[…] gave the main reasons (not including the original strategic ones): in the ensuing debate, Milner, Lloyd George, Smuts, and Barnes were all in favour. Bonar Law (bourgeois Conservative) was neutral and Curzon (aristocratic Conservative) was the only one to oppose it. The decision to publish was on October 31. After this debate, Balfour communicated […]
[…] another vicious attack on a Catholic. Campbell and Longstaff were both defended at their trials by Donald Findlay QC, Scottish Barrister, Dean of St Andrews University, leading Conservative, and who himself was caught on video giving a fine rendition of the Protestant anthem ‘The Sash’ at a post-match piss-up at Glasgow Rangers’ ground, Ibrox. […]
[…] up a large fund to enable ordinary citizens to sue newspapers; or introduced a Right of Reply Act. Etc etc. In the event they did nothing. The conservative nature of the British media became the cover story for their own conservative beliefs. A member of the Labour Party for tribal rather than political reasons, […]
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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] across to the States to absorb the meaning of the ‘special relationship’ at first hand. Put-down of the decade? Edward Du Cann, some time Chairman of the Conservative Party, Chairman of the Party’s 1922 Committee, and, until 1991, Chairman of Lonrho, published an autobiography in 1995, Two Lives (Image Publishing, Upton upon Severn, UK), […]
[…] that other material from my collection was used in a speech by Mr Neave at the Young Conservatives in Brighton on 6 August 1976 and in a Conservative Party paper about Northern Ireland issued in September that year. Furthermore, as Mr Neave’s other letters to me show, I continued to do work for him […]
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
[…] the Right are somehow less than human and undeserving of even basic human courtesies.’ This is certainly partly true. At worst, the left suspects that underneath the conservative is the fascist; at best, that a conservative philosophy is either rationalisation of self or class interest, or a delusion. But the mirror image is also […]
[…] 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 […]
