[…] in explaining Soviet policy and thinking just at the point when the Soviet Union was cracking up, thus smoothing to way for the Gorbachev relationship first with Thatcher and then with the Americans. ‘Decisive’ – maybe not; but not insignificant. The cry that intelligence services are useless is a variation on the more specific […]
[…] kind of minor explosion of interest in parapolitics in the United States. And not before time. The interest in conspiracies is simply reality breaking through. The Reagan- Thatcher years saw unprecedented expansions of unregulated intelligence and military agencies, and breathtaking multi-billion rip-offs (most obviously, in the U.S., the S and L scam; in the […]
[…] an endorsement better than that, thanks very much. And if ‘the Establishment’ was cross with ‘West’ it didn’t stop him becoming a Conservative MP; and under Margaret Thatcher, who hated dishers of dirt and secrets. So, for me, ‘West’ has always been a puzzle: a conservative (and Conservative) historian of spookery with ambiguous relations […]
[…] big business, increasingly at odds with the left-wing of his party. He is pro MX, pro Israel, pro uranium mining and a promoter of economic policies which Thatcher would endorse. He is also immensely popular, but recently support has begun to slide and the election victory wasn’t as decisive as he wanted. “He has […]
[…] over the next decade. The Tory Party would have to reject not the free market side (which Gordon Brown has absorbed) but the a-social side of the Thatcher Revolution to become electable – and its activists will not allow this to happen. From this point of view, Europe is a sideshow. Clearly, Tory free-thinkers […]
[…] this fuss about the police woman who was shot outside the Libyan embassy? We should not shed any tears over the death of an agent of the Thatcher regime.’ (50) His views weren’t universally shared, and by October 1985 an Organisers’ Bulletin was urging members to ‘make an effort to be pleasant to PCs […]
W. D. Rubinstein (Second edition, revised and updated) London: Social Affairs Unit, 2006, pp., £20 Did you know that, on his death in 2001, former Beatle, George Harrison, left the second largest fortune in the UK (£98,916,000)? If you like facts like this, you will enjoy this book, and you will be in good … Read more
[…] lost interest in the subject, and though Neil Kinnock had shown a flicker of interest in the Peter Wright allegations, he had run for cover when Mrs. Thatcher challenged his patriotism. His successor, John Smith, was a life-long friend of the SIS officer, now Baroness Ramsay, and Donald Dewar, I am informed, had a […]
[…] to protect the security of the state as the political comfort of ministers.’ (Times 27 August) Story, already printed, due for Times (of 23 August) claiming Mrs Thatcher present at Naval HQ when Belgrano was sunk, was withdrawn at last minute by editor, apparently after conversation with Rupert Murdoch. (Guardian 4 October) Book about […]
[…] with, she tells us, through her ‘employment law work’. This is a complete travesty. The strike was deliberately provoked by Murdoch, with the full support of the Thatcher government, in order to deny the workers their redundancy payments. She must have known this at the time through, as she puts it, her ‘employment law […]
