Harold Wilson plot allegations

[citation needed] According to Wright, at the end of the 1960s MI5 received information from two Czechoslovak defectors, Josef Frolík and František August, who had fled to the West, alleging the Labour Party had "almost certainly" been penetrated by the Soviets.

Attending were Mountbatten, King, Cudlipp, and Sir Solly Zuckerman, the Chief Scientific Adviser to the British government.

According to Cudlipp: [Cecil] awaited the arrival of Sir Solly and then at once expounded his views on the gravity of the national situation, the urgency for action, and then embarked upon a shopping list of the Prime Minister's shortcomings.

[9] King subsequently decided to override the editorial independence of the Daily Mirror when he instructed the paper to publish a front-page article he had written that called for Wilson to be removed through some sort of extra-parliamentary action.

In the autumn election of 1974, it predicted that economic crisis would produce a coalition government of national unity well inside five years and urged one there and then between Conservatives and Liberals.

The first time was in the late 1960s after the Wilson Government devalued the pound sterling but the threat faded after Conservative leader Edward Heath won the election of 1970.

However, after a coal miners' strike Heath decided to hold an election to renew his mandate to govern in February 1974 but lost narrowly to Wilson.

[16] On 22 March 1987 former MI5 officer James Miller claimed that the Ulster Workers Council Strike of 1974 had been promoted by MI5 to help destabilise Wilson's government.

[17] In July 1987, Labour MP, Ken Livingstone used his maiden speech to raise the allegations of a former Army press officer, Colin Wallace, that the Army press office in Northern Ireland had been used in the 1970s as part of a smear campaign, codenamed Clockwork Orange, against Harold Wilson and other British and Irish politicians.

[18] In The Defence of the Realm (2009), the first authorised history of MI5, by Christopher Andrew, it was shown that MI5 kept a file on Wilson from 1945, when he became an MP – because communist civil servants claimed that he had similar political sympathies.

[19] Doubt was cast on this claim, however, in 2010 when newspaper reports made detailed allegations that the bugging of 10 Downing Street had been omitted from the history for "wider public interest reasons".

The suspicion of Wilson and others towards the activities of the security services and other figures resulted from concrete domestic and international developments ... Andrew is correct to be sceptical, and there remains limited evidence of a 'plot', if a plot is defined as a tightly organised high-level conspiracy with a detailed plan.