[…] 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 […]
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 […]
[…] heads Opinion Leader Research (OLR), part of the Chime Communications empire of Tim (since 1990, Lord) Bell, who served in a somewhat similar advisory capacity to Margaret Thatcher. I have yet to see any report of how much of Gould and Mattinson’s wealth has come from Labour party sources in those 20 years, or […]
[…] leader Neil Kinnock’s book Making Our Way, the Labour Party as an institution had grasped that the interests of the City of London were the core of Thatcher economics – Labour MPs’ constituents were unemployed because of it. You might have thought that since everybody hates the bankers, and they were getting fat in […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
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
