Into the Dark Johnston Brown Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2006, £22.99, h/b When Fred Holroyd first made his disclosures regarding the activities of SAS Captain Robert Nairac to Duncan Campbell of The New Statesman in 1984, they were credible because Holroyd was a loyal Army Intelligence Captain with absolutely no sympathies for IRA terrorism. … Read more
[…] Club – A Danger to Democracy (discussed below) with the late John Paul, at that time Chair of the Anti-Common Market League and a substantial figure in Tory Party circles. Butler’s protege, Don Martin, came to the U.K. in 1970, if the Monday Club etc version is to be believed, essentially as a replacement […]
[…] an enormous variety of groups on the neo-fascist British Right. Who could achieve this kind of penetration? Only MI5 could, I thought. Then I re-read the s tory of the ‘Gable memo’ in the New Statesman — and that was the case closed as far as I was concerned. Thus it was that I […]
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 the … Read more
[…] 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
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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
