Fifty-First State (37 page)

All I could do was give him the names of other solicitors likely to be sympathetic and advise him to leave Britain as fast as he could. He was in danger. I also knew my own client's interests could be badly affected by being linked with Jemal.

I was being watched now. A sequence of cars parked outside my house at erratic hours during the day and night, cars which were never interfered with by police and traffic wardens, and from which men and
women blatantly photographed the comings and goings to my house. Only a few days after my meeting with Mohammed the house at the back of my own was sold and I heard from neighbours that a group of youngish men and women, too old and well-dressed to be students, had begun to live there. They came and went at varying hours. They had moved in with little furniture. The postman had said they received no post. It seemed fairly obvious that the security services were keeping my house under surveillance from the back. I assumed my phones were tapped and my correspondence and emails read. I don't know what they think I know, or am about to go and do. It may be my connection with Edward Gott that concerns them.

I was contacted by John Stafford, recovering after a liver transplant. He was still worried about the British soldiers, Bob Carter in particular, who were in custody. Like everyone else he saw their eventual fate as extradition to the US to face the American legal system. I had to turn him down because, as with Mohammed Al Fasi, I felt I could not have my innocent client associated with men who had obviously been involved in the seizing of Hamscott Common.

By now I was in touch with the Muslim Council of Britain, all the civil liberties groups, EU lawyers and a cluster of MPs of all parties who were opposed to the summary nature of the wave of arrests. My workload was heavy. And I was even worried about the effect on our marriage. Sam was a childless widower, my only daughter Chloe was married and a mother herself, so we had busy lives, but we were able to live quietly and contentedly, in a unit of two. Now I was always tired, there was an office in our house, the phone never stopped ringing and Special Branch was taking photos of the laundry on the washing line. But Sam was staunch and, in any case, by summer, when people were getting hungry, tired and ill because of the hardships, he was working under pressure himself. We were both in harness and pulling heavy loads.

To be frank, some parts of this disaster were of benefit to me. A few months into the Frith case, and I knew the pressures were beginning to affect my bread-and-butter work at Jellicoe and Ogunbaye. A few months more, and just as I was thinking I might have to resign before they fired me, routine work at the firm was drying up. By this time fuel, food, jobs and money were all in short supply. Conveyancing was down and people for some reason were less keen to divorce. The bread-and-butter work was in decline. But then the terror really kicked in with a rise in summary arrests, raids, disappearances, deportations and police brutality (the dreaded Auxiliaries were frequently responsible). These measures began to affect our ordinary clients – in other words, people were generally staying in the same houses and flats and not falling out with their marriage partners, but random arrests and forced entries into houses began to affect
them, the ordinary clients whose houses we had conveyed, whose wills we had drawn up, whose children we had represented on shoplifting charges. Slowly, in our neck of the woods at any rate, families who had been living in the country for two and three generations were being caught in the huge net being spread by the government. Our clients – shopkeepers, local businessmen, plumbers, electricians, employees of the local council, of banks and building societies – were coming to us with tales of summary arrests and disappearances, of doors being kicked in and searches made. Our clients now needed representation by someone with my kind of experience. This saved my job at Jellicoe and Ogunbaye.

It was in August, six months after I'd begun to make a noise about William Frith's detention – and up to that point noise was all it had been, that I got a call from the Home Office at six in the evening and was curtly informed that William would be released from a London jail the following morning. When I asked if the charges had been dropped, the woman at the other end of the line was, she said, unable to tell me. The call was a courtesy, so that I or my client's friends would be able to meet him outside the prison when he was released. I thought it wiser not to question this. William had been arbitrarily taken and was being arbitrarily released – better to get hold of him first and ask questions later. But to date none of the questions about William's legal situation have been answered and I doubt if they ever will be. But we got him back and in the circumstances that was all that mattered. The Home Office woman said that if William had anywhere outside the country to go to, it might be a good idea for him to leave. They would have known about the Friths' home in Spain.

The situation was hard to decode. There must have been massive pressure from the State Department to give them suspects in the Hamscott Common raid. They saw us as a back door for terrorists to infiltrate the States. They had to kick ass. I had expected no mercy for William Frith. Yet now they were releasing him.

On the other side, though, there must have been a different story. William's job made him a suspect at first, but in the end, I think, could have protected him. William had been the manager at Sugden's. William had been in a position to eavesdrop on important private conversations held by people at the heart of government. If William stayed in custody or, even worse, was charged with harbouring or assisting an extremist who had been part of a force which took over an air force base, what would British security look like to the Americans?

It's possible that without the barrage we kept up it might have been easy for the authorities to put William's name down on the extradition papers and get rid of him quietly. But I think at some point strings started being pulled. It helped that by then those concerned must have known
William wasn't involved in anything. William Frith had never even bothered to vote in an election. At all events, he was released.

I remember him coming through the prison gates at eight on an August morning, staggering, throwing his arm up over his eyes and falling over. It could have been comic, though it wasn't. It was the opposite. Luckily, Lucy, who had been getting out of the car, quickly saw what was the matter. It was a sunny day and William hadn't seen natural light since he'd been incarcerated. It had blinded him. She ran to him, pulled him up, dragged off his coat and threw it over his head. Then she and his parents stood round him in a little protective circle, talking quietly to him while under the coat. Grace Frith told me later that William began to weep, almost as if in shame. We took him straight to my husband's surgery, which was when he was weighed and found to be seven stone – he had lost just over a third of his normal body weight in custody. And it wasn't only what had happened to his body – it was what had happened to his mind. He spent a fortnight lying in a darkened room, not speaking. William's mother said that she thought they might never get him back, not in any real sense. It seemed important to act on the tip from the Home Office and a week later the Friths and Lucy got him on a plane. They all went to Spain.

Lucy is running a beach bar. William has been helping her more and more. One day they may become part-proprietors of an expanded Hotel Rimbaud – my father's an incorrigible romantic – but it won't be soon.

Jemal and the other fourteen men captured after Hamscott Common have disappeared into the American justice system without trace. They were extradited to the USA. Lawyers, friends and relatives still do not know where they are. John Stafford and many others are still fighting for them, but the US authorities are obdurate. The European courts have declared all the processes illegal. Gott told me that when the judgement was announced the Home Secretary said, ‘Who gives a stuff?' The issue is before the Supreme Court now but no one is hopeful about the outcome. Those men will sit and rot for a long time, maybe for ever. The thought is sickening, humiliating – how, why, have we ceded rights to our own detainees?—but it's still at a distance. You don't see the figures huddled in cells in Texas and Louisiana. I only saw William, coming like a skeleton out into the daylight after six months in Belmarsh. I don't think I'll ever forget it.

And while I was concentrating on the fate of just one man, in the wider world events were going into free fall. As I was talking to the police, the judiciary and the European courts about William, and as the security services were setting up their arrangements to track me wherever I went and whatever I did, Edward Gott and his allies were putting together the
case for taking the seven air force bases into British hands. Petherbridge had not resigned after the defeat of the Ministry of Defence Lands Sale Bill. Of course, he's still Prime Minister, now known sneeringly as the Senator for England. Ultimately, the plan which Gott, Joshua Crane and others started in March – to take back the British bases, including the nuclear submarine base – collapsed in July, because Petherbridge and his allies had out-thought the opposition.

After the defeat of his bill – with hindsight, his US paymasters' way of making sure he could deliver and secondly, knew who was boss – Petherbridge had to go into overdrive. He'd lost the confidence of his backers; he had to get the next bit of the programme right. We didn't know – almost no one did – that from November 2015, immediately after the election of the Conservative government under Petherbridge, and before Gott's opposition to the MoD Lands Sale Bill was much more than a twinkle in his eye, land was being slowly bought up by the government and various complicit companies. Many thought the plan had been hatched at Camp David in August, when Petherbridge made his secret visit there. With the defeat of the bill, this land acquisition accelerated.

Look round your own neighbourhood and you'll be surprised by how much property is in state or council hands, from an old closed school here and some playing fields there to the old wing of a hospital under reconstruction. On a larger scale there is Ministry of Defence land. There are factories which owed their survival to government contracts, which can be, and were, sold up when the contracts were cancelled. The property, land and equipment then fell, one way or another, into government hands. Often, the mere threat of lost contracts was enough to persuade the management to sell. Then there were the private sales of land in key parts of the country to various purchasers. It was carefully done. Sometimes the land would be taken by a government department or a local council for a proposed development, sometimes bought by a holding company based offshore, its ownership untraceable. All this was handled discreetly over six months by a small and diligent unit working from Downing Street. By spring 2016, just after the MoD Lands Sale Bill was overturned, four thousand square miles of land in city and countryside was directly in the hands of the government or its corporate agents. It was done quietly and quickly. The only warnings came from the Internet and were ignored as the ravings of conspiracy theorists and nutters.

Just as this was beginning, in dead earnest and at speed, over ten days in March the London Underground and Canary Wharf were bombed, and buses and public buildings in Manchester and Glasgow were attacked. The Scottish Parliament building was damaged in a massive bombing campaign. Over 100 people were killed and 200 injured, 150 seriously.

During the week after the bombings my husband's surgery bulged with people who just couldn't cope – couldn't sleep, couldn't get to work, couldn't get out of bed, couldn't look after their children.

For Petherbridge and his Washington allies – masters – this bombing campaign could not have come at a better time. The usual nutters and conspiracy theorists say Petherbridge and America were responsible. They planned it and carried it out themselves. I find that hard to believe. For an ordinary person from what's called a ‘stable democracy' this idea is too awful to accept.

Two days after the bombings, in an atmosphere of shock, grief and fear of further attacks, the Prime Minister announced to the House of Commons that the US had offered aid to Britain and that there had been a Cabinet decision to accept the help of American Assistants. One of the results was a flood of intelligence agents from the US, the other, more visible one was the arrival of 3,000 US Marines and the setting up of camps on secretly purchased or commandeered land. There were large bases on the South Downs, outside Cambridge and Glasgow and in the Kings Cross area of London. Planning permission for the new barrage in the Thames Estuary had been pushed through by the Independent Planning Authority, which had been packed for years by whatever government was in power at the time. The contract had gone to a friend of the President of the USA. And as the barrage was built, a long overdue development many thought, a base and military airfield were being built on the drained land nearby.

There were challenges to all this on many fronts, but in British law there were no recent precedents, except in time of war. It was simply outside the rules. And it happened fast, while many people were so shocked by the attacks that the measures seemed nothing but a way of avoiding more deaths.

At the same time, heavy fortification of the airbases began. The defeat of the bill had changed nothing. Petherbridge said that at a time of acute national crisis the rule book had to be temporarily abandoned. The bases remained, as they always had been, jointly controlled, under a less-than-opaque system, by the RAF and USAF. Huge modern castles dominating the skylines were created, patrolled by heavily armed men and swept over, night and day, by helicopters.

And so, by August 2016 – just as William Frith was released – there were ten thousand American troops in Great Britain. The principal US Army bases were in Glasgow, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Sheffield, Birmingham and London. The inhabitants of the cities grew accustomed to the sight of US military vehicles and armed US servicemen in their streets. The servicemen were quiet and polite. They assisted good causes in their spare time. Children and teenagers were excited by the presence of these heroes. Others were less happy, especially as by this stage the US Assistants had
begun to arrive and occupy the corridors of power in Whitehall and at Westminster. Gott, like many others, had to recognize that between them the British government and the Pentagon had changed the rules of the game. Gott and others had parliament and the law, but no constitution to which to appeal. And the Americans had the guns. And they were here. Here to ‘assist'.