Last year the Guardian newspaper revealed that Private Eye ‘may have been used to smear Wilson’. The former editor, Richard Ingrams, told reporters: “Looking back on it, it’s obvious that the Eye could have been used by MI5, but it’s hard to be concrete.” Its hard to be concrete because nobody bothered to look […]
I: Wilson, Cromer and the City One anniversary which has come and gone this year without much comment is the attempted 1968 ‘coup’ orchestrated by Cecil King against the Labour government of Harold Wilson. The plot was provoked by collapse of confidence in Wilson in the media (led by King’s Daily Mirror), finance, industry […]
[…] communist control were made at the time, I have seen no evidence to support this view. The second occasion was during the 1966 seamen’s strike when Harold Wilson made his notorious comments in the House of Commons about the role of the CP in the strike, and actually named CP members said to be […]
[…] of the government’s handling of various incidents, interesting though they are; but for the picture it contains of the people of No. 10 Downing St. in the Wilson administrations of the 1970s and the light it throws on some of the central themes in the smear campaigns run against Wilson. We are talking about […]
[…] London has staged a comeback which would be the envy of any child movie star reaching maturity.’ – Professor Ira Scott, 1969(4) Edward Heath, who succeeded Harold Wilson as Prime Minister in 1970, is conventionally viewed as someone who began as ‘Selsdon Man’, a prototype of the later Thatcher Tory Party, then made his […]
HP source ‘The plot against Harold Wilson’, the drama-documentary broadcast on BBC 2 on 16 March, was a strange affair. It was really little more than a World in Action half hour from the late 1970s puffed-up, complete with redundant reconstruction of Wilson and Marcia Falkender meeting BBC journalists Penrose and Courtiour (Pencourt). Is […]
MI5 and the Wilson Plot The MI5 website (www.mi5.gov.uk) has a section called ‘myths and misunderstandings’, which features, among other things, ‘the Wilson Plot’. The paragraph it devotes to this episode is worth studying. It refers the reader to Spycatcher and Peter Wright’s allegation that ‘up to 30 members of the Service had plotted […]
[…] Maurice Oldfield who was to become a life-long friend. Cavendish makes great use later of the friends he met in intelligence work. (One of the alleged anti- Wilson MI5 conspirators, Harry Wharton, began his intelligence career in SIME). In the late 1940s Cavendish followed Oldfield into MI6 where he served in the counter-espionage and […]
Wilson: The Authorised Life of Lord Wilson of Rievaulx Philip Zeigler Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1993. As might be expected of an establishment man like Zeigler, he has some difficulty with the evidence of plotting against the Wilson governments. On p. 567 in a footnote to the brief discussion of the ‘plots’, Zeigler comments […]
[…] 1972, with the MRF, they were taking part in some of the first covert operations against the IRA. In Ambush, however, the authors claim that when Harold Wilson dispatched SAS soldiers to South Armagh in 1976, they ‘had never been deployed against terrorists at home’. To explain covert operations which occurred before 1976 the […]
