[PDF file]: Wilson, MI5 and the rise of Thatcher Covert operations in British politics 1974-1978 Robin Ramsay and Stephen Dorril Introduction: Kevin McNamara MP Any person who lived through the anguished days from November 1973 until Wilson’s resignation will recall the high level of anticipation, expectation, surprise and wonder about what would be the next […]
[…] – Heath, Van Straubenzee, St. John Stevas, Thorpe Child prostitution: William McGrath, Van Straubenzee, Clifford Smyth Wilson’s affair with Marcia Williams (Secretary) in Moscow Finance: Maudling, Thorpe, Wilson, Short etc. Fianna Fail: Charles Haughey – IRA/drugs link. Bill Fuller ‘Old (illegible) Hotel’ Norman Frank Butler/Sammy Smyth UDA Jackie Watson: Billy Hull LAW funds Paisley: […]
[…] increased arms expenditure – overseas expenditure paid for by domestic cuts – proposed by Labour Chancellor Gaitskell which led to the resignation of Aneurin Bevan and Harold Wilson from the government in 1951. The Tories return The arrival of the Conservative Government in 1951 saw the return of interest rates – that is, putting […]
[…] the future.’ Mountbatten later recollected that ‘…King was a man filled with folie de grandeur…I said, “This is rank treason. Out.” ‘ King continued to rail against Wilson through the columns of the Daily Mirror but without support from other public figures he became a figure of fun.(2) Although his own ‘coup’ failed, King […]
What was Henry Brandon? One of the most interesting secondary sources covering the struggles of the British Labour government under Harold Wilson to prevent the devaluation of sterling between 1964-66 is Henry Brandon’s In the Red, published by Andre Deutsch in 1966. It is a remarkably well-informed text and its reliability is underlined by […]
Geoffrey Goodman London: Pluto Press, 2003 hb £18.99 As a conventional political memoir, this is quite an interesting read. The big figures march by: Bevan, Wilson, Callaghan, Healey, Robert Maxwell; and there are interesting stories about all of them. The best anecdote has Denis Healey, as Chancellor in the House of Commons in […]
[…] between 1970 and 1974, it opposed membership. In an attempt to rally the public and the Labour Party behind continued membership, the 1974 Labour Government under Harold Wilson pledged to renegotiate the terms of entry and consult on the outcome through a general election or a consultative referendum. Although there was significant opposition to […]
[…] the Limitation of Secret Police Powers which produced two reports on the activities of MI5. To the probable distress of the Security Services, in May 1976 Harold Wilson made Mayne a member of a committee to ‘review the rules governing the active participation by civil servants in national and local political activities’. (Attlee had […]
[…] of Sinn Fein. Churchill took great delight in hearing about these activities first-hand, much to the disgust of the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Henry Wilson. If this had become public knowledge at the time it would probably have ruined him, but historians take a much more generous view of such minor […]
[…] without recourse to conspiracy theory. The Group was formed out of the merger of a small group of business interests who had supported the private offices of Wilson and Callaghan with a much broader group of pro-Labour Keynesian academics and economists the sort who were thoroughly dished by Geoffrey Howe’s determination to push […]
