THE intense personal rivalries that had put the political police in permanent crisis mode throughout the 1880s did not continue unabated into the following decade. Robert Anderson and Edward Bradford remained comfortably secure and unchallenged as head of CID and Commissioner respectively. Lushington went on as Permanent Under-Secretary (retiring in 1895), while Henry Matthews briefly stayed on as Home Secretary until 1892 when he was replaced by the Liberal H. H. Asquith – a man who, much like the previous Liberal Home Secretary, Hugh Childers, had no great interest in matters of policing subversion.

Subversion meant something altogether different during the 1890s. Although dynamite outrages continued to occasionally disturb the peace of Irish cities (Dublin in particular), in Britain insurgent Fenianism was more of a theoretical concern – a reality illustrated by the fact that Irish Branch, reduced to a clerical section of the CID, was increasingly threatened with extinction. If its detectives were going to detect they had to act through the all-purpose Section D headed by Chief Inspector John Littlechild. Though still the ‘brilliant and distinguished’ head of the ‘political crime department’ as far as everyone was concerned, Littlechild was, unbeknownst to his superiors, thinking of taking his talents into the private sector. The political police apparatus – still grounded in gentlemen's agreements and shrouded in extra-legality – was once again ready for a strong-willed and opinionated administrator to bend it to his will.

The new perceived threat to national security was not a movement which aimed specifically at striking the British state, as Fenianism had professed to, but it was a movement nonetheless and it declared itself inveterately opposed to all states everywhere. In Britain it was overwhelmingly made up of exiled revolutionary socialists – or anarchists as some preferred to style themselves – who were opposed, on libertarian grounds, to the state-driven political revolution of Marx and his followers as well as to the gradualist reformism of non-Marxist socialists. They came from Western European countries like Italy, France or Spain where strikes and workers’ demonstrations, insofar as they were allowed at all, often ended in bloodshed thanks to heavy-handed interventions by police and the military.