[…] that they were going to be pro-American, pro-NATO, pro-business, anti-union and media conscious. What we did not know then was just how completely they had internalised the Thatcher ethos, how hostile they were going to be the public sector and, as a result, what a complete bunch of schmucks they were going to be […]
With the decline of the revolutionary socialist Left the Right has turned to the anarchists for a law-and-order bogeyman – and a stick to beat the Left with. One journalist involved is Jamie Dettmer. Having worked for Tribune for a while, Dettmer migrated to the Sunday Telegraph (for whom his first article was an ‘expose’ […]
Mr Tony was a spook? Issue 7 of Larry O’Hara’s Note from the Borderland () includes a section from the Anne Machon and David Shayler book, Spies, Lies and Whistleblowers (reviewed in Lobster 49), which was apparently dropped by the publisher. The key section is this, from an unnamed MI5 officer: ‘Blair was recruited early […]
[…] to ‘dozens’ of former officers, mostly SIS, all of whom have broken their ‘duty of confidentiality’, or whatever the exact form of words it was that the Thatcher government came up with against Peter Wright. In the last chapter Bower reveals – confirms what some had suspected, or heard whispered – that White had […]
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 […]
Never mind Peter Wright, he was obviously lying in Spycatcher anyway. Wallace is a vastly more important source: he doesn’t tell lies, for one thing; and he’s got bits of paper, evidence, some of which concerns his dealings with the late Airey Neave after he was thrown out of government service. At the time Neave […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] produced a radical local monthly magazine. I stayed involved for about 20 issues, none of which sold more than 500 copies. At that time, four years into Thatcher, her big recession in full swing, local radical mags were springing up all over Britain. I remember attending a conference in 1984 at which we all […]
[…] left, and the CIA’s covert political actions. He had some input into the Social Democratic Alliance in the mid 1970s, the forerunner of the SDP, briefed Mrs Thatcher, while she was leader of the opposition on the ‘communist menace’, and began producing IRDtype briefings on the British left British Briefing. British Briefing was published […]
[…] 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 […]
