A senior Metropolitan Police officer has denied they were under any political pressure to clampdown on anti-monarchist groups protesting during the coronation of King Charles III.
But the Met’s Temporary Assistant Commissioner, Matt Twist, told MPs on Wednesday: “I felt under no pressure politically, 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.”
Giving evidence to the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee, Twist said: “There were 312 protected people that we managed to get in and out of [Westminster] 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.”
1st Arrests Under New Public Order Act
The six Republic members—who were later released without charge—were the first people to be arrested under the new Public Order Act, which had been brought in three days before the coronation.They were held under suspicion of going equipped to “lock-on,” a new offence which is designed to prevent demonstrators from padlocking themselves to barriers or gluing themselves to roads or other surfaces as an act of obstruction or disruption.
Smith also gave evidence to the same committee on Wednesday and said his arrest had been a “traumatic experience.”
Police Questioned Over ‘Intelligence’
Smith said the police could not have intelligence relating to a threat from 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.”He said he had numerous meetings and written exchanges with police in the months before the coronation in which they had agreed how many placards they would bring, and agreed on an exact location in Trafalgar Square where Republic’s main protest would take place.
Smith said, “We gave them every piece of information we possibly 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.”
Wednesday’s meeting was ironically disrupted at one point when Just Stop Oil protesters, wearing T-shirts with large slogans on them, stood up and started to protest. The video feed cut out before they were removed.
Earlier Twist was confronted by MPs who pointed out Republic did not have a reputation for using lock-on tactics.
He 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,” Twist said.
‘Fine Line’ Between Protest and Illegality
Twist said there was often a “fine line” between a lawful protest and a demonstration “straying into illegal activity.”The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Mark Rowley, has defended the force’s actions in a letter to the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, in which he said, “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.”
A constitutional monarchy was created in 1689 after the Catholic King James II was usurped by his daughter Mary and her Protestant husband, William of Orange.
