Mick Hartley

Dominic Sandbrook in the Times, in the wake of the shambolic martial law pronouncement by South Korea's president Yoon, looks at other coup failures – including the largely forgotten effort here planned by "the megalomaniac media chairman" Cecil Harmsworth King:

Having endorsed Labour’s Harold Wilson in 1964, King was furious not to have been offered a hereditary peerage and was appalled by Britain’s apparent economic decline. High above the Mirror’s Holborn headquarters, he brooded alone in a vast office decorated with 18th-century Italian tables, Persian carpets, Anatolian prayer mats and entire bookcases of rare antiquities. In his desk drawer he kept a list of possible ministers in a potential “Emergency Government”, to be led ideally by himself. And in the late spring of 1968 he decided the time had come to strike.

On May 8, King and the veteran Mirror editor Hugh Cudlipp drove to the country house of the Queen’s second cousin Lord Mountbatten, formerly viceroy of India and supreme allied commander in southeast Asia. Having been shown in, King announced that within weeks “the government would disintegrate, there would be bloodshed in the streets [and] the armed forces would be involved”. The British people, he declared, would need Mountbatten to take charge, “a leader of men … backed by the best brains and administrators in the land”.

At first, according to King’s own account, Mountbatten seemed tempted. Then his close friend Sir Solly Zuckerman, the government’s chief scientific adviser, joined the party and the mood changed. Zuckerman could not believe what he was hearing. “This is rank treachery!” he exclaimed. “All this talk of machine guns at street corners is appalling. I am a public servant and will have nothing further to do with it. Nor should you, Dickie.” Then he walked out.

Had Mountbatten really been tempted? It seems much more likely that he was humouring an eccentric guest, though we’ll never know for certain. Either way, King left empty-handed. A few days later he tried to launch a desultory version of his putsch anyway, devoting the front page of the Mirror to an apocalyptic signed editorial ordering Labour MPs to ditch Wilson for a new leader.

The reaction was total derision and three weeks later King was sacked by the IPC board.

Yes I know: it was always ridiculous – though I have my doubts about Mountbatten. Still, a Jewish intervention saving the day….a Jew the only one who can see the "rank treachery", surrounded by these upper-crust buffoons. My take: once again we see the centrality of Jews in British life.