[…] to ‘dozens’ of former officers, mostly SIS, all of whom have broken their ‘duty of confidentiality’, or whatever the exact form of words it was that the Thatcher government came up with against Peter Wright. In the last chapter Bower reveals – confirms what some had suspected, or heard whispered – that White had […]
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 […]
[…] overthrow him gives some insight into the murky world of mercenaries and their financial backers.(28) One well known name that keeps cropping up is that of Mark Thatcher, although, thanks to the efforts of his mother, he ‘never spent a day in jail, despite investing in an aircraft that the plotters intended to use […]
[…] produced a radical local monthly magazine. I stayed involved for about 20 issues, none of which sold more than 500 copies. At that time, four years into Thatcher, her big recession in full swing, local radical mags were springing up all over Britain. I remember attending a conference in 1984 at which we all […]
[…] confront the possibility that Argentine air superiority and Exocet missiles could mean the military defeat of the British task force and the rapid political extinction of the Thatcher government. The New Statesman has been able to confirm that a Polaris submarine was indeed deployed to this position. Details of the deployment are given in […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] Dept. Head of Station 1959 FO 1960 Counsellor, Washington, Head of Station 1973 Chief of MI6 1977 Retired 1978 Fellow of All Souls, Oxford 1979 Recalled by Thatcher: Sec. and Int. Co-ordinator, Northern Ireland 1980 retired PERKINS, Col. Harold (Perks) Prague University Merchant Navy Officer (Master Mariner) Owner of a steel mill in Poland […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
