Clockwork Orange

 Clockwork Orange (subversion,  regime change)

Date	1970s - April 1976
Location	UK
Perpetrators	MI5
Exposed by	Colin Wallace

Clockwork Orange was a secret campaign carried out to try to discredit the government of Harold Wilson.

Military coup

After his resignation, UK Prime Minister Harold Wilson claimed that he was the target of a planned military coup. He also denounced a campaign to smear him staged by members of MI5 in order to force his resignation. According to journalist Barry Penrose "Wilson spoke darkly of two military coups which he said had been planned to overthrow his government in the late 1960s and in the mid 1970s."

Cover-up

In 1987, Margaret Thatcher's government carried out an inquiry into Clockwork Orange, which as The Guardian reported in 2006 "concluded the allegations were false, implying that the fading Wilson had descended into paranoia. This can't be allowed to stand. Not only does it do an injustice to Wilson, it also represents an enormous cover-up."

Exposure

One of the project's members, Colin Wallace, who was the press officer at the Army Headquarters in Northern Ireland, claimed^[When?] that in 1973, after MI5 became the primary intelligence agency in Northern Ireland, the project began giving briefings to foreign journalists against members of Wilson's government. These briefings included distributing forged documents in an attempt to show that the victims were communists or Irish republican sympathisers leading a campaign to destabilise Northern Ireland or were taking bribes.

BBC film

In 2006 the BBC broadcast a film about Clockwork Orange. A week before, a story on their website was headlined Wilson 'plot': The secret tapes , and noted that "new revelations in BBC drama documentary The Plot Against Harold Wilson, to be broadcast next Thursday, suggest the Labour prime minister was also convinced he was the target of plans to stage a military coup - and that the Royal Family backed it. The story sounds barely credible - a sign, perhaps, that Wilson was suffering from paranoia - but it is backed up by corroborating interviews with other senior figures from the time."

 

An example

Page name	Description
The Cecil King coup plot	1968 coup plan for the United Kingdom

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