A Wapping mystery I noticed with some interest that Sunday Times editor, Andrew Neil, was described in the Guardian on May 27 as having been labour correspondent of the Economist in the 1970s. Was he, I thought, one of the correspondents recruited by MI5 in the big F branch expansion circa 1973-5? Did that explain […]
[…] reported to be the largest Tory Party grouping at Westminster, with over 80 MPs. The ‘New Right’ discovered by the media in the late 1970s (essentially after Thatcher came to power), is little more than an expression of the media’s complete lack of interest in the British Right prior to Mrs Thatcher. This ‘New […]
Mr Tony was a spook? Issue 7 of Larry O’Hara’s Note from the Borderland () includes a section from the Anne Machon and David Shayler book, Spies, Lies and Whistleblowers (reviewed in Lobster 49), which was apparently dropped by the publisher. The key section is this, from an unnamed MI5 officer: ‘Blair was recruited early […]
[…] left, and the CIA’s covert political actions. He had some input into the Social Democratic Alliance in the mid 1970s, the forerunner of the SDP, briefed Mrs Thatcher, while she was leader of the opposition on the ‘communist menace’, and began producing IRDtype briefings on the British left British Briefing. British Briefing was published […]
A secret service? In the Guardian of 12 June 2000 David Leigh had an important piece on the relationship between our secret servants and the media. At the core of this was his account of the revelation, via a libel suit in London, of an MI6 operation to plant disinformation in the Sunday Telegraph about […]
[…] is strongest, as one would expect, in those who have exercised power at the highest levels – among the Men in Suits. From Chamberlain through Heath and Thatcher, each deposed leader retained the support of the Party beyond Westminster. Tory supporters in their associations and clubs felt a great sense of loss and bereavement […]
Kevin Coogan is the author of the study of the American fascist Francis Parker Yockey, Dreamer of the Day, reviewed in Lobster 39. He sent me an essay primarily about the American far-right group the Defenders of the American Constitution. The essay, while fascinating, is too big (about 20 pages) for these columns. However within […]
Jane Kelsey, Pluto Press, London 1996, £14.99 Kelsey describes how a handful of bureaucrats in the New Zealand state, backed by some of the big New Zealand companies, seized control of economic policy in New Zealand and imposed on it a bizarre amalgam of the IMF restructuring programme traditionally imposed on the Third World, traditional […]
[…] Cambridge before serving in Germany and Vienna. He lists his hobbies as watching sport, gardening, beachcombing, and is 59 years old…MI5 Director is Sir John Lewis Jones…. Thatcher has a new spy chief at No.10. Air Vice-Marshall Basil Lock is Cabinet Security Adviser – known in Whitehall and Pall Mall clubs by the nickname […]
[…] overthrow him gives some insight into the murky world of mercenaries and their financial backers.(28) One well known name that keeps cropping up is that of Mark Thatcher, although, thanks to the efforts of his mother, he ‘never spent a day in jail, despite investing in an aircraft that the plotters intended to use […]
