Tom Bower London: Fourth Estate, 2001, £6.99 After tackling the Paperclip Conspiracy, Klaus Barbie, Nazi medical experiments, looted cash from holocaust victims in Swiss banks and various tycoons (Rowland, Maxwell, Fayed) the latest target for a thorough Tom Bower investigation is Sir Richard Branson, though this is a tale on a smaller scale than … Read more
[…] their first instinct was to resume the practice. And indeed sales did recommence – but not on a very grand scale. The anti-climax (from the perspective of Tory imperialists such as Julian Amery) has been ascribed by recent historians to an unwillingness to upset the Commonwealth, especially the newly independent African states. Heath certainly […]
[…] we were setting ourselves an agenda that would preoccupy us for the foreseeable future, and (b) that this agenda was nothing less than recent British political his tory. This issue contains some of that post-11 research: updates, fragments, bits we left out of No.11, plus a large chunk of material which I was turned […]
[…] matters — except Mrs Thatcher. The result is a fascinating account of how a tiny group of people, with a handful of elementary, core ideas, captured the Tory Party — and its attendant media. Much of the book is directly sourced to interviews with key individuals of the period, and even the bits attributed […]
[…] and now a freelance writer whose work appears widely. The purpose of the 1988 gathering – as of all the BAP functions — was summed up by Tory MP David Willetts, previously director of studies at the Centre for Policy Studies founded by Margaret Thatcher and Sir Keith Joseph in 1974. Willetts said: ‘The […]
[…] a tactic emerged ‘when several of us went to the Home Office weeks before the strike began’ (Sunday Times November 25) Met. police on picket duty used Tory Party clubs as temporary police stations. (letter in Leveller Supplement No 2, December 1984) (b) and public order Met. Police ‘exceeded their powers’ in arresting people […]
[…] appendix – containing five essays by occasional Lobster contributors Challen and Hughes. The Challen essays bring together a good deal of what is known about the post-war Tory Party and its links with the secret state – in this case, almost exclusively MI5 – and various disinformation and smear campaigns against Labour Party politicians […]
Contemporary British Fascism: The British National Party and the quest for legitimacy Nigel Copsey Palgrave/Macmillan 2004, £47.50, h/b The Radical Right in Britain Alan Sykes Palgrave/Macmillan, 2005, £16.99, p/b Modern British fascism has been poorly served by academic research, especially when it comes to coverage of the last two decades. These books attempt to … Read more
[…] Thatcher’s rise was managed by Airey Neave, whose ‘intelligence connections’ even she acknowledges in the first volume of her memoirs; and when she became leader of the Tory Party she was given tutorials by a group of retired spooks, which included Brian Crozier. Little wonder that she once told an interviewer that she’d read […]
En route to their crushing general election vic tory in 2001 the Prime Minister and his colleagues found time for a private working breakfast with some of the big movers and shakers in UK corporate capitalism – Glaxo Smith Kline, HSBC, Unilever, Tesco, Royal Bank of Scotland, Centrica and many others – ‘to reduce […]
