[…] arrival of Blair, is worth noting for the final three in which Kenneth O. Morgan on Wilson, editor Tiratsoo on the 1970s and Paul Hirst on the Thatcher period, firmly reject the conventional neo-liberal/Thatcherite redemption drama of slow descent through the sixties into the nightmare of the 70s and salvation under Mrs Thatcher. The […]
[…] the British political system, the City, the secret state and the Conservative Party, there is quite a lot of information available Inevitably, the chapters on the pre- Thatcher years are thinner than those since she came to power. One of the ironies of our time is that while Mrs T took office determined to […]
[…] confront the possibility that Argentine air superiority and Exocet missiles could mean the military defeat of the British task force and the rapid political extinction of the Thatcher government. The New Statesman has been able to confirm that a Polaris submarine was indeed deployed to this position. Details of the deployment are given in […]
[…] Murdoch three name checks; and John Rentoul of The Independent on Sunday managed ‘10 brief mentions’ in his big Blair book. Was it any different with Margaret Thatcher? ‘Hugo Young’s much-praised book on Margaret Thatcher, One of Us, reserves one minor, passing reference to Murdoch,’ writes Oborne. Will, the political chroniclers be more outspoken […]
[…] Dept. Head of Station 1959 FO 1960 Counsellor, Washington, Head of Station 1973 Chief of MI6 1977 Retired 1978 Fellow of All Souls, Oxford 1979 Recalled by Thatcher: Sec. and Int. Co-ordinator, Northern Ireland 1980 retired PERKINS, Col. Harold (Perks) Prague University Merchant Navy Officer (Master Mariner) Owner of a steel mill in Poland […]
[…] resign; he would not be prosecuted. This agreement was reached just before Pat and I received Zander’s first phone-call. But the Prime Minister was no gentleman. Mrs Thatcher had returned from holiday on the Tuesday and was informed about Ponting. She decided to renege on the agreement Ponting thought he had and nail him […]
[…] was the output of these disinformation programmes (a couple of examples are reprinted in this volume) that a tape recording in which the voices of Reagan and Thatcher had been edited together to apparently show them discussing a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union was attributed to the KGB. In the event the tape […]
BERR In a profile of John Hutton, the new Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, Hutton said that Labour ‘is the natural party of business’,(1) another benchmark (or, in Corinne Souza country, ‘rebranding’) in the shift from old to New Labour. For it was Harold Wilson’s boast that he had made Labour … Read more
[…] of unlawful activities by members of the Security Forces in Ulster in the early 1970s initiated an RUC and Garda inquiry, is currently in correspondence with Mrs Thatcher. He has pointed out to her that the Ulster Director of Public Prosecutions’ statement that “there was insufficient evidence to bring charges against anyone” is simply […]
[…] to identify his politics. Three years ago David Aaronovitch wrote about him. (14)Aaronovitch noted that Laughland is European Director of the European Foundation whose patron is Margaret Thatcher, and concluded by describing Laughland (and his associates) as ‘right-wing anti-state libertarians and isolationists, suspicious of any foreign entanglements’. Aaronovitch’s description above isn’t entirely inaccurate, though […]
