Plan to get Queen out of London if riots start
THE Queen has been dragged into an extraordinary ‘Project Fear’ row after it emerged that civil servants have drawn up plans to evacuate the royal family if a no-deal Brexit sparks riots on the streets of London.
The MoS has learned that Whitehall contingency planners have included among their worstcase scenarios the need to move the royals to safe locations away from the English capital.
Officials in the Civil Contingencies Secretariat, the government department responsible for emergency planning, have ‘repurposed’ a secret operation under which the royals could have been accommodated in various country houses to protect them during the Cold War.
The revival of the plan was ridiculed by Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg, who described it as a ‘wartime fantasy’ dreamt up by
mandarins who had watched too many news clips of helicopters landing on the US Embassy roof in Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War.
He said: ‘The over-excited officials who have dreamt up this nonsense are clearly more students of fantasy than of history.’
A source in the secretariat said that the most extreme no-deal crisis scenario envisaged riots breaking out in London as shops ran short of staple foods.
The source claimed that the plan had been moved up the priority list (which is dominated by issues such as the availability of clean water and medicine) after Mr Rees-Mogg called on prime minister Theresa May last month to ask the Queen to suspend parliament in order to thwart efforts by remainer MPs from delaying Brexit.
The source said: ‘As the Queen has been dragged into some of the politics around all this, it becomes more likely that she and her family could be targeted by protesters.’
Neither Buckingham Palace nor Downing Street would comment yesterday but a senior UK government source insisted: ‘It is not “Project Fear”. There are dozens of contingency planners whose job is to envisage every possible eventuality.
‘They would be negligent if they didn’t include the royal [family] in that, however far-fetched the scenario might seem.’