A very English Coup d’Etat

Malcolm Evans reports on an article published on independent UK electronic news platform, The Grayzone.

From a landslide election victory two years ago to barely surviving a vote of no confidence last week, Boris Johnson’s hold on the keys of 10 Downing Street may have been further shaken by “a bombshell report” seriously questioning how he came to be PM in the first place.

Published by The Grayzone, an independent electronic news platform founded in 2015 by award-winning journalist Max Blumenthal, “to shine a journalistic light on America’s state of perpetual war,” the report claims Johnson’s election was engineered by “a clique of current and former defence and intelligence officials backed by shady aristocratic financiers. 

Citing a tranche of leaked emails and documents, The Grayzone says; “they expose the dimensions of a wide-ranging conspiracy managed by a shadowy ‘cabal’ of hard-core EU-leavers to sabotage former Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit deal, remove her from office, replace her with Boris Johnson, and secure a ‘hard’ withdrawal from the European Union.”

“The emails and documents represent but a negligible fraction of a gargantuan tranche of leaked files. But even this provides a frighteningly candid glimpse of how power truly operates in Britain, and in whose interests it is ultimately exerted,” The Grayzone asserts.

The leaked material “demonstrates that a group of operatives linked to the intelligence services and wealthy, reclusive pro-Brexit financiers spied on campaign groups, infiltrated the civil service, and targeted high-profile UE-remainers with reputational destruction.” 

While the majority of British voters elected to leave the EU, this clique of mostly unknown “influence agents” sought to subvert the process and manage it according to their own elite “hard exit.”. Among the cabal’s key objectives was the strengthening of the security relationship between London and Washington, with the aim of supplanting EU authority with more substantial US oversight.

The tranche of emails, which The Grayzone says would be impossible to counterfeit or to doctor, were shared with it anonymously, but, “their authenticity has been verified through analysis of the associated metadata, together with other evidentiary sources.” 

The Guardian newspaper dismissed the report as being the work of Russian hackers but, even if that were the case, that doesn’t necessarily detract from their validity. Indeed, if, as Malcolm Muggeridge said; “News is something that somebody somewhere doesn’t want published…..” it follows that reports like this are most likely to surface as a result of covert activity. And there are plenty of examples of major news stories emerging from just such sources; The Watergate Affair; The Pentagon papers, The Winebox Papers, The Paradise Papers, for instance. 

And that the media establishment would be disparaging of such material is not surprising, especially when viewed against its refusal to support, or even report on, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s years-long fight to avoid extradition to the United States, where he faces several life sentences for revealing documents exposing The West’s involvement in political espionage, up to and including the commission of war crimes.

That said, it’s not as if secret efforts to subvert the tenure of democratically elected British governments is anything new. While the records of the Tower of London attest to the fact that it’s been going on for centuries, more recently Harold Wilson’s premature exit from office, which the Guardian subsequently described as “Britain’s Watergate,” was linked to a very serious coup attempt by a cabal of British secret service and British military connections. 

Reporting the affair the Guardian said that, fearing the country was out of control and that Wilson lacked either the will or the desire to stand firm, retired intelligence officers and military brass plotted to seize Heathrow airport, the BBC and Buckingham Palace. Lord Mountbatten was tipped to be the interim Prime Minister and the Queen was to read a statement urging the public to support the armed forces, because the government was no longer able to keep order.

And then there’s the numerous examples of CIA interference in foreign countries’ elections, not least that reported in Time magazine, July 15 1996, which details how the US engineered the election of Boris Yeltsin. 

And let’s not forget that the US-engineered coup in Ukraine, in 2014, is directly responsible for the war between it and Russia today, which, as we speak, has the world closer to a global conflagration than it has been since the Cuban Missile crisis of 1962.

And then again, as detailed in a recent Chris Trotter article on TDB, there’s the example of NZ’s own security services, in the mid 1970s, leaking a story to The NZ Truth, “outing” Bill Sutch as a Russian spy (a charge of which he was later acquitted) to undermine his department’s influence on New Zealand Government policy.  

Since the activities of those exposed in the Grayzone article are so flagrantly anti-democratic that they could lead to criminal investigations of at least some of the players involved, the public interest in this report is abundantly clear.

The cabal is reported to be have been led by Gwythian Prins, a member of the Chief of Defence Staff’s Strategy Advisory Panel, former NATO and Ministry of Defence advisor, and board member of pro-Brexit group Veterans for Britain.  And he is joined by former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove, who is frequently dubbed “C” in the leaked emails, a reference to the operational initial granted to all heads of Britain’s foreign intelligence service. 

The Grayzone article says Dearlove’s MI6 tenure, from 1999 through to 2004, was typified by controversy.  Thanks largely to the deceptions he advanced to justify the war on Iraq, Dearlove was ultimately singled out by an official inquiry which found he had directly passed on bogus intelligence testifying to the existence of Baghdad’s non-existent WMD, to then-Prime Minister Tony Blair.

And then there’s the New Zealand connection; The Grayzone reports that the cabal’s purpose was to ferociously oppose any arrangement that would keep Britain tethered to Brussels’ defence structures and obligations, contending that it would undermine the US and UK-led ‘Five Eyes’ global spying network, of which New Zealand is a member. 

Among the leaked files cited in the report is one authored by Prins, in August 2018, which spells out the cabal’s “bold and malicious objectives,” culminating later in an email revealing highly sensitive briefings on EU withdrawal, meant for Prime Minister May, being passed to Dearlove, with Prins declaring, “Here is her war plan. Now kill her and it.” 

Funding for what Dearlove described as; “A very English Coup d’Etat,” is said to have been supplied by wealthy backers including Tim and Mary Clode, an aristocratic couple based in Jersey, a notorious British tax haven. And Julian ‘Toby’ Blackwell, owner of the Blackwell publishing empire, who has an SAS special forces background, is also said to have helped fund the operation. Described as, “an arch Brexiteer and multimillionaire,” Blackwell’s Who’s Who entry lists his hobbies as “fighting Eurocrats and chopping firewood.”

A subsequent email from Prins revealed that the covert effort to “penetrate the enemy’s inner councils” would be led by former SIS (MI6 Secret Intelligence Service) operatives, connected to the notorious lobbying firm Crosby-Textor. 

In April 2019, Crosby-Textor was exposed as the hidden hand behind a series of bogus social media accounts targeting millions of British voters with ads extolling the virtues of a ‘Hard Brexit,’ and urging viewers to “chuck Chequers.” 

Boris Johnson took over as prime minister in July 2019, promising to “get Brexit done” after accusing his predecessor and fellow Tory Theresa May of being too soft on Brussels in negotiations. Brexit stepped into effect on 31 January 2020 after months of gruelling talks.

Of course all efforts to lobby, persuade or engineer political change can be cast in a conspiratorial light, but when the identities of those involved are hidden from the public, and then, when subsequently exposed, are seen to have acted clandestinely, the apostles of democracy have a right to ask; “What’s going on here?” 

All but one of the cabal members and funders exposed in this report ignored repeated requests from The Grayzone for comment. That lone exception was Evelyn Farr, the cabal’s mole in the British civil service. Reached by The Grayzone at a phone number listed on her CV, Ms. Farr reacted with alarm. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, I don’t know who you are, or why you’ve got this number, and I haven’t gotten a clue what you’re talking about,” an audibly startled Farr proclaimed.

And when asked if she had worked to sabotage the Brexit process from behind the scenes, she hung up.

Since initiating these inquiries, the email account of Kit Klarenberg, the Grayzone journalist who wrote this article, has experienced numerous attempted break-ins.

References; https://thegrayzone.com/2022/05/15/operation-leaked-emails-intelligence-coup-boris-johnson/

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/may/26/hard-brexit-plans-ex-m16-richard-dearlove-hacked-leaked-russians

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/mar/15/comment.labour1