Scotland Yard was not put under political pressure to crack down on anti-royal protesters during King Charles’ coronation, a senior Met police officer said today.
The force faced fierce criticism of arrests made around the event, including volunteers who handed out rape alarms and six members of the campaign group Republic that had liaised with police for weeks before the coronation to organise their own protest.
A complaint has also been lodged by royal fan Alice Chambers, 36, who was held in custody for 13 hours after being mistaken for a Just Stop Oil protester as she waited on the Mall hoping to catch a glimpse of the King.
The i newspaper quoted an anonymous senior police source saying that there had been ‘a very firm instruction not to damage the reputation of the UK’, although the Home Office said it did not recognise the claim.
However, the Met’s Temporary Assistant Commissioner Matt Twist told the Commons Home Affairs Committee – which was briefly disrupted by a Just Stop Oil protest – that he felt ‘under no pressure politically’.
Protesters from climate protest group ‘Just Stop Oil’ are apprehended by police officers before the Coronation
The Met’s Temporary Assistant Commissioner Matt Twist told the Commons Home Affairs Committee he felt ‘under no pressure politically’
He said: ‘I felt pressure to deliver a safe and secure operation, but that was because of the fact that it was a once-in-a-lifetime event for so many people and there would be hundreds of thousands of people in London to celebrate it, and also and importantly, this was the biggest protection operation we have ever run.
‘There were 312 protected people that we managed to get in and out of the Abbey and across the footprint in about 90 minutes. So the stakes were enormously high, so I absolutely felt pressure to deliver a safe and secure operation. But that wasn’t political pressure.’
Mr Twist told the Commons Home Affairs Committee that officers had faced ‘the most challenging, fast moving and complex policing picture we’ve ever encountered for national celebration’.
The six Republic members were the first people to be arrested under the sweeping Public Order Act, brought in days before the coronation.
They were held under suspicion of going equipped to ‘lock-on’ – a measure protesters use to make it harder for police to move them – but later released without charge.
Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley has defended the force’s actions in a letter to London Mayor Sadiq Khan, saying: ‘Had our officers not acted on reasonable grounds, based on the evidence in front of them in the moment and the potential risk to the event, there would now be much more serious questions to answer about the event.’
Mr Twist said there can be a ‘fine line’ between lawful protest and a demonstration ‘straying into illegal activity’.
‘We are continually balancing the rights of those who seek to protest with those who are impacted by it,’ he told the committee.
‘And what we have seen latterly is there is a sort of fine line between what is peaceful protest and what is straying into illegal activity, as we’ve seen in the latter part of last year and start of this year, and the shifting of those scales taking place.
‘Where crime is being committed, we need to intervene much more quickly.’
The force faced fierce criticism of arrests made around the event, including volunteers who handed out rape alarms and six members of the campaign group Republic that had liaised with police for weeks before the coronation to organise their own protest
Royal superfan Alice Chambers was arrested and locked up for 13 hours after standing next to Just Stop Oil protesters ahead of the King’s coronation
Told that there was no history of Republic using lock-on tactics, he said officers on the ground did not know that the straps would be used to secure placards.
Mr Twist said: ‘Officers have to make a difficult judgment at the time, in the moment, based on what they are faced with and based on the information they have.
‘They have to form reasonable grounds for an arrest and, as the committee will know, reasonable grounds is actually quite a low threshold and is much lower than where you would need grounds to meet the evidential test to charge and a public interest test to charge. So what was found was 12 heavy-duty material straps with combination locks on them, which the officers were told was for securing placards.
‘But at the time the officers were operating in a threat environment where they believed, taking into account the time, the location, proximity to the route and what they had in front of them, those officers believed that those could be items that could be used for locking on, and that was why the arrest was made.’
Home Secretary Suella Braverman and London Mayor Sadiq Khan were alerted the evening before the coronation that intelligence suggested there was going to be a ‘concerted attempt to disrupt the coronation procession’, the hearing was told.
Mr Twist said: ‘What we do is base this on intelligence, base this on actions, we will base this on the group.
‘And clearly at the time, what we were talking about if we draw this back to Golden Orb, was a situation where we had very clear intelligence that was deeply concerning, sufficiently so that we ended up briefing the Home Secretary and the Mayor late at night on the Friday.
‘And we briefed senior stakeholders and partners late on Friday and early on Saturday that there was going to be a concerted attempt to disrupt the coronation procession.
‘Officers were asked to be extremely vigilant and extremely proactive in dealing with this. So in the wider threat context, that would have played into some of the decision making, I think.’
Mr Twist told the Commons Home Affairs Committee that officers had faced ‘the most challenging, fast moving and complex policing picture we’ve ever encountered for national celebration’
The senior officer was grilled by a number of MPs including Conservative Tim Loughton
Mr Twist later said he did not think the Public Order Act would be used on a regular basis.
Noting that the coronation was the first time its arrest powers were used, he added: ‘I don’t think (it is) legislation we are going to be seeing used day-in-day-out or even week-in-week-out on the basis that since it was passed there have been 68 other demonstrations that have taken place and we have not used this legislation on any of them.’
Mr Twist denied that officers had been overzealous, but accepted that they were ‘cautious’ in the context of the enormity of the event.
‘Of course, we were cautious but in the context of the largest security operation we’ve ever run, the once in a generation, once in a lifetime event, and no second chances to get it right,’ he said.
He said that the Republic protesters were arrested with luggage straps with combination locks on them, which it was unusual for demonstrators to use to secure placards.
It took 16 hours to release them from custody because five of them had the same legal representative who had to go into interview with them one by one, Mr Twist said.
Ashfield Tory MP Lee Anderson asked him for reassurance that officers would be as tough on Just Stop Oil protesters who have staged a series of protests marching slowly in the road in central London.
Police now issue a warning to demonstrators to move onto the pavement in order to clear the road.
Mr Twist said: ‘We are dealing robustly where people are just effectively hell bent on causing disruption to the overwhelming majority of others going about their lawful business.’
Protesters hold up placards saying ‘Not My King’ in Trafalgar Square on the morning of the King’s Coronation
Police were seen scouring vans with hundreds of Not My King banners
A Republic activist is questioned and searched by police following protests on The Mall
Republic chief executive Graham Smith, describing his arrest on the morning of the coronation as a ‘traumatic experience’, told MPs his anti-monarchy group ‘never had any intention’ of disrupting the coronation.
Mr Smith said he had meetings and written exchanges with police in the months beforehand setting out how many placards his protest group would be bringing, what they would say on them and confirming they would have amplifiers and megaphones with them, while issuing officers with maps about where the demonstrations would be located.
He said: ‘We gave them every piece of information we possible could.
‘It is possible that the occasional tiny minutia might have slipped through and not been communicated but they were very clear with us that they did not have a single concern about any of the things we had told them we were going to do.’
He added: ‘We never had any intention of doing anything which even came close to falling outside of the law. And claims that they had intelligence cannot possibly be true. Either they are being dishonest or they are making a very serious error.
‘Because you cannot have intelligence relating to Republic because there was not a single email, text message or conversation, fleeting remark or anything at all that would suggest we had any intention of doing anything unlawful or disruptive.’
Mr Smith confirmed that Republic had not alerted the Metropolitan Police to the fact they would have luggage straps but contested that they were ‘heavy-duty’.
Asked whether he had mentioned the straps in prior discussions with the police, he said: ‘No because we hadn’t realised until we had them delivered a few days earlier that they are quite cumbersome to move.
‘I simply went on Amazon, found the first straps I saw, picked them mainly because they were yellow and matched everything else we were carrying and threw them in the van, still in the packaging.
‘They are not physically capable, as our solicitor pointed out when she arrived at the station and as they I believe have now accepted, of locking people on.
‘They may have a combination lock but they also have an adjustor like any bag strap. They are quite long and also quite easy to cut, so they are not particularly heavy-duty.
‘They are the sort of strap you might strap around your case if you are going into an airport.’
Sacha Deshmukh, Amnesty International UK’s Chief Executive, said: ‘There was widespread shock at the police’s heavy-handed behaviour ahead of and during the coronation day protests.
‘The police overreaction was exactly what we’d been fearing – that the Met and other forces would routinely use extremely authoritarian new legislation to clamp down on any protest deemed ‘disruptive’ or ‘noisy’.
‘The right to be able to peacefully protest is the lifeblood of any free and open society, yet we’ve almost sleep-walked into a period where the police can classify anything from t-shirts, banners, rape alarms or luggage straps a potential ‘threat’, swoop on people for being in possession of these items and then detain them for 16 hours at a time.
‘We’d like to see the committee unequivocally recommending an end to the crackdown on peaceful protests, including with the repeal of extreme anti-protest laws and a re-affirmation from ministers that peaceful protest is in fact still permitted in this country.’
