The Christie File part 3, 1967-75 Stuart Christie p/back, £34 (inc. p and p) from Like the first, reviewed in Lobster 44, this third volume (300 pages, indexed) in Christie’s autobiography is done on A4 pages with the central text bordered with photographs of the people and incidents concerned, newspaper clippings, posters, cartoons etc. With […]
A secret service? In the Guardian of 12 June 2000 David Leigh had an important piece on the relationship between our secret servants and the media. At the core of this was his account of the revelation, via a libel suit in London, of an MI6 operation to plant disinformation in the Sunday Telegraph about […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] Cambridge before serving in Germany and Vienna. He lists his hobbies as watching sport, gardening, beachcombing, and is 59 years old…MI5 Director is Sir John Lewis Jones…. Thatcher has a new spy chief at No.10. Air Vice-Marshall Basil Lock is Cabinet Security Adviser – known in Whitehall and Pall Mall clubs by the nickname […]
[…] 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 […]
Kevin Coogan is the author of the study of the American fascist Francis Parker Yockey, Dreamer of the Day, reviewed in Lobster 39. He sent me an essay primarily about the American far-right group the Defenders of the American Constitution. The essay, while fascinating, is too big (about 20 pages) for these columns. However within […]
Jane Kelsey, Pluto Press, London 1996, £14.99 Kelsey describes how a handful of bureaucrats in the New Zealand state, backed by some of the big New Zealand companies, seized control of economic policy in New Zealand and imposed on it a bizarre amalgam of the IMF restructuring programme traditionally imposed on the Third World, traditional […]
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 […]
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’ […]
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 […]
