Staging the state of exception: William le Queux and the campaign for emergency powers in Britain 1906–1914

This essay examines a high-profile campaign to roll back civil rights in Britain in the years before World War One. By persuading government and the people that Britain was already invaded and facing imminent colonisation, its aim was to place the nation in a state of emergency, requiring a new regime of disciplinary control. Popular novelist William le Queux, Field Marshall Frederick Roberts and government intelligence specialist James Edmonds have all been associated with ‘spy mania’ by historians. However, their role in a larger effort to erode legal and social protections in Britain has not been sufficiently addressed. I examine their attempts to stage an existential crisis for Britain using the platform of the Daily Mail in 1906, and the strategies they followed thereafter. Importantly, the essay locates these within a sustained campaign of advocacy for exceptional measures, both in war and civil crisis. As the essay seeks to demonstrate, the joint actions of these collaborators helped initiate far-reaching changes in the relationship between security and democracy in Britain.