[…] deep into the heart of the Blair project and into the history of its precursors. Follow Draper, the Labour student initially offered work by Agriculture Minister Nick Brown and then taken up by Trade and Industry Secretary Peter Mandelson, and we get a few insights into New Labour of the ‘stuffing my bank account […]
[…] the two men became friends. (4) A month later the leader of the Labour Party, John Smith, died, and Blair won the leadership election contest with Gordon Brown – in some accounts with financial assistance from Levy. (5) All accounts are agreed that Michael Levy then set about raising money – the figure of […]
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 […]
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 […]
[…] America, along with the central economic and cultural concepts which are in our politicians’ heads: no bigger fans of all things American have there been than messieurs Brown and Blair following in the footsteps of Margaret Thatcher.(3) Since Suez in 1956 no UK government has ever tried to find out how much real independence […]
