[…] the way the party was changing under Harold Wilson. The trio had been at the core of the 69 pro-Market Labour MPs who had voted with the Conservative Government in 1971.(7) Bradley quotes Liddle’s future business partner, Taverne, as saying of that time: ‘We feared not only that the party would turn against the […]
[…] interest in whether fortunes are inherited or acquired in one generation, and his interest in ‘politics’ concerns only which parties the rich support. His approach is unquestioningly conservative. This edition is an update of the author’s now classic book from 1981 on the history of the super-rich in Britain. It coincided with the rise […]
[…] of invisible strings; their manipulation was an altogether subtler art. The ideal for the secret service marionette-masters was, after all, to use left-wing extremists to serve their conservative cause without any direct contact or collusion’. Some elements of his case he argues persuasively — for instance the possibility that with the 1974 arrest of […]
NB This issue of Lobster went to the printer in late May. At that stage no Iraqi ‘weapons of mass destruction’ had been found by the ‘coalition’ forces. Before the furore over the British government’s ‘dodgy dossier’ in February, in truth I hadn’t been really paying much too attention to the then impending assault on … Read more
[…] ‘Morningside Mata Haris’, Morningside is an upper-crust area in Edinburgh famous in Scotland, any way for having a distinctive accent, posh Edinburgh. Malcolm Rifkind, erstwhile Conservative Foreign Minister, is an example of it. Elma Dangerfield and the Duchess of Atholl don’t seem to have had much to do with Morningside and were […]
[…] book. ‘Unusual’ because Young, who is generally regarded as a racialist and political extremist, appears as a reasonable human being. Like Young, Cavendish was accepted as a Conservative candidate in the early seventies, though their politics were to the right of the party. Cavendish, in Diana Menuhin’s account, was “so British as to belong […]
[…] during the late 1970s. Once upon a time, the stories continued, the Communist Party invited him to join. But Ace turned them down ‘because they were too conservative.’ Ace was bright and articulate, in a gruff sort of way. He had no tolerance for the well-turned subtleties of talking heads and conventional wise men. […]
Tony Blair will be remembered not just for the slaughter in Iraq, and the subsequent collapse of Labour in Scotland in face of a resurgent SNP, but as the Labour leader who could have forged common links across Europe but chose to side with one of the continent’s most despised figures. Charles Clarke, one of … Read more
[…] Bernard McGourlay, was on a golf course when he had a conversation with Gerry Wareing, a friend of property developer, land speculator, and chairman of the Manchester Conservative Association, Kevin Taylor. Wareing had recently returned from a holiday in Spain on Taylor’s yacht, Diogenes. According to one account he mentioned the QSG and the […]
[…] that followed the collapse of communism in the 1980s.’ Notes 2 Here is Gordon Brown on 26 February 1992: ‘Let no one, absolutely no one on the Conservative benches, try to peddle the misleading statement that the Labour party is not committed to playing its full part within the workings of the ERM and […]
