[…] was quickly moved to one side. Holroyd notes that Stalker’s downfall came after he and Colin Wallace had sent their file of allegations and evidence to Mrs Thatcher in 1984. After which ‘two events took place: the first was the Government’s robust attempt to stop Spycatcher; the second was the attack on the integrity […]
[…] per cent of the UK GDP. It fell back from this level over the subsequent twenty years, but its share still remained over 30 per cent. The Thatcher years saw a much more rapid decline, as large parts of British industry closed down while the financial and service sectors expanded. This process slowed down, […]
[…] as being a ‘link with the foreign office’, he was trusted by the Foreign Office mandarins even more than security overlord Sir Maurice Oldfield, appointed by Mrs Thatcher in 1979. The appointment in 1980 of Sir Brooks Richard, an ex-diplomat, as Security Co-ordinator in Northern Ireland, was seen as giving the Foreign Office ‘game […]
[…] of the Atlantic the professional diplomats and the rational core of the intelligence community are slowly throwing off some of the vile nonsense perpetrated in the Reagan-Bush- Thatcher years? The release of various official US documents which could easily have been withheld on national security grounds – eg on the CIA’s role in Guatemala […]
The debate about whether the British should have a military presence East of Suez seemed to have been settled under the Wilson-Callaghan Government in the 1960s and 1970s. The process of withdrawal started with the independence of India and Pakistan (widely celebrated in the UK media recently on its sixtieth anniversary), was confirmed by the […]
[…] and journalists. Those who read them could keep in mind a throwaway comment (1997) by Sir Percy Cradock, Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee under Prime Ministers Thatcher and Major: ‘The bulk of the records of its outposts, principally JIC (Germany), JIC (Middle East) and JIC (Far East) have disappeared.’ (24) That they have […]
Christopher Harvie Hamish Hamilton, London, 1994 This is nominally the book of the Channel 4 TV series on NSO. TV is an entertainment medium, almost wholly useless for conveying detail or arguments. (An hour’s documentary viewing covers what you might read in ten minutes – or less.) So the TV series was interesting in small … Read more
[PDF file]: […] November 1981. 12 ‘Social Democratic Alliance statement,’ The Times, 29 September 1975. 13 Robin Ramsay and Stephen Dorril, Lobster 11 (1986), ‘Wilson, MI5 and the Rise of Thatcher: Covert Operations in British Politics 19741978,’ appendix 6: ‘Examples of political psy ops targets 1973/4 – non Army origin’. 14 ‘New Marxism charge for privileges body’, […]
[PDF file]: […] Her ideological mentor, Sir Keith Joseph, commented in 1976 that ‘the pursuit of income inequality will turn this country into a totalitarian slum’. During the 1979 election Thatcher told BBC reporter Michael Cockerell, ‘I can’t bear Britain in decline, I just can’t’.18 Like the coup plotters, the Thatcher governments were determined to reverse a […]
[PDF file]: […] Atkinson and Elliot’s Going South, in Lobster 65,1 Simon Matthews offered a kind of alternative history of British history in the 1970s and 80s, in which Mrs Thatcher did not win the general election of 1979. Michael Morton contacted me to let me know such speculation had already been done by Andrew Marr in […]
