[…] heroes. This changed in the 1980s when the SAS found themselves enlisted as Thatcher’s Praetorian Guard, their exploits, both past and present, exploited as part of the Conservative Party’s ideological offensive against the post-1945 political and social settlement.’ (p. 3) He notes the ‘interesting cultural difference between Britain and the United States that there […]
[…] June 2000, he has been welcomed back into the ranks of the Pinay Circle and attended the June meeting of the Circle in Lisbon. Also present were Conservative MPs Michael Howard and Alan Duncan and Lord Cranbourne, leader of the Tories in the House of Lords. NATO and Kosovo The most surprising comments on […]
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
[…] Sutch. There was the Moyle affair in which a police report about Colin Moyle’s nocturnal activities on the streets of Wellington somehow got into the hands of Conservative leader Muldoon. There was the “Think tank’ affair, in which the newspaper Truth concocted a conspiracy fantasy in which Labour was going to nationalise all the […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
