Scimitars on Whitehall - a mini TL by Forcon & James G

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?

Nice to see another joint TL between both of you.

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.

Something is going to happen, yes.
Forcon will give us the details tomorrow!

After this, would radio stations still play 'oh Cecilia'? (I heard it on the radio today!)

Brilliant.
Thank you very much. I'm sure forcon will approve too.
These images you do for stories are always well done.

I thank that and you then.

The gates of Downing Street have been crashed through!
Excellent work.