[…] didn’t get this to read yet another account of post-war British politics. I got it because in Lobster 39 (p. 21) I noted comments made by Mrs Thatcher to Robert Armstrong, MI5 liaison at the Home Office, in the mid 1970s on her ‘misgivings’ about the presence of Goodman in the Labour government. There […]
[…] Frank Portnoy, Fiasco: blood in the water on Wall Street (London: Profile Books, 1997) On the wider British issues, the connections between the current situation and the Thatcher years’ obsession with the market and the City, see Peter Wilby, ‘All of us live by the logic of finance’ at . Dan Hind’s ‘Jump You […]
[…] period is entirely inadequate – evasive essentially – there is this little snippet on p. 610. Robert Armstrong, after guidance from the Prime Minister (Callaghan), saw Mrs Thatcher at Scotney Castle and then in Chelsea on 9 and 11 August 1977. On these occasions, she expressed ‘misgivings’ about Harold Wilson’s ‘reliability’ although her evidence […]
[…] ones it lost. As in that other mythical election, 1979, the one where millions of former Labour voters were so disgusted with the Left they switched to Thatcher, somehow leaving Labour’s national vote higher than in 1974, the Tory increase was caused by ex-Liberals (30 of Labour’s 40 net losses were caused by tactical […]
[…] National Union of Mineworkers in the Morning Star of 2 August 2002 ‘It gave me enormous pleasure that, after the 1984-5 miners strike, the Tories threw out Thatcher as Prime Minister and the miners reelected Arthur as their president.’ I like that use of ‘after’ and its implied causality. So it was the miners’ […]
[…] suitcase, which a local farmer says was full of heroin, and had a name-tag which did not correspond with any names on the passenger list? Bush tells Thatcher to cool it Even more significantly, why did George Bush ring Margaret Thatcher in mid-March 1989 to ask her to soft pedal on Lockerbie? This gem […]
Neil Cooper I. B. Tauris, London, 1997, £39.50 This is an analysis of the arms business in the UK, chiefly about the MOD’s procurement system. Not a subject I knew much about, I approached the book expecting little. Discovering it had begun as a PhD reduced my expectations even further. In fact it is a … Read more
[…] Hindsight and Truth But hindsight is a wonderful thing. After the invasion of Poland, Suez, the intervention of the IMF in the 1970s, the arrival of Maggie Thatcher, the Falklands War, the Iraq War, there are always those who see an inevitability that may never have been there in the first place. So it […]
[…] overthrow him gives some insight into the murky world of mercenaries and their financial backers.(28) One well known name that keeps cropping up is that of Mark Thatcher, although, thanks to the efforts of his mother, he ‘never spent a day in jail, despite investing in an aircraft that the plotters intended to use […]
[…] is strongest, as one would expect, in those who have exercised power at the highest levels – among the Men in Suits. From Chamberlain through Heath and Thatcher, each deposed leader retained the support of the Party beyond Westminster. Tory supporters in their associations and clubs felt a great sense of loss and bereavement […]
