Graham Smith had just hung up on Jeremy Vine’s BBC Two radio show. “He was sort of suggesting, you know, shall we have this nice little debate about whether or not someone should be locked up for 16 hours so people can wave their flags,” says Smith, 49, who looks a little coy as he settles down on his front-room sofa, stepping over an unfinished 1,000-piece jigsaw. “It was partly down to me being quite tired and starting to get antsy.”
It has been quite a few days for the normally mild-mannered and longstanding chief executive of Republic, the country’s leading anti-monarchist organisation, a somewhat lonesome voice since it was formed in 1983.
Despite the car-crash quality of Prince Harry’s sulk from a middle-status row behind Princess Anne’s feathered hat and the introduction to the coronation of that dress by Penny Mordaunt, the sword-wielding leader of the Commons, the standout story of the crowning of King Charles III on Saturday continues to be the arrest, hours before the event at Westminster Abbey, of Smith and the five other key organisers of the main Republican protest.
Their revolutionary cause might not wholly shared by the British public, yet a sense of offending the British sense of fair play has evidently been widely felt in the wake of the arrests, with former chief constables among those voicing their unease. The Met police commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, described them as “unfortunate” on Tuesday.
Smith and the others were arrested for conspiracy to cause a public nuisance but were all released without charge. On Monday evening a Met chief inspector, sergeant and police constable arrived on the doorstep of Smith’s terraced home to give him back his phone. “The chief inspector looked quite unsure of himself,” Smith says. “He did apologise. I don’t think he was supposed to.”
Of course, it has in many ways been a public relations triumph. The weekend earned them an extra £50,000 in income and multiple offers of free counsel for a legal action that Smith vows he is now going to take against the police for unlawful arrest and imprisonment. But for a comparatively little-known organisation, the value of the wall-to-wall coverage to their arguments and the plucky battle against the heavy hands of the boys in blue cannot be overstated.
Smith can see the value of all that now, he says. A friend of a friend spotted him on the TV news in Mexico. “If they were trying to diminish our publicity in order to enhance theirs, it massively backfired, in a spectacular way,” he says. And yet, he appears genuinely troubled as he details for the first time the full extent of the conversations and agreements he had with a senior officer in charge of policing the coronation, Supt Martin Kirby.
There is a photograph taken of Smith immediately after his arrest. He is sitting on the ground, his head in his hands. “I actually genuinely think I was in shock, to some extent. I felt a bit unwell in the morning when I got [to the police station].”
The first meeting with Kirby, at Lambeth police station, had been as long ago as 8 February, he says, where he was introduced to a young police constable who would be his liaison officer for the next three months, during which Republic shared all their plans. “I had never had any doubts and still don’t doubt her honesty and sincerity,” Smith says.
At that first meeting the Republic delegation stated their intention to hold a “static protest” at one point and smaller ones further down the procession. “We told them, they said: ‘There’s no problem with any of this. No, that’s perfectly lawful.’
“They said: ‘You seem quite concerned about this, but really if you turn up and protest peacefully, there’s no reason why there should be any problem.”
Further details were shared by email and in phone calls with the police over the plans to take amplifiers to allow people to hear speeches from the protest, and some megaphones. Again, no concerns were raised. A second meeting with Kirby was held on 26 April. A map was provided to Kirby of where Republic would hold their protest. “They said: ‘Yeah, absolutely fine. The only restriction on amplification is Parliament Square, and sort of slightly up.” Smith informed them they were ordering 600 placards and they were asked what they would say. There were some follow-up calls, but Smith was left with no concerns.
At around 6am on the morning of the coronation, Smith and his colleagues brought down the amplifiers and megaphones from their Premier Inn hotel on St Martin’s Lane to Trafalgar Square. Then they returned to outside the hotel to unload a large rental van full of placards. “I managed to get one of those bundles out on to the tailgate and I turn around and these police officers come in, three or four of them, but then all of a sudden all the others come out of a van, wanting to know what we were doing.”
Smith was ushered away from the van. It was about 6.40am. “I said: ‘We have been talking to senior officers.’ And he said: ‘Who?’ And I said: ‘Mr Kirby’, and he clearly recognised that and seemed a bit disappointed. And then I went to phone the liaison officer. And he said: ‘I’m now detaining you,’ and I went: ‘I’m just gonna stay on the phone.’ He just said: ‘What are you doing? I’m detaining you.’ And he just grabbed my wrist and took my phone off me.”
Plastic packs were also found in the van containing 10 adjustable luggage straps, the type to keep bulging suitcases together, but which Smith was going to use to hold the placards on to trolleys as they were pushed down to Trafalgar Square. He was arrested for possession of lock-on devices and then all six of his group were put in a police van and taken to Walworth police station, in south London.
Smith, who had never been arrested before, was put in a cell measuring 12ft by 8ft. He felt conned, upset. Around midday, the detective looked in. “He said: ‘You’re making the news around the world.’ You know, I immediately felt more bullish although it was sort of 11 hours before I got out.”
Smith gave a statement denying the allegations in his interview and declined to answer further questions. At sometime after 10pm, once the TV cameras outside had left after the end of the evening bulletins, the Republic detainees were released. Smith has rarely been out of the media since. He is convinced the arrests were a premeditated attempt to kill the protests. The amplifiers and megaphones had also been seized from the protest spot while he was in his cell, along with the £12,000 worth of placards. Smith wants answers. But, while there may be moments of exasperation, as a jigsaw fan and campaigner for the overthrow of the British royal family, he has learned to be patient.
• This article was amended on 10 May 2023 in two respects: to correct the location of Walworth police station and to change a picture caption. An earlier version of the picture caption referred to Smith being “detained at His Majesty’s pleasure”. To clarify: he was held by the Met police.
