NIck on Macintyre

Lobster Issue

[…] regiment at the time – four of whom were actually members of the ‘Pagoda’ assault team. Then there’s the versions by political and policing figures – Margaret Thatcher, Willie Whitelaw, Douglas Hurd and (Metropolitan Police Commissioner) Sir David McNee – who also were integral at some level. That’s another four. There is the autobiography […]

A Hack’s Progress by Phillip Knightley

Lobster Issue 34 (Winter 1997)

[PDF file]: […] in explaining Soviet policy and thinking just at the point when the Soviet Union was cracking up, thus smoothing to way for the Gorbachev relationship first with Thatcher and then with the Americans. ‘Decisive’ – maybe not; but not insignificant. The cry that intelligence services are useless is a variation on the more specific […]

NIck on Macintyre

Lobster Issue

[…] regiment at the time – four of whom were actually members of the ‘Pagoda’ assault team. Then there’s the versions by political and policing figures – Margaret Thatcher, Willie Whitelaw, Douglas Hurd and (Metropolitan Police Commissioner) Sir David McNee – who also were integral at some level. That’s another four. There is the autobiography […]

Knightley

Lobster Issue

[…] in explaining Soviet policy and thinking just at the point when the Soviet Union was cracking up, thus smoothing to way for the Gorbachev relationship first with Thatcher and then with the Americans. ‘Decisive’ – maybe not; but not insignificant. The cry that intelligence services are useless is a variation on the more specific […]

The Richer, The Poorer, by Stewart Lansley

Lobster Issue 86 (2023)

[PDF file]: […] shallow and temporary. (pp. 2/3) The author traces this well-footnoted and indexed history with academic rigour and journalistic anecdote. He shows how the free-market evangelists of the Thatcher and Reagan era repeated the myth that the great prize for a widening gap would be faster growth and a new economic dynamism that would raise […]

Knightley

Lobster Issue

[…] in explaining Soviet policy and thinking just at the point when the Soviet Union was cracking up, thus smoothing to way for the Gorbachev relationship first with Thatcher and then with the Americans. ‘Decisive’ – maybe not; but not insignificant. The cry that intelligence services are useless is a variation on the more specific […]

The Spy Who Was Left Out in the Cold by Tim Tate

Lobster Issue 81 (Summer 2021)

[PDF file]: […] was a Soviet agent in a Labour Party which was controlled by the KGB through the trade unions. Ultimately Angleton and Golitsyn helped to give us Margaret Thatcher. Finally, considering how important Goleniewski was in intelligence terms, and how many books have been written about the intelligence ‘war’, it is striking – not to […]

The Clandestine Caucus: a minor update

Lobster Issue 88 (2024)

[PDF file]: […] that book’s exploration of role of the spooks in British politics, with an interest in the history of the Tory right triggered by the arrival of Mrs Thatcher. And I was interested in Labour Party history. (I was a member in the 80s and 90s.) I haven’t methodically revisited CC since but relevant odds […]

A Jimmy Savile sex scandal concealed during the 1997 General Election

Lobster Issue 73 (Summer 2017)

[PDF file]: […] If Parliament or the public had been told in 1999, when Savile had over a decade left to live, future offences might have been prevented. In 1988 Thatcher Government junior health minister Edwina Currie had appointed Savile to lead a task force to tackle various problems at Broadmoor.
 The entertainer had cultivated Ms Currie […]

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