[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[PDF file]: To the halls of Montezuma, from the shores of Tripoli: Donald Trump as ‘anti- Wilson’ Dr. T. P. Wilkinson A century ago, a Southern academic and racist emerged in Europe and the United States as a crusader to ‘make the world safe for democracy’.1 Woodrow Wilson had been elected president in 1913, a year […]
[…] 1973/4 MI5 was trawling through MPs’ private lives gathering dirt. But evidence of security agency-gathered material wrecking MPs careers is thin. There are some cases in the Wilson period of MPs who wanted to become Ministers having their careers blocked by bad references from MI5. But the MP who has done the most attacking […]
[…] intelligible. Wallace’s revelations illuminated the hysteria on the British right in the 1970s about the threat from the left and the belief of Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson that there was a disinformation campaign against him and his government. He was right: the hysteria and the campaign were largely the work of serving or […]
[…] to the South Atlantic To my knowledge since Suez in 1956 the British state has refused only twice to do what the Americans wanted. In 1965-66 Harold Wilson refused to send British troops to Vietnam, despite heavy pressure from President Johnson and threats to halt US support for sterling. Wilson refused for two reasons […]
[…] Winstanley) died in July. A long obituary in the Daily Telegraph of July 19 failed to mention Winstanley’s revelations about his knowledge of one of the anti-Harold Wilson plots of the 1960s, reported on p. 174 of the Dorril/Ramsay book Smear! Clive Derby-Lewis, briefly a South African Conservative MP, elected Honourary President of the […]
BERR In a profile of John Hutton, the new Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, Hutton said that Labour ‘is the natural party of business’,(1) another benchmark (or, in Corinne Souza country, ‘rebranding’) in the shift from old to New Labour. For it was Harold Wilson’s boast that he had made Labour […]
[…] War allegations also lay behind the highly publicised claims of the former officer Peter Wright that the Service had plotted to undermine the former Prime Minister Harold Wilson. A vigorous internal enquiry failed to produce any evidence to substantiate these claims, and Wright himself subsequently admitted that they were false.’ This is a nice […]
