[…] Brigade’ was claiming responsibility for setting fire to a magistrate’s court in Epping. The Angry Brigade? That ‘Angry Brigade’? In May the Daily Mail ran a s tory about a fictitious ‘Gay Rights Action Movement’ which was threatening members of the House of Lords. (reported in Tribune 13 May 1988) But the most interesting, […]
[…] and was about to join the World Bank before he joined Brown. Sue Nye, Gordon Brown’s personal assistant, lives with Gavyn Davies, chief economist with the preda tory American bankers, Goldman Sachs. And then there’s Peter Mandelson. Via the United Nations Association, of all obscure vehicles, by the end of his final year at […]
[…] in part in the analysis in Lobster 11 and Smear!, Larkin correctly identifies the anti-communist, anti-subversion alliance formed by elements within Whitehall and a section of the Tory Party but oversimplifies it and makes many errors of detail. For example, on p.182 he writes of the ‘right wing of the British establishment (Airey Neave, […]
[…] and at the Eye he nursed an unrequited passion for Patrick Marnham.”(5) The first indication that the Eye may have been used appeared in the official his tory of the Eye written by Marnham. He wrote that “(Wilson’s) … return as Prime Minister in March 1974 was followed by a barrage of anonymous information […]
[…] the figures were: 1978 -72 1987 -164 This doubling over the period of the Thatcher years is very interesting. For while the South and Midlands has voted Tory, Scotland has been moving leftwards throughout the Thatcher period – the Tories now have only slightly more than 10% of the Parliamentary seats in Scotland. And […]
[…] Routledge. ‘This is not the same thing.’ Of course I asked the wrong question. What I should have asked was: does Gordon Brown understand British economic his tory? Or: does he understand economic politics? In any case, I would have been asking a question to which I knew the answer. Brown knows little of […]
[…] sharp pen-pictures of the politicians who have dominated the period. The author is one of the first historians to acknowledge the parapolitical dimension in modern British his tory, from the formation of the Special Branch to the construction of the new MI6 headquarters over a century later. This is allied to a perception that […]
[…] that respect’ (May 5th, 1993). It seems reasonable, ten years on, to add a footnote for the historians and, for others, a bit of analysis. The s tory is that Simon Haskel (later Lord Haskel), then Chair of the Labour Finance & Industry Group (LFIG), asked me to help out Geoff Mulgan. I had […]
[…] them and press reports of the speeches Neave made with Wallace’s material were shown on Channel 4 News. Despite being unable to find holes in his s tory some journalists remain suspicious of him. They accuse him of being ‘too professional’, or ‘too pat’, ‘too well rehearsed’ and so on. What they seem to […]
Edward Pearce London: Little, Brown, 2002, £25, h/b. Compared to the present crop of media-trained, PR-conscious, line-following, careerist pigmies who comprise the current Labour Cabinet, Denis Healey looks like a giant from a golden age. Before his well known roles as Minister of Defence and Chancellor of the Exchequer (during the Tory-induced inflation of […]
