[…] Cambridge before serving in Germany and Vienna. He lists his hobbies as watching sport, gardening, beachcombing, and is 59 years old…MI5 Director is Sir John Lewis Jones…. Thatcher has a new spy chief at No.10. Air Vice-Marshall Basil Lock is Cabinet Security Adviser – known in Whitehall and Pall Mall clubs by the nickname […]
A secret service? In the Guardian of 12 June 2000 David Leigh had an important piece on the relationship between our secret servants and the media. At the core of this was his account of the revelation, via a libel suit in London, of an MI6 operation to plant disinformation in the Sunday Telegraph about […]
Jane Kelsey, Pluto Press, London 1996, £14.99 Kelsey describes how a handful of bureaucrats in the New Zealand state, backed by some of the big New Zealand companies, seized control of economic policy in New Zealand and imposed on it a bizarre amalgam of the IMF restructuring programme traditionally imposed on the Third World, traditional […]
[…] tends to support this. A number of cases have made it extremely difficult for councils to sue for libel and/or damage to their reputation(s).(6) In the early Thatcher years Tory Party central office set up a section to trawl for, collate and occasionally invent, local government (i.e. anti-Labour) ‘stories’ that were then fed to […]
[…] advisors, nicknamed ‘the adjutant’ by Canard Enchaine. Langemann also reports that Sir Arthur Franks and Nicholas Elliott were invited to Chequers for a working meeting with Mrs Thatcher, after her election. But perhaps the key political figure was the late Franz Josef Strauss, Bavarian Premier and Langemann’s boss. Strauss was a close friend of […]
A new royalty? A few weeks before former BBC political editor Andrew Marr received two Broadcasting Press Guild awards – one as ‘best TV performer in a non-acting role’ – his journalistic colleagues were quietly made aware of a little drama in his own life. Typical of the message from editorial lawyers circulated among Britain’s […]
[…] the Heritage Foundation for 11 FCS activists. Although there are still libertarian strands within the Tory Party, David Hoile and his colleagues were on the good ship Thatcher, and when she went down, so did they. (For a while they seemed to genuinely believe that Mrs Thatcher was a libertarian; a bit like believing […]
[…] community which was threatened by immigration. GKY’s aims But who was he trying to impress? The ‘correspondents’ themselves, the party leaders or both? Or the ‘anti- Thatcher’ element in the party? He claimed that pro-Heath elements wanted to stage a comeback through the constituencies. GKY did not want people to join the National […]
[…] Mother, after all. Before he died, Andrew Boyle, whose book finally exposing Blunt came soon after her election in 1979, expressed to me his opinion that Margaret Thatcher had withdrawn Blunt’s immunity from publicity rather than let him successfully sue Boyle for libel, only to have the truth emerge when Blunt died of old […]
[…] Madrid he was appointed permanent secretary to the European Community in 1978 during Roy Jenkins’ presidency and then ran the Foreign Office news operation during the middle Thatcher years. John Major made him press secretary at No 10 and then Blair sent him to Washington in 1997. Diplomat and upmarket spin merchant Meyer, who […]
