Challenge: Coup against British PM Harold Wilson

Realistically? A coup not as such.

However getting the government from office or removing the PM is a different matter. Most of the Conspiricy theories don't hold much these days other than for works of fiction.

Still. A coup by the military, is nigh impossible.

The civil service could easily damage the government with leaks and embarressments. The Ulster Unionists were doing a fine job damaging Wilson anyway. Maybe they could just assissinate him and rig the looming general election?
 
The Ulster Unionists were doing a fine job damaging Wilson anyway. Maybe they could just assissinate him and rig the looming general election?

That might actually give PM Callaghan or Healey an excuse to implement an Indira Gandhi style 'national emergency'. (At least that scenario is less ASBish than a military coup.)

But all this bullshit about military coups against Labour governments does ignore the fact that (a.) senior public servants could just--if pushed real hard--leak damaging information about senior ministers, and cause the Labour PM of a weak government to the polls, and (b.) it would still be much easier for conspirators to just split a party & arrange for governing party MPs to defect to the crossbenches.

Military coups in stable liberal democracies are for fantasists, i.e. people crazy enough to think Harold Wilson (or Gough Whitlam) are communist agents. Such people tend not to be able to organise the proverbial piss-up in a brewery.
 
That might actually give PM Callaghan or Healey an excuse to implement an Indira Gandhi style 'national emergency'. (At least that scenario is less ASBish than a military coup.)

This is probably one of the few non-ASB possibilities for a coup-like situation within the UK in the 1970's. Perhaps Callaghan and Healey form a centrist National Government with moderate Tories.

To get this to occur you would need there perhaps to be much more support for both the hard-left, such as Tony Benn and the hard-right, such as Enoch Powell in the mid-1970's.

In this scenario, believing that 'The centre cannot hold' as the saying goes, moderate Labour and moderate Tory politicians decide to suspend Parliament and establish some kind of semi-authoritarian National Government in order to 'safeguard' democracy from the extremes.

Perhaps Callaghan in the Prime Minister of the National Government and Ted Heath is the Deputy Prime Minister (or vice-versa). I do know that Ted Heath harboured hopes (or delusions, depending on your point of view) of returning to the Prime Ministership under some form of centrist government of Nationa Unity, into the early 1980's.

I say this is the one of the most plausible coup-like scenarios as I personally believe that only a broadly centrist authoritarian goverment would be able to get public support or more correctly, public acquiescence to its policies.
 
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