[…] a group of right-wing politicians’. (6) Enoch Powell denied any connection with the station, but its station manager admitted to The Observer that he was ‘basically a Conservative and had once stood unsuccessfully for election as a Conservative city councillor.'(7) There was some speculation that it was funded by the South African government, but […]
[…] to Beckett and Hencke, in the late 1980s Nigel Lawson could never understand why Tony Blair was a member of the Labour Party rather than of the Conservative Party. This question subsequently occurred to a growing number of Labour Party members and the answer they came up with saw tens of thousands of them […]
[…] International Red Cross campaign against landmines. What would normally have been a strictly humanitarian gesture was given a political dimension by the fact that John Major’s rapidly-deflating Conservative government had stalled repeatedly on banning landmines, whereas Labour was promising a foreign policy with ‘an ethical dimension’. Declassified US diplomatic cables record that ‘Government officials […]
[…] Liberation Army (INLA) soon claimed responsibility. The widespread shock which greeted his assassination was probably nowhere more clearly felt than by Mrs Thatcher, then leader of the Conservative opposition. Neave had masterminded Thatcher’s rise to power in the Conservative Party, organising her election as party leader. It was probably him who directed the ‘dirty […]
[…] pay to guarantee assured outcomes to his backers: active members, after all, can rock the boat carrying the big donor cheques which keep New Labour afloat. The Conservative party is no better placed and it is difficult to see how they would want to change the direction of foreign policy anyway. Whatever Hutton concludes, […]
Ex-British intelligence officer Richard Winch said KGB defectors regularly named 7 ‘MPs, trade union leaders and 1 former Conservative Cabinet Minister’ as KGB agents. (Daily Telegraph 24 and 27 September 1984) What, only 7? According to Frederick Forsyth’s ‘sources’ in the British labour movement there are 20. (See Times 31 August 1984). And doesn’t […]
Oliver Kamm London: The Social Affairs Unit, 2005, h/b, £13.99 Kamms’ Anti-totalitarianism was published in the same week and possibly on the same day as the Henry Jackson Society announced itself to the world. So this is a kind of manifesto for that group. ([4] ) It’s a nice try, in a way, this … Read more
[…] first: why did the story emerge now? The answer, I think, is to be found in the veiled complaints in the last year or so from the Conservative Party that Boothroyd, qua Speaker of the House of Commons, was prejudiced against them. The charge has no foundation as far as I am aware: it […]
[…] Hurd, now Minister for Northern Ireland. It would be interesting to know if this Round Table connection has anything to do with his promotion within the contemporary Conservative Party despite his role as Heath’s private secretary and apologist. A profile of Hurd in the Sunday Telegraph (16 September 1984) contains a good deal of […]
[…] made public.’ You can’t buy an endorsement better than that, thanks very much. And if ‘the Establishment’ was cross with ‘West’ it didn’t stop him becoming a Conservative MP; and under Margaret Thatcher, who hated dishers of dirt and secrets. So, for me, ‘West’ has always been a puzzle: a conservative (and Conservative) historian […]
