[…] the spooks is money wasted. For much of the past twenty years none of this mattered much, for the intelligence services had one major fan – Mrs Thatcher. If no-one else took their reports seriously, she did, taking them home in the evenings; and under her the spooks’ budgets more than doubled. This isn’t […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] year (the Gibraltar shootings followed by killings at two funerals, ‘Death on the Rock’, Lisburn, Ballygawley and other bombs) had led, only a month previously, to Mrs Thatcher appealing to the British media to withhold publicity from IRA sympathisers. A spokesman for the IBA said, ‘The fact that After Dark is a live programme […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing Stephen Marshall (Guerilla News Network, $13.22. Available from and ) The Shock Doctrine: The Rise Of Disaster Capitalism Naomi Klein, (London: Allen Lane, £25.00) ‘When new (forms of capitalism) emerged in the past …they sparked a flood of analysis and debate about how such seismic shifts in the production of […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] In the last issue I discussed the research by Giles Scott-Smith on the US State Department’s funding of a big freebie trip to the US for Mrs Thatcher in 1967, after the US embassy in London had spotted her as a possible future prime minister. Scott-Smith has more information on the Net. His ‘Searching […]
[…] British Industry (remember Beckett’s speech about a ‘bareknuckle fight’ with the government?) suggests that the kind of distinction White wants to make may still be meaningful. The Thatcher wing of the Tory Party certainly represents the revival of a militant, anti-socialist, anti-working class strand in the party which had almost disappeared – gone underground […]
[…] 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 […]
