Whitehall plan to evacuate Queen if Brexit sparks riots on streets of capital
No, it’s not a farce, it’s all too real . . . in the most risible No Deal scare story yet
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 causes riots on the streets of London.
The Mail on Sunday has learned that White hall contingency planners have included among their ‘ worst case’ scenarios the need to move the Royals to safe locations away from the 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 from enemy forces during the Cold War.
The revival of the plan was ridiculed by leading 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 – now Ho Chi Minh City – at the end of the Vietnam War.
He told The Mail on Sunday: ‘The over- excited officials who have dreamt up this nonsense are clearly more students of fantasy than of history. The Monarch’s place is always in the capital, as the late Queen Mother, wife of George VI, made very clear during the Blitz.’
A source in the Secretariat said that the most extreme No Deal cri- sis scenario envisaged riots breaking out in London as shops ran short of staple foods.
The source claimed that the plan had been moved up their ‘priority list’ – which is dominated by issues such as the availability of clean water and medical supplies – after Mr Rees-Mogg called on the Prime Minister last month to demand that the Queen should suspend Parliament in order to thwart efforts by Remainer MPs to delay Brexit.
Mr Rees-Mogg argued that ‘vestigial constitutional means’ could be necessary to stop a No Deal Brexit being taken off the table, and accused No 10 of being behind the Queen’s Brexit intervention last month when she made a plea for people across the UK to ‘seek out the common ground’ that binds the country together.
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, citing security concerns, but a senior 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 Royals in that, however far-fetched the scenario might seem.’
The Cold War plans to protect the Royals were drawn up in 1962 following the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Under the first phase, named Operation Candid, if hostilities had broken out with Russia, members of the Royal Family would have been dispersed to a variety of country houses, where they would have been guarded by a newly formed militia called the Royal Duties Force.
If tensions had escalated further, a so-called ‘python system’ would have been deployed, with senior Royals transferred to the ‘floating bunker’ of the Royal yacht Britannia. As an alternative, the Queen could have been moved to the Central Government War Headquarters at Corsham Court, Wiltshire.
Mr Rees-Mogg said: ‘The apparent airlift of the Queen for the London Olympics in 2012 was a very good joke – not a serious Brexit-related blueprint to rerun the American departure from Saigon.’
‘It’s likely she could be a target for protesters’