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 […]
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 […]
[…] 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 […]
Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real Role in the World Mark Curtis London: Vintage, 2003; p/b, £7.99 This latest analysis of British foreign policy by Mark Curtis could not be better timed. With more than a million Britons on the streets of London protesting against the Iraq war earlier this year there is a potentially large […]
IRD, home and away The creation of the Information Policy unit in HQ Northern Ireland in 1971 may have been the last occasion on which the classic IRD psy-war operation was created. Evidence of previous examples is hard to find, but skimming through Charles Foley’s Legacy of Strife: Cyprus from rebellion to civil war (Penguin, […]
[…] 1987, notably through the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, the claim being that the operations against the Wilson government were designed to ‘stabilise’ not destabilise it; and by BBC TV producer Peter Taylor, who argued (Sunday Telegraph (21 January 1990) that ‘there was a conspiracy to remove from Northern Ireland but the purpose I believe […]
[…] London’s gay scene. There are also more detailed accounts of a number of the episodes in Pencourt, including the moves made by the higher management at the BBC to shut them up; the Peter Bessell version of events, the perambulations of Norman Scott – and the actual conspiracy to murder him. But in ignoring […]
[…] Oldfield who was by then ‘C’, to speak up in its defence. But latterly he confessed himself defeated by the left-wing clique who had a grip on BBC and independent television networks, and who deliberately and effectively distorted programmes on security matters. The exceptions were Robin Day and the ITN editors who always gave […]
[…] current situation it is possible that the FCO are entirely happy to have Murray’s comments made available but are unable to admit so publicly. Reported on the BBC News Website of 3 August 2006. . See Richard Beeston and Tom Baldwin, ‘New blow for Blair over his policy on Lebanon’, The Times 2 September […]
[…] or the Bank of England. Cromer backed down in a hurry. On 3 January 1997 the Guardian carried a long, splendidly condescending letter from John Cole, erstwhile BBC political editor, pointing out that this Wilson-Cromer conflict was not news, that it had been described in great detail in, for example, Wilson’s own account of […]
