Scimitars on Whitehall - A British coup d'état[{locked}]
Dec 17, 2019 22:14:37 GMT
lordroel, archangel, and 1 more like this
Post by James G on Dec 17, 2019 22:14:37 GMT
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?
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?