The unspeakable Martin Kettle of The Guardian is a political journalist who has been pretty close to, and supportive of, New Labour since the 1990s. His article ‘The special relationship that squandered a noble cause’ (27 May 2006) opened with this: ‘The long arc of Tony Blair’s rise and decline has been punctuated by journeys […]
Never mind Peter Wright, he was obviously lying in Spycatcher anyway. Wallace is a vastly more important source: he doesn’t tell lies, for one thing; and he’s got bits of paper, evidence, some of which concerns his dealings with the late Airey Neave after he was thrown out of government service. At the time Neave […]
[…] British Industry (remember Beckett’s speech about a ‘bareknuckle fight’ with the government?) suggests that the kind of distinction White wants to make may still be meaningful. The Thatcher wing of the Tory Party certainly represents the revival of a militant, anti-socialist, anti-working class strand in the party which had almost disappeared – gone underground […]
[…] was the output of these disinformation programmes (a couple of examples are reprinted in this volume) that a tape recording in which the voices of Reagan and Thatcher had been edited together to apparently show them discussing a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union was attributed to the KGB. In the event the tape […]
[…] the British political system, the City, the secret state and the Conservative Party, there is quite a lot of information available Inevitably, the chapters on the pre- Thatcher years are thinner than those since she came to power. One of the ironies of our time is that while Mrs T took office determined to […]
[…] Murdoch three name checks; and John Rentoul of The Independent on Sunday managed ‘10 brief mentions’ in his big Blair book. Was it any different with Margaret Thatcher? ‘Hugo Young’s much-praised book on Margaret Thatcher, One of Us, reserves one minor, passing reference to Murdoch,’ writes Oborne. Will, the political chroniclers be more outspoken […]
[…] resign; he would not be prosecuted. This agreement was reached just before Pat and I received Zander’s first phone-call. But the Prime Minister was no gentleman. Mrs Thatcher had returned from holiday on the Tuesday and was informed about Ponting. She decided to renege on the agreement Ponting thought he had and nail him […]
BERR In a profile of John Hutton, the new Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, Hutton said that Labour ‘is the natural party of business’,(1) another benchmark (or, in Corinne Souza country, ‘rebranding’) in the shift from old to New Labour. For it was Harold Wilson’s boast that he had made Labour … Read more
[…] of unlawful activities by members of the Security Forces in Ulster in the early 1970s initiated an RUC and Garda inquiry, is currently in correspondence with Mrs Thatcher. He has pointed out to her that the Ulster Director of Public Prosecutions’ statement that “there was insufficient evidence to bring charges against anyone” is simply […]
[…] to identify his politics. Three years ago David Aaronovitch wrote about him. (14)Aaronovitch noted that Laughland is European Director of the European Foundation whose patron is Margaret Thatcher, and concluded by describing Laughland (and his associates) as ‘right-wing anti-state libertarians and isolationists, suspicious of any foreign entanglements’. Aaronovitch’s description above isn’t entirely inaccurate, though […]
