The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 91 (2025)

[PDF file]: […] Conservative MP Matthew Parris and Gerard Baker, former editor of The Wall Street Journal. They devoted their columns in The Times to bemoaning the decline of the Thatcher legacy (Baker, 17 October) and yearning for someone like Mrs Thatcher to sort things out (Parris, 20 October). The difficulty most of us have in changing […]

Consultants Challen

Lobster Issue

[…] consultancies rocketed: At the time of the 1979 general election in the United Kingdom, the government was spending about £6 million on consulting services annually; when Margaret Thatcher stepped down as prime minister eleven years later, the amount was more than 40 times greater at £246 million.8 Where the Iron Lady failed, Reeves’ ‘Iron […]

View from

Lobster Issue

[…] Conservative MP Matthew Parris and Gerard Baker, former editor of The Wall Street Journal. They devoted their columns in The Times to bemoaning the decline of the Thatcher legacy (Baker, 17 October) and yearning for someone like Mrs Thatcher to sort things out (Parris, 20 October). The difficulty most of us have in changing […]

View from

Lobster Issue

[…] Conservative MP Matthew Parris and Gerard Baker, former editor of The Wall Street Journal. They devoted their columns in The Times to bemoaning the decline of the Thatcher legacy (Baker, 17 October) and yearning for someone like Mrs Thatcher to sort things out (Parris, 20 October). The difficulty most of us have in changing […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] credible industrial strategy to get the UK back on its feet’.18 Well, well, well: ‘Industrial strategy’ and ‘the establishment’ is the language (and thought) of the pre- Thatcher era. Curious that he’s a City commentator because few in the City give a dull fuck about an industrial strategy – or the nation, for that […]

The Mandelson legacy

Lobster Issue 91 (2025)

[PDF file]: […] journalism at home and abroad, I’d become the head of external affairs at the National Union of Teachers in the early 1980s to take on such choice Thatcher or 1 2 This is detailed at great length in Paul Holden’s The Fraud (London: OR Books, 2025). It is summarised here or . 3 1 […]

View from

Lobster Issue

[…] as chief executive of the Tax Payers’ Alliance and Williams was the CBI’s chief economic adviser. 2 1 Type to enter text bemoaning the decline of the Thatcher legacy (Baker, 17 October) and yearning for someone like Mrs Thatcher to sort things out (Parris, 20 October). The difficulty most of us have in changing […]

View from

Lobster Issue

[…] as chief executive of the Tax Payers’ Alliance and Williams was the CBI’s chief economic adviser. 2 1 Type to enter text bemoaning the decline of the Thatcher legacy (Baker, 17 October) and yearning for someone like Mrs Thatcher to sort things out (Parris, 20 October). The difficulty most of us have in changing […]

The rise of New Labour

Lobster Issue 63 (Summer 2012)

[PDF file]: […] Gaitskellites. In the late 1960s and 70s it gathered round Roy Jenkins and eventually split Labour to form the SDP – a move which ensured that Mrs Thatcher won the 1983 general election. After which, job done, the SDP faded away. After the Labour election defeat of 1987 its leadership, Kinnock and Hattersley, set […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] the (theoretical) risk of prosecution. Today it wouldn’t. What has changed? Then it seemed worthwhile to stick two fingers up to the British state, headed by Margaret Thatcher, by revealing (minor) state secrets. Today we have Cameron and Clegg, imitations of Tony Blair, Thatcher’s successor, who hardly matter. Then, influenced by research on the […]

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