[…] and on the Euro in the lead-up to the European elections. Crucially, senior staff at the BBC managed the news to such an extent that the Pro-Euro Conservative Party, which received just 1% of the popular vote, received infinitely more coverage than did my Party, which achieved 8% of the vote. Yet, when we […]
[…] the story has been subject to some ridicule by some sectors of the defence establishment. Tam Dalyell’s initial source, shortly after the Falklands War, was a senior Conservative back-bench MP with an interest in defence matters and close links with the Ministry of Defence, and who later held ministerial office. Tam later had it […]
A Hack’s Progress Phillip Knightley Jonathan Cape, 1997, £17.99 This is a highly enjoyable and very well written memoir by one of our senior investigative journalists. As a young-Aussie-leaves-home-and-sees-the-world tale this is nearly as entertaining as the celebrated Clive James version (and with fewer forced jokes). Any journalist’s memoirs are welcome: it’s always interesting to … Read more
[…] pro-nuclear, pro-EU and pro-destroying the public sector. The only significant difference is that the Cameroons are linked to a different cluster of corporate sponsors. The NuLab and Conservative parties’ use of PR is discussed but that isn’t the meat of those chapters. This is the best introduction to real power politics in this society […]
[…] We’ve got another MP who takes a serious interest in the British secret state. In the past we have had MPs who had been secret servants (mostly Conservative) and a few Labour MPs who took a temporary interest. Almost twenty years ago Ken Livingstone took a sustained interest until the researcher who was generating […]
[…] Brown’s economics advisor, and former SIS officer Baroness Ramsay.(9) Only in forelock-tugging Britain would a former intelligence officer be appointed to a (nominal) oversight committee. From the Conservative Party there is former Northern Ireland junior minister Michael Mates (Colonel, rtd.), and Tom King, former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and former Minister of […]
[…] the Labour Movement and his former allies, but in the words of his former wife Margaret, has sold his soul to the devil. Never mind, that ghastly conservative creep Blair tells us we should be proud of our MI6 boys and girls for they give us a cutting edge over the rest of the […]
[…] Observer had stood out against the British invasion of Suez in 1956, despite courting the scorn of the government and the loss of some of its more conservative readers and advertisers. And yet this newspaper which had thrived on scepticism was seduced into accepting unproven and extravagant claims; this flagship of the left was […]
[…] powers. The clandestine rearming of Germany, in which the Soviet Union was complicit, saw ‘Mother Russia’ repaid with the slaughter that accompanied Operation Barbarossa. Indeed the ‘ conservative revolutionary’ geopolitics that made possible such alliances belies Coogan’s thesis that the today’s left is immersed in the throes of similarly deadly malaise. For those who […]
Political debris continues to fall from the bombing of the Pan-Am flight 103 on 21 December 1988, which killed 270 people. Fallout from Lockerbie has begun to reveal one of the ugliest political corruptions of recent times. This Byzantine tale is further evidence of just how powerful and ruthless the American-led international security apparatus — … Read more
