Gwythian Prins or The Hornepipers’s Tale.
As I write ritual sacrifice of the King is being practised at Westminster. If I say that Boris enjoyed Felicity you must wait till I’ve finished — Boris Johnson enjoyed felicity with language well beyond all other comers — felicity, facility. Who else could have so quickly woven future combat air into one of last formal discourses as easily as if saying pass the marmalade?
What was criticised as his bluff and bluster was really the laid bare workings of a highly sophisticated and powerful machine for creating language. He was the logical end-point of the marriage between Westminster and Fleet Street. The next leader may not be so gay: Steve Baker? Priti Patel?
Johnson was notoriously blond. His public death is another sign that God’s great experiment with people of varicoloured hair is coming to an end. It’s final flourish was punk and mauve for oldies. Varicoloured hair people have served their purpose (we have had everything we need from them) and as the black hair noose tightens whitey becomes desperate and dangerous.
In Brexit England behind the seventeen point four million instinctive insulards are a shadowy set of sharp witted Tories whose emails, especially that generated by prime mover, Gwythian Prins can now be read thanks to Russian hackers. For altho Russia and the Eastern European kleptocracies are the final reservoir of varicoloured hair power they have no inhibitions about doing down their Five Eyes rivals.
The material dates from two thousand eighteen but there are still enough glowing coals to make it relevant. (Prinforce, to use his own weaponised to the point of masturbatory language, is now taking on the job of replacing Johnson with Patel). It seems indecent to be peeking into Gwythian’s smartphone but since they like to see Brexit as a war why not?
The context is yesteryear when Teresa May was put in to bat for Britain at Brussels in 2018. Gwythian and friends plotted to push her out “…the best would be the Anthony Eden golden bridge of her health” and put Boris in her place. An excellent resumé of the political story can be found in this article by Kit Klarenberg.
The conspirators were lucky to get Boris Johnson’s journalistic, imagist language to serve them. He in turn planted their core member Gisela Stuart in the same role that Stalin used to build his power: appointments secretary in the civil service.
Embedded within Whitehall was (is?) Evelyn Farr who moonlighted under (her own words) the nomme de guerre Caroline Bell. From her home in Balcombe Street Evelyn pumped out …political analysis, private high-level briefings, major policy interventions. She had inherited the pluck and love of shadow from her French mother, an SOE operative who had been perhaps (like my friend Colette) a girl that fell in love with an Englishman parachuted onto her lawn at night.
As a footloose european emigrant, I enjoy Gwythian’s strategic speculations and the primacy he gives to the Arctic. Brexit logic leads to a re-integration of England with Scandinavia, firmly clapped into the last white redoubt. Expect to see more fast footwork with Scandi bureaucrats now that they have bloodied themselves with the Assange affair and hid behind the NATO wall.
But my interest is also linguistic. Many of the emails are topped and tailed by a chatty line or two which taken together build a picture of Gwythian’s habitat and values which I believe can be generalised (that’s why they can conspire) across what you might call the officer class of Brexiteers as opposed to the NCO class represented by Steve Baker and the near Dad’s Army Mark Francois. Here are some samples:
“… before I get on a tractor and start de-pooing and then topping paddocks. a brief up-date”
“… message from ‘C’ fishing for salmon on the Tamar. He is mobilising his team”
Scotland has long been the playground of Britain’s rulers. being called from the grouse moors to the Whitehall telephone is a trope of many post-war cabinet memoirs.
“… my morning main task preparation for the catering tents for our daughter’s wedding next weekend. But the Boss is allowing me about 15 mins a day to try to help save the country”
“… happy couple safely in the air on the way to Sri Lanka. grandson behaving immaculately — so far. Marquee and loos vanishing as I write”
Cash for the lobbyists comes from Jersey domiciled couple the Clodes, thanked by author Ewen Southby-Tailyour for … priceless snippets from afloat, ashore, in the air and along the corridors of military and civilian power. From dialogue with the Clodes:
“… does Jersey, like Guernsey, have a ‘clameur de Haro’ equivalent and can Mary therefore use it to get the duc to stop disloyal politicians betraying us??!!!. Would a call tomorrow morning be convenient? It it getting into supper-time and already past ‘wine o’clock’ for me — so I am not as sharp as before hours of mowing and lugging tables and chairs and washing cars and the like!”
“… clameur de Haro. Yes, indeed, Jersey has the same as it is a right to appeal to the Duke of Normandy. Still the Queen as far as we are concerned! Unfortunately, it only applies to property matters”
The plan: Operation Surprise is topped and tailed with pastiche Patrick O’Brian:
“…their Plan to refit Her Majesty’s Frigate SURPRISE by means of refurbishment of the Great Guns, increase of the Ship’s Company, lading of New and Special Provisions for an Urgent Mission, reporting certain discussions held at Swan Walk and Perfected at the Public House Surprise hard by, on 7 August 2018…. England is under threat of invasion …this ship is our home. This ship, is England. So it’s every hand to his rope or gun, quick’s the word and sharp’s the action. After all, Surprise is on our side.”
Much of the conspirator’s material is flushed with the afterglow of England’s nineteen forty moment and a heroic maritime past — the whole island becomes a ship. Clever Penny Mordaunt has picked this up with her leadership pitch: …it is not about the leader, it is about the ship. It is difficult to overestimate the pull of this imagery for (mostly) men between say forty five and eighty five. I understand this historical kink. That shadowy time just before being alive pulls me in, the bomb sites of Notting Hill were my playground. Jim, the drunken shell of a Desert Rat was fed at our lodger’s table. Gwythian refers to the nineteen forty change of leadership drama in a circular email:
“… dear OP SURPRISE crew — having just finished Nicholas Shakespeare’s Six Minutes in May, I realise that we should have (been) called from the outset the Salisbury Watching Committee, since Robert is heroically replicating his grandfather’s role in 1940”
Robert is Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 7th Marquess of Salisbury, Baron Gascoyne-Cecil, KG, KCVO, PC, DL. His grandfather was the pivot by which Chamberlain swung out and Churchill swung in. Nineteen forty is the image of the island under attack and island consciousness is something very special. In Literature, Identity and the English Channel — Narrow Seas Expanded Dominic Rainsford quotes from someone who would have been a contemporary of the fictional Captain Aubrey of Prin’s fond love:
“… the island-dweller, protected by the element that surrounds him, having that force as his companion, has nothing to fear from any other, and everything invites him to make the most of his location. For the efforts that he is daily obliged to make for his own subsistence or to increase his wealth become the most powerful means at once of self-assertion and of defence; his boats are both his industry and his army. He is at home when he wishes to be so, and not with others except when the need arises. I conclude, therefore, that an insular people is led by the very force of circumstances towards commerce, liberty and egoism: at least, to that sort of egoism that isolates them in a way from other nations, and allows them to avoid any other contact than such as fits with their taste, interests and ambition.”
Prin’s world is a world of successful buccaneers contemptuous of the timid. They are the new Tudors throwing off the musty meliorist garments of earnest sub-christian public servants. Their scorn ranges wide, they are all for coal and against windmills. They long to lunge at the Chinese whilst battering the poor old Russians. Tho appalled by the US withdrawal from Afghanistan they had to fall into line because being cozy with the Pentagon gives them a specially important feeling — aggrandisement.
They are a possible tomorrow for a post-Brexit Britain. Just as the Clodes don’t live in the country they profess to love, it is possible to imagine the happy few careering around the globe as maritime entities while the cinder-strewn and violence engorged streets of the english speaking archipelago are raked thru for willing subjects by teams of earnest Swedes.
Everything seemed to come together for Gwythian when he got a sensational leak in September 2018:
“… please find attached a very troubling report. I was called to a face to face meeting with the source, who is as careful about the security of communications are we now are. The source is unable to weaponise this information directly but very much hoped that I might have a way… … my inexpert instinct is that this note needs to be seen by Jacob Rees-Mogg for one, who will understand the issue instantly and likewise Nigel Lawson and Mervyn King… … I am currently nearing Paddington for the Veterans for Britain Board meeting”
He emails ex-MI6 man Dearlove:
“… try suspend judgement until you or someone has been able to check him out. But I cannot stop my mind and if he is the real deal and does have access to the EU embassy in Beijing and if that briefing note is remotely accurate, then a new possibility appears to me. A dossier in the hands of Jacob Rees-Mogg (for example — he has the nerves for it) to tell May that we know what she has been doing and that she needs either do what we ask (ditch Chequers and revert to Canada Plus plus plus or better to WTO) or step aside for Boris or we publish. Yours blood-thirstily”
The China Material (as they called it) was a paper setting out an agreed position between May and Merkel on how to get thru the Brexit saga and come out at the right place. Gwythian gets into intelligence analyst mode:
APPALLING MATERIALS — FOR YOUR EVES AND EXPERT ASSESSMENT ONLY AT THIS POINT
From i Gwythian Prins <gwythian@protonmail.com> To giselastuart, Robert1611, Julian Thompson
Dear Gisela and Robert,
The attached materials have come to General Julian and to me yesterday and this morning from a UK source who, as far as we can tell, is reliable… …a British businessman long resident in China, married to a Chinese woman, Read them at face value first and it is beyond shocking… … Richard’s first reaction on the secure ‘phone last night ( we now use mobiles via the WhatsApp encrypted service which is the SIS recommended secure phone method) on seeing the emails was that they didn’t seem quite right… …his first instinct is that it might be poisoned bait for us to eat. I pointed out that the origin and the channels are entirely German, not British and he observes — and I have no way of knowing otherwise — that the Germans handle things differently and perhaps less fastidiously than over here… … the latest note reporting on (a) secret agreement having been reached between EU and May and her agreement to a second referendum and (b) Soros, I did not know that Soros was both a collaborator with the Nazis and a GRU agent — IF these things are true, Richard will tell us, If they ARE true then the quotes from the son’s girlfriend are very pertinent. It would also fit with what I have long suspected, namely that Russian alleged support for ‘leave· is maskirovka because Russia’s strategic interest is better served by a UK crippled and subordinate within a and under a collapsing EU… … one thing not clear to us is precisely why the originating source in China is willing to share this information at obvious risk- if exposed to public view- to himself, the translator and his niece… …source in China has said that he would be prepared to attest that he has seen the translator’s crib- the paper source -with his own eyes, He plainly has access to and sight of papers in the EU Embassy in Beijing… …you and Richard are the only people to whom we are giving this material at this moment. Please keep very secure,
Gwythian
Three days later doubt set in:
“… is it L6 (single source, prima facie credible but unverified) or E5 (potential fake kompromat). No detailed probing done but the meeting yesterday shared the view that on circumstantial evidence it was very suspect. No judgement can therefore be made, but no active use should be made of it by any of us”
They decided to keep the paper to themselves but here is a flavour:
In April 2020 Prins tries to pimp his daughter Susannah to Johnson citing her as Lady Calthorpe.
But wait a minute, was he confused? I hate to draw in the innocent but are there two Lady Calthorpes? Starlet Isabella and another hidden one called Susannah? One can never be sure with the aristocracy and all their names and grades. His daughter (whoever she is) has a walk on two years later:
“…we have two visits from adorable two year old grandson and his mummy — our daughter (and once his daddy); and my horse is going well — so yes, batteries recharged. I hope that your batteries are topped up for I fear that we are all heading into rough waters. As you know from The Worm in the Rose I much prefer diesel tanks as the right analogy — not batteries — for a well-found warship such as we are!
I am coming to the view that I cannot see how the PM will not founder one way or another; and he has so lost control of his mind and willpower that maybe this would be for the best? It will take fresh leadership to exit the green quagmire which can only be done decisively, not in small steps. Having lost the greatest frost since 1709, have we confidence that he really has the stamina to ‘get brexit done’?
Plainly the Foreign Secretary, with Frost’s backing, has, and is showing the determination of a convert as Mrs T once was. Sunak wont do will he? He’s another globalonist blairite at heart isn’t he? like Boris?
Before the holiday closure I happened to be seated at a dinner next to one of BoJo’s long-time funders who told me that he had dumped him and told him so and told him that it was because of Anne Boleyn and her managers (Goldsmiths and Gummers Inc); and that he had shifted his money to Truss”
We can take it that Anne Boleyn is code for Carrie and green sympathies. Which brings up to date with the whirling hornepipers who look like settling on Pritti Patel for leader according to this latest from Kit Klarenberg.
Matthew Hilton
apwb.org
