J. F. C. Fuller

**John Frederick Charles** **Fuller** was a senior British Army officer, military historian, strategist, and most importantly, the current prime minister of the United Kingdom. A military theorist and prolific author, Fuller became widely known to the public and rose through the ranks of the British military in the 20s. Radicalized by the British defeat in the Cairo War, Fuller became a founding member of the British Populist Party, alongside others like Oswald Mosley. Despite his initial popularity in the 1931 election, Fuller saw the support for the party drop drastically, but still retained enough support in the 1935 election. In the wake of the collapse of India alongside growing labor unrest, many aren't quite sure of the success of the Party, and of Fuller's ability to serve a possible third term.

## Early life

Fuller was born in Chichester, West Sussex, the son of an Anglican clergyman. After moving to Lausanne with his parents as a boy, he returned to England at the age of 11 without them; three years later, at the age of 14, he began attending Malvern College and, later trained for an army career at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, from 1897 to 1898.

## Career

Fuller was commissioned into the 1st Battalion of the Oxfordshire Light Infantry (the old 43rd Foot), and served in South Africa from 1899 to 1902. In the spring of 1904 Fuller was sent with his unit to India, where he contracted typhoid fever in autumn of 1905; he returned to England the next year on sick-leave, where he met a woman he married in December 1906. Instead of returning to India, he was reassigned to Volunteer units in England, serving as adjutant to the 2nd South Middlesex Volunteers (amalgamated into the Kensingtons during the Haldane Reforms) and helping to form the new 10th Middlesex. Fuller later claimed that his position with the 10th Middlesex inspired him to study soldiering seriously. In 1913, he was accepted into the Staff College, Camberley, starting work there in January 1914.

During the Great War, Fuller was a staff officer with the Home Forces and with VII Corps in France, and from 1916 in the Headquarters of the Machine-Gun Corps' Heavy Branch which was later to become the Tank Corps. He helped plan the tank attack at the 20 November 1917 Battle of Cambrai and the tank operations for the Autumn offensives of 1918. His Plan 1919 for a fully mechanised offensive against the German army was never implemented. After 1918 he held various leading positions, notably as a commander of an experimental brigade at Aldershot.

### Cairo War

During the early days of the Cairo War after the Egyptian capital was occupied by rebel forces, Fuller was deployed in Ismailia and lead a small battalion of tank units. Fuller caught the eyes of the public after leading the Battles of Tanta and Rosetta, some of the only London victories in Egypt. Despite his early successes, the fervor and tenacity of the Egyptian rebellion, coupled with revolutions in Israel, Syria and Yemen forced Fuller to evacuate Ismailia for Port Said before being taken to Malta, being one of the only men to flee before the Suez Canal was put on siege. Fuller, for his part, did not want to leave the Suez Canal and frequently argued with his superiors in the days before leaving. With the Italian declaration of war, Fuller was once again pulled out of Malta, where he was reassigned to Ireland.

Fuller was disappointed upon entering Northern Ireland, having very little men or equipment to make use of. Complaining of the current situation in a telegraph to London sent in March of 1920, he described himself and his men as "sitting ducks to the Irish snipers". In spite of this, Fuller put up noticeable resistance against Irish attacks to the north. With civilian volunteers, he successfully fended off nationalist encroaches even as Dublin finally fell in May that same year.

## Entry into politics

Fuller became quite radicalized in the aftermath of the Cairo War and the continual unrest the British Empire faced. John in the years following the end of the war was seen as a national hero and revered by most within the UK. During the 1922 general election, Fuller ran within the Conservative Party and won a seat in parliament. It was in politics where he met Oswald Mosley, and from then on both men became good friends of one and another. Inspired by Mosley "crossing the floor" in 1920, Fuller joined him one year later, and both men became independents. Little changed for the men, and Fuller continued his run in Parliament for the next several years.

In 1924, fully dissatisfied with the political and economic fallout of the British Financial Crisis, Fuller, Mosley and over a dozen MPs created the New Party of the United Kingdom. At first, the New Party's official stances were vague, but the most well known of the party's policies and beliefs was that of authoritarian-like intervention in the economy, seeing both the liberal and conservative parties to have failed in their initiatives of economic reform.

## Head of the United Kingdom & retirement

Over the next seven years, the New Party's populist rhetoric attracted many benefactors and voters, from the working class to the wealthy and the nobility. Combined with Fuller's charisma and his positive reputation among the people, the New Party, in a coalition with many smaller parties and independents, won a slim majority, both for the Prime Minister and in the House, finally breaking the Liberal and Conservative Party strongholds within the government.

Fuller's reign as prime minister proved to be difficult from the start, as just one month after the election the Indian Civil War broke out. Fuller's policies in the war were controversial, and his decisions lead to the deaths of hundreds of British soldiers, most prominently in the Battle of Kota, where his insistence against surrendering to Indian forces lead to their slaughter. These events lead to Fuller's first major plummet of national popularity, but with the help of Mosley he was able to recover, even if he still was not as popular as before. Being forced to leave India entirely, Fuller in 1934 kickstarted the so-called "National Recovery Plan", aimed at increased government intervention in the economy to decrease unemployment and keep inflation at a minimum.

Crucially, Fuller transformed British foreign policy at the end of the civil war in India alongside the later Canadian declaration of “full autonomy” in the British Empire. He recognized that the Empire was small and weak, and in order to save the Party's slim majority, focused more on what he called "Red Containment", that instead of keeping or fighting directly for the British Empire, he sought out to increase the influence of London on the European continent especially as the Red Scare worried many on the Isles after the French Civil War. This, alongside the surprising success of the National Recovery Plan and his successful gamble intervening in France lead to Fuller's reelection in 1935. While his reign as Prime Minister has stabilized, many are still unwilling to forget his humiliating defeats in India, and opposition to the New Party has been increasingly militarized as it has become increasingly authoritarian in recent months.