[…] country’s most expensive PR firms.’ (The Journalist, November 2007). Declaration of Interests: I am a supporter of the Campaign for Press & Broadcasting Freedom which supports the BBC. See Independent on Sunday, 16 September 2007 See admission by former SIS Chief Sir Richard Dearlove of sympathy with what he called ‘initial use’ of rendition […]
[…] them up the Anglo-Americans assembled an ‘invasion fleet’ on the English east coast and launched 3215 fighter and bomber sorties against ‘invasion targets’.(3) On 17 August the BBC announced ‘the liberation of occupied countries has begun’. But the Germans did not believe any of it. Indeed they actually moved some divisions out of France […]
Introduction There are a couple of interesting chapters in Chapman Pincher’s recent The Truth About Dirty Tricks, (Sidgwick and Jackson, 1991), especially the one about Harold Wilson’s ‘spymaster’, the late George Wigg; but, despite the usual shower of interesting fragments, mostly it is junk. Pincher’s primary strategy is clear enough. During the mid 1970s bureaucratic […]
Tony Blair will be remembered not just for the slaughter in Iraq, and the subsequent collapse of Labour in Scotland in face of a resurgent SNP, but as the Labour leader who could have forged common links across Europe but chose to side with one of the continent’s most despised figures. Charles Clarke, one of […]
[…] study: Murphy’s Law……. Notes Robert Verkaik, ‘The Freedom of Information Act misused’, The Independent, 22 March 2007. The complete text can be read at . For a BBC version of the original ‘Israeli art students’ story from 2002 see . Or, rather, don’t see that URL for it evoked a 404 when I tried […]
[…] a peace agreement with Germany in 1941. Thomas’s theory was examined in a highly critical film by Dr Christopher Andrew of Corpus Christie College, Cambridge, for the BBC 2 history programme Timewatch in January. Andrew maintained that Hess was Hess after all and that he had probably committed suicide. The Thomas story was, Andrew […]
[…] Heathfield show no scramble by Deere and Hanbury. Again, base records disagree with the personal log books of pilots. In an interview with McRoberts for a 1984 BBC documentary, Al Deere talked about the scramble, by referring to his log book and suggesting the reason he failed to kill the 110 was that the […]
[…] movements were gathering strength everywhere, Omo was being sold all over the Caribbean, Africa and the African Middle East with the advertising strapline ‘Omo washes whitest…..’ 2 BBC 6 O’clock News, 3 October 2003. The high profile launch of the American doughnut chain contrasts with the non-existent one in many London suburbs of the […]
[…] perhaps the biggest obscenity of them all. Faced with the death of David Kelly he managed to turn the Hutton Inquiry into a witch hunt of the BBC. Blair’s legacy? Well, Tony saved the Tory Party from oblivion through his failure to deliver the socialist goods. He also enabled the BNP to appear radical […]
[…] Presumably this refers to the Economist’s Foreign Report, among whose editors were Brian Crozier and Robert Moss. ‘Crucial to the IRD’s success was its relationship with the BBC.’ (p. 29) What is wrong with Mayhew’s account is his ignorance of the way IRD developed long after his involvement with it; he remembers it simply […]
