[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] at a press conference in the House of Commons in 1986 were not interested and, while we thought we had a story which might bring down the Thatcher government if taken seriously, not a word appeared in print in the following months. Figuring that my part in the story was over, that the major […]
