[…] how it was wrecked by the City’s lending explosion in 1972/3 – and on the protracted struggle between Lonrho, the Fayed brothers and various factions of the Tory Party over the ownership of Harrods. It also contains one of the best extended put-downs in recent years. This exquisite hatchet-job is on fellow Lonrho board […]
[…] report that Cox had attended the 2001 Bilderberg meeting. Off target Back in the 1970s the Army’s psy-ops unit in Northern Ireland once put out a s tory claiming that the IRA had hired American Vietnam vets to do its killing for them. (‘Paddy’ couldn’t really shoot straight was the subtext.) A new variation […]
An Essay on a Militant and Technological Nation David Edgerton Macmillan, London, 1991, £14.99. Short (130 pages), elegant assault on the thesis of ‘the declinist’ tendency in British history, now associated chiefly with Corelli Barnet and Martin Weiner, who have argued that science and technology failed to penetrate British (but essentially English) culture. By looking … Read more
[…] if their countries had a bad record, or if the individuals concerned were training for paramilitary or security branch work. This system was overturned by the incoming Tory administration. In April 1984, Douglas Hurd, then a Minister of State at the Home Office, listed the countries whose police personnel had been trained in the […]
[…] them becoming ex-Labour Party members. More important, of course was not why Blair himself was a member of the Labour Party but how someone so obviously a Tory was able to become party leader and moreover transform Labour into a centre right party, into another, indeed, into the main British conservative party. The ‘New’ […]
[…] And a new blockbuster is on the way from Anthony Summers, he of File on the Czar and Conspiracy fame. Friends in High Places: the Bechtel S tory by McCartney. (See Mother Jones, June 1984) for Bechtel’s relevance to the Reagan regime, and earlier periods in the Middle East … and Citizen Hughes: how […]
In January 1994, three months before John Smith’s death, the then shadow Home Secretary Tony Blair, with wife Cherie Booth, went on a trip to Israel at the Israeli government’s expense – a trip, incidentally, neither the Sopel nor Rentoul biographies of Blair mentioned. (1) Blair had always been sympathetic to Israel, had shared chambers … Read more
[…] himself said that rather than disband, the IRA could reconstitute itself as a ‘commemorative association’. This outrageous capitulation to IRA terrorism, on the part of a ‘green Tory’ Prime Minister, was duly reported on the RTE, BBC Northern Ireland and Channel 4 News programmes on the same day. Most grotesque, was his claim that […]
Blair and Gladstone Tony Blair’s Labour Party conference speech this year galvanised the delegates who were especially moved by his suggestions that Britain could play the role of an international troubleshooter, bringing liberal values, civilisation and the benefits of its skills in conflict resolution to troubled parts of the world. There were however some more … Read more
[…] question? The same process is at work when it comes to photographs. Consider three relatively famous photographs. In 1964 the Daily Mirror published a photograph of the Tory peer Lord Boothby sitting near the gangster Ronnie Kray. The German magazine Stern used the photograph with a caption that noted that both men were homosexuals. […]
