[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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, […]
[…] which he stated that he had been approached ten days before the hostage taking with a view to reporting the capture. Glover was approached by an unnamed Conservative MP with an interest in Africa, who suggested flying with him and a senior director of Lonrho to Unita’s headquarters at Jamba, Southern Angola, to preside […]
[…] 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 […]
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. (1 ) It’s a nice try, in a way, this … Read more
[…] the Labour Party and socialism. Hulton, who later joined the Common Cause Advisory Board, had earlier told his editor, ‘Kindly remember that I am not only a Conservative, I am loyal supporter of Mr Neville Chamberlain.’ (25) Hulton, like many right-wing Tories, may have supported corporatist aims in war-time, but never socialism. He was […]
[…] by the late Sir Fitzroy Maclean…… managing director, Christopher James…..Baroness Smith joins Sir Brian Cubbon, a former top civil servant, Lord Laing of Dunphail, Treasurer of the Conservative Party towards the end of the Thatcher period…Earl Jellicoe….Sir Peter Cazalet, director of the P and O Group, former BP Chairman…and Sir Peter Holmes, one-time managing […]
Ivan Molloy London: Pluto Press, 2001, £18.99/£55 In the 1980s the resurgent US military and neo-conservatives were in a bind: faced with a variety of challenges to the American economic empire, the enormous military power they possessed was constrained by PR considerations; American parents who didn’t want their children dying abroad (the so-called ‘Vietnam … Read more
