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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] arrival of Blair, is worth noting for the final three in which Kenneth O. Morgan on Wilson, editor Tiratsoo on the 1970s and Paul Hirst on the Thatcher period, firmly reject the conventional neo-liberal/Thatcherite redemption drama of slow descent through the sixties into the nightmare of the 70s and salvation under Mrs Thatcher. The […]
[…] 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 […]
