Ben Pimlott Harper Collins, London 1992, £20 At one level, this deserves the plaudits it has received. It is a belting good read, such a good read, in fact, that I had got as far as 1967 before I realized that there was no mention of Lord Cromer, the Governor of the Bank of England […]
BAP The Pocket Oxford Dictionary defines a bap as a ‘large soft bread roll’. How soft or hard the British American Project for the Successor Generation is — only time will tell. But it is certainly proving rather indigestible to the British media. By any standards a major story, Tom Easton’s piece on BAP (in […]
Our Secret Servants: the Shayler affair Things had been going rather well for the British security and intelligence services in the 1990s. Under pressure from the Wright-Wallace-Massiter revelations of the 80s, they had conceded a notional form of parliamentary accountability with the creation of the Intelligence and Security Committee. With members who either knew nothing […]
Cherie Blair: Speaking for Myself Cherie Blair London: Little, Brown, 2008, h/b, £18.99 The relentless harrying of Neil Kinnock by the Murdoch press at the time of the 1992 general election outraged Labour Party people, among them Cherie Blair. This was the general election when The Sun proudly boasted that it was its […]
[…] secondary bond market, for more than 40 per cent of global derivatives’ means that much of the chaos of the past year originated in London, while Gordon Brown and Ed Balls were in charge of the Treasury. Which makes Brown’s posturing as the man who will reform the financial world the more ridiculous. Credit […]
The SAS, MI6 and the War Whitehall Nearly Lost Nigel West Little Brown and Company, 1996, £16.99 There are two substantial essays in here, one about the SAS raid on the Argentine mainland which didn’t take place, and the other about the SIS operation to prevent the French delivering any more Exocets to the […]
‘You don’t investigate people for why they think but for what they do.’ – former Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti (1) Introduction If nothing else, the Iran-Contra scandal temporarily illuminated the extent to which ostensibly private organizations have been helping secretive elements within the American government — in this case the core of the executive branch’s … Read more
[…] the British secret state was, I presume, its financial support by Libya. It seems clear that contact with Libya is taken very seriously by our spooks. Ron Brown MP had visited Libya and he has now been discredited as a result of his affair with Nona Longden. Brown claimed some months ago in the […]
[…] the veterans of D-Day who then voted Labour in such large numbers in 1945? Lucas also prompts many thoughts along the way. Why, for example, does Gordon Brown spend so much time in the company of Rupert Murdoch’s Neocon American pal Irwin Stelzer? He also is not, as some reviewers have suggested, harsh on […]
[…] examines the US military’s heavy reliance on PMCs (Private Military Companies) to help with the provision of essential support services in Iraq. In the vanguard is Kellogg Brown and Root, which just happens to be a subsidiary of Dick Cheney’s old company, Halliburton. Particularly heartening is the final paragraph: ‘If conditions in Iraq continue […]
