[…] Healey become leader many commentators believe the SDP would never have been launched and the result of the 1983 election would have been different (a much lower Conservative majority). By staying on and adopting an easy-going and lacklustre stance, Callaghan gave credibility to the many demands for a radical change of direction. When he […]
[…] as he ends his period in office mired by the honours scandal. The reason that the Economist gave for backing his re-election, that he was the best conservative on offer was totally true; but even die-hard conservatives must have been shocked at his totally supine attitude to the Bush administration. He provided legitimacy to […]
Compromised Reporting Taking its cue from a powerful network of far-right radio commentators, the American press insists on noting only those financial scandals which don’t sully ultra- conservative politicians. Of either party. For example: Rush Limbaugh, who has become the Republican Party’s Goebbels, loudly applauded Clinton’s appointment of Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, an appalling […]
[…] of Labour MPs could effectively bring down the government. For some years past the arguments for a realignment had been taken seriously by a section of the Conservative Party who had been close to MacMillan. Since 1973, Reg Prentice had taken a lone path, one which would eventually take him out of the Labour […]
Votescam (again) Reading the papers and listening to the radio in the days immediately after Bush’s election victory brought home what a parallel universe we readers of magazines like Lobster are living in. Here we had an enormous election surprise: despite many of the pre-election polls in the last few days of the … Read more
[…] that the conspiracy theories of the subversive-hunters of the British right – Brian Crozier et al – had ‘captured’ a significant section of the leadership of the Conservative Party which had actually tried to use them to damage the elected government of the day. None of this is included in the Routledge biography of […]
Watergate revisited: Hougan’s ‘Secret Agenda’ Introduction No apologies for returning to Jim Hougan’s Secret Agenda. As Steve Dorril said in Lobster 8, this is a major event. This essay is in two parts. In the first I make some critical remarks about Secret Agenda’s central theses; In the second I speculate about other items on […]
[…] son, Nicholas, this always rankled: he ‘had seen little active combat, and this played on his mind’. His subsequent entry into the House of Commons as a Conservative MP owed considerably less to his war record than it did to his affairs with the wives of prominent Tories and the connections and contacts this […]
[…] English and this may explain what appear to be errors. The Pinay Circle is an informal group which meets twice a year in different locations. It includes conservative and anti-communist politicians, journalists, bankers etc., and occasional guests, all of whom originally gravitated around former French President Pinay. A meeting took place at the Madison […]
[…] a nuclear arms race, the Cold War was under way. It might therefore be supposed that Kennan was a supporter of the Vietnam War, of the neo- Conservative revolution in foreign policy which began with Reagan, and maybe even of the recent war against Iraq. In fact since 1950 his has been one of […]
