Why are we with Uncle Sam?

Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009) £££

[…] this resulted in a temporary halt in the US signals intelligence flow to the UK. Heath was defeated two years later in a leadership contest by Margaret Thatcher, whom the Americans had been cultivating and promoting since 1967 as a potential leader of the Conservative Party. This may have been pay-back for Heath daring […]

Yo, Blair!

Lobster Issue 52 (Winter 2006/7) £££

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 […]

The getting elected project

Book review
Lobster Issue 56 (Winter 2008/9) £££

From Thatcher to the Third Way: think-tanks, intellectuals and the Blair project Robert Carl Blank Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2003, ISBN 3-89821-277-7 This illustrates the hazards of Amazon’s ‘search inside the book’ feature: I read an interesting couple of pages of this and bought it for about $30 and it isn’t worth the money. This is […]

Tittle-tattle

Lobster Issue 51 (Summer 2006) £££

[…] 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 […]

The Making of New Labour’s European Policy

Book cover
Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3) £££

[…] 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 […]

Politics and Paranoia

Book cover
Lobster Issue 56 (Winter 2008/9) £££

[…] 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 […]

A note on the British deployment of nuclear weapons in crises – with particular reference to the Falklands and Gulf Wars and the purchase of Trident

Lobster Issue 28 (December 1994) £££

[…] 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 […]

Intelligence Personnel Named in ‘Inside Intelligence’

Lobster Issue 15 (1988) £££

[…] 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 […]

Briefly: Ideas. Blitz to Blair. Covert Network. etc

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Lobster Issue 36 (Winter 1998/9) £££

[…] 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 […]

The once and future king?

Lobster Issue 56 (Winter 2008/9) £££

[…] MP.(18) But for bureaucratic reasons, neither Livingstone nor Knight achieved their objectives before the 1983 General Election. The Brent East selection was not finalised by the time Thatcher asked for Parliament to be dissolved and Freeson automatically remained the Labour candidate. Knight failed in an effort to become PPC for Coventry North East.(19) Plan […]

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