>\n Next morning, on hearing this shock news, the nine dissenting ex-ministers met and went through a draft paper by one of their number. This laid out a conspiracy theory: that the government had been broken by a financiers\u2019 plot. A message from a New York bank had been read out at that Sunday night cabinet meeting; they contended the bank had ordered the British government to cut unemployment benefit as the price of a loan.<\/p>\n Labour\u2019s parliamentary leaders joined union chiefs in passing the accusation to the Labour newspaper the Daily Herald<\/em>. This splashed the story on its front page as the \u201csecret reason\u201d for the split.<\/p>\n In reality, though, there was no gloating conspiracy to nobble the Labour government. The reason that the American bankers, the City, the Bank of England<\/a>, Conservatives, Snowden and MacDonald all agreed on the necessary course of action was because their economic beliefs meant they saw no alternative. As the historian Philip Williamson has shown, the New York bank\u2019s message was merely responding to Snowden\u2019s own proposals.<\/p>\n Yet many in Labour sincerely believed the bankers had broken their government: in the election that October, two thirds of the party\u2019s candidates made that accusation. Despite its interim leader Arthur Henderson admitting it was a myth, the story haunted Labour for decades, entrenching its suspicions of City and establishment conspiracies.<\/p>\n For our second example, we need to fast forward to 1968. Labour was again in power, this time with a big majority. Nevertheless, as strong trade unions kept wages high, and the pound once again came under intense pressure, prime minister Harold Wilson<\/a> became increasingly embattled. Some blamed union pay demands and strikes. There was much talk of the need for a national government, rule by businessmen, or even a forced seizure of power.<\/p>\n In the decades since, many people have come to believe that Britain came very close to a coup to oust Wilson in favour of an \u201cemergency\u201d government, with Lord Mountbatten<\/a>, former chief of the defence staff and Prince Philip\u2019s uncle, at its head. Military figures were said to have been waiting in the wings.<\/p>\n This has elements of truth \u2013 but, as the political scientist Michael Barkun has argued, one characteristic of conspiracy theory is the notion that \u201ceverything is connected\u201d. That is what happened here. At the heart of the story is a meeting Mountbatten had in May 1968 with Cecil King, a director of the Bank of England and chief of the company that owned the hugely popular Daily Mirror<\/em>.<\/p>\n King was convinced that the economy was about to collapse, and thought there would have to be an emergency government. He put this to Mountbatten via his deputy Hugh Cudlipp, a Labour-supporting, working-class Welshman, who was friendly with the noble earl.<\/p>\n Mountbatten had been Britain\u2019s last Viceroy of India, and when partition<\/a> triggered a wave of intercommunal bloodshed, he volunteered to chair an emergency committee to restore control. Now, as he worried over Britain\u2019s domestic struggles, Cudlipp reported him saying: \u201cPerhaps there should be something like the Emergency Committee I ran in India.\u201d<\/p>\n Together, they drew up a list of names, including ex-military figures and moderate politicians, and agreed a meeting with King. This took place at Mountbatten\u2019s Belgravia flat, along with his friend Solly Zuckerman, Wilson\u2019s chief scientific advisor. King set out his nightmare scenario: a tanking pound would bring on political collapse, and the army would try to restore order by, among other things, installing machine guns on street corners.<\/p>\n Wilson would be forced out, and, King suggested, Mountbatten might serve as the figurehead of an emergency government. Zuckerman stormed out; Mountbatten, he realised, was \u201creally intrigued\u201d. According to palace rumours, it was Queen Elizabeth II<\/a> herself who talked him out of it.<\/p>\n No evidence has emerged, however, that Mountbatten was making the sort of complex, high-risk plans needed to seize power. And, for a purported plotter, Cecil King was remarkably keen to tell anyone who would listen. This included members of Wilson\u2019s own cabinet, such as Tony Benn, who developed what he called a \u201cconspiracy theory\u201d that \u201cthe City was planning a coup against the government\u201d.<\/p>\n Benn informed Wilson, who thought King was mad. But the PM also seemed \u201crather agitated and excited\u201d. Imaginations were outstripping reality. It was when the details of the meeting were revealed eight years later that all this was blown up into a conspiracy theory \u2013 thanks to Wilson himself.<\/p>\n On 11 February 1976, shortly before he resigned as prime minister, Wilson met Zuckerman at a lunch at the Savoy Hotel. Zuckerman told him that Cudlipp\u2019s forthcoming memoir was going to make the King-Mountbatten meeting public. Wilson knew that it had happened, but not the lurid details, such as King\u2019s talk about machine guns.<\/p>\n He hurried to tell his political secretary Lady Falkender, who recalled that he was \u201cabsolutely bursting\u201d with the news. Here at last, he seemed to believe, was confirmation of all those rumours of a coup plot. But Wilson had connected two separate stories: the King-Mountbatten meeting, and the hostility to his government among some serving military officers.<\/p>\n Falkender relayed Wilson\u2019s \u201cconfirmation\u201d to the journalists Barrie Penrose and Roger Courtiour, who then spoke to an ex-chief of MI5, who revealed that, in the late 1960s, the security service had indeed investigated coup talk among \u201cgin-sodden generals\u201d. But without specific evidence of a link, the meeting in no way confirmed that there was a serious plot to oust the government by force.<\/p>\n All this only really became a cause c\u00e9l\u00e8bre in 1981, when Wilson made public his belief that the 1968 meeting was to discuss King\u2019s \u201cplans for a coup to take over the machinery of government\u201d. He was in no position to know but, with an ex-premier\u2019s stamp of authority, the \u201ccoup\u201d was now established \u201cfact\u201d, into which other tales of apparent plotting could be folded.<\/p>\n The Guardian<\/em> noted that, in the period of the King-Mountbatten meeting, \u201ca Times<\/em> reporter uncovered virulent criticism of the government, and some thirst to remove it, in a Wiltshire officers\u2019 mess\u201d. But that report was dated 23 May 1972, four years after King\u2019s meeting, under a Conservative government. Another ominous incident was the appearance of troops outside Heathrow airport<\/a> \u2013 but that happened in January 1974.<\/p>\n If all this revealed a coup plot, it was an unusually relaxed one. Evidence of conspiracies against democratic government should be taken very seriously indeed. But cobbling together a sprawling myth may not be the most effective approach. As in 1931, these stories reveal not a single plot, but a shared belief: that the unions were too powerful, and the only way to curtail them and force down wages was an emergency government.<\/p>\n All of this just underlined the need for new thinking. Soon, Margaret Thatcher<\/a> would provide a different, once unthinkable, solution: let unemployment climb. Thatcher\u2019s shock rise would itself generate further conspiracy theories.<\/p>\n The British right was not immune from all this. In the 1945 general election, Conservative candidates from Winston Churchill<\/a> down warned that Labour would push its plans through by turning authoritarian. Some cast its national executive committee as a shadowy cabal, ready to co-opt or oust the party\u2019s leader, Clement Attlee<\/a> \u2013 or, according to one minister, impose a dictatorship.<\/p>\n The biggest impetus for rightwing conspiracism was the radical social change that came to a head in the 1960s. To some, this felt like a hydra-headed, existential threat that had to have a single explanation. The most visible exponent of this was the renegade Conservative politician Enoch Powell<\/a>.<\/p>\n His notorious \u201crivers of blood\u201d speech in April 1968 \u2013 delivered amid the same economic crisis as King\u2019s meeting with Mountbatten \u2013 was a conspiracy theory about establishment collusion to impose mass immigration on Britain. The outrage that this provoked from newspapers and politicians was driven in part by their fear that the public were all too susceptible to Powell\u2019s incendiary rhetoric.<\/p>\n He responded by turning the idea of a gullible public misled by men who abuse their power back against his accusers, declaring, \u201cthe politics of the last few years have been little more than a series of conspiracies conducted by the politicians and the press against the common sense of the public\u201d.<\/p>\n This is another staple element of conspiracy theories: the notion of the easily manipulated masses cast into a stupor by a shadowy elite, from which the plucky maverick must awaken them. In the 1970 general election, Powell fleshed this out in more inflammatory speeches, claiming to detect an \u201cenemy within\u201d conspiring to \u201cbrainwash\u201d the British people on race and economics alike.<\/p>\n Powell charged that civil servants had faked immigration statistics, \u201ccruelly and persistently\u201d misleading the voters, implying that they were Soviet spy-style infiltrators. The enemy within expanded to encompass radical students, \u201canarchists\u201d, protesters against apartheid, nationalists and republicans in Northern Ireland, and strikers \u2013 until, finally, Powell pursued his obsessions into the wilderness.<\/p>\n But the spectre of an enemy within scheming to destroy democratic government would be revived by Thatcher during the 1984\u201385 miners\u2019 strike<\/a>.<\/p>\n Other 1970s rightwingers, rooted in the military and intelligence services, spied a similar array of enemies, but had a more coherent vision of the dark force hovering behind them. They thought it was the KGB.<\/p>\nHarold Wilson versus Lord Mountbatten?<\/h3>\n
![\""Cecil\"](\""https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2023\/05\/GettyImages-1450448973-9ac791d.jpg?quality=90&resize=620%2C413"\" "\\"\"Cecil\\"\/")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div> Cecil King set out his nightmare scenario: a tanking pound would bring on political collapse, and the army would try to restore order by, among other things, installing machine guns on street corners <\/blockquote> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>\n<\/div>
The King-Mountbatten cause c\u00e9l\u00e8bre<\/h3>\n
![\""Harold\"](\""https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2023\/05\/GettyImages-544747639-0c01c0b.jpg?quality=90&resize=620%2C413"\" "\\"\"Harold\\"\/")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div> Evidence of conspiracies against democratic government should be taken very seriously indeed. But cobbling together a sprawling myth may not be the most effective approach <\/blockquote> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>\n<\/div>
![\""Tanks\"](\""https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2023\/05\/E10T0X-7499933.jpg?quality=90&resize=620%2C413"\" "\\"\"Tanks\\"\/")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>Enoch Powell and his \u201crivers of blood\u201d<\/h3>\n
Another staple element of conspiracy theories is the notion of the easily manipulated masses cast into a stupor by a shadowy elite, from which the plucky maverick must awaken them <\/blockquote> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>\n<\/div>
The threat of outside influences<\/h3>\n
![\""Crowds\"](\""https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2023\/05\/GettyImages-1314505556-5c09e15.jpg?quality=90&resize=620%2C413"\" "\\"\"Crowds\\"\/")
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