[…] defendant typically receives an expedited but much-reduced sentence for their candour and penitence. The effect of Ashton-Cirillo’s untruthful pre-trial comments was to convict Lira in the public mind as soon as he had been arrested. The reality was clarified when the Ukrainian authorities proceeded to set court dates for Lira’s defence case, in a […]
[PDF file]: […] for inventing an interview, only to move straight over to the Telegraph, where presumably such things were not considered so important. The question that inevitably comes to mind as one reads Purnell’s book is: how on earth does he get away with it? Certainly, his carefully constructed comical toff persona is an important factor. […]
[PDF file]: […] always easy meat for the orthodoxy of the City.) What was inflation between 1945 and 1970, 2-4% per annum on average? Who, in his or her right mind, would not trade off 4% inflation for full employment and 2% growth? Vaisey’s vision Another version of the same basic perception that a great watershed had […]
[…] past 40 years or so.4 He quotes a South African report from 1991 describing it as ‘an informal forum of influential representatives of a “conservative cast of mind“’ – which is what Pinay/Le Cercle was and remains. Among recent British participants are former Conservative MPs Norman Lamont, Rory Stewart and Jonathan Aitken.5 Three pages […]
[PDF file]: […] processes have been followed correctly. (This happened in the recent notorious case of Thomas Quick – a convicted serial killer who turned out not to be. Never mind; if the trial was conducted by the book, he must have been.) The Swedish police are pretty dodgy, too; look at the mess they made over […]
[PDF file]: […] Alder The terrorist attack staged by Khalid Masood on 22 March 2017, in which he attempted to enter Parliament, raised some questions. Most interesting, to my mind, was the matter of how he managed to arrive with such precision at the moment when the Carriage Gate to the South of the parliamentary estate […]
[PDF file]: […] between the privations suffered by ordinary citizens, especially pensioners and war veterans, and the affluence and corruption evident in senior Party circles.38 His willingness to speak his mind reinforced the paranoid school of opinion about him in the KGB and led to the temporary suspension of his training sessions and seminars: ‘It was Oleg […]
The view from the bridge Robin Ramsay As always, thanks to Nick Must and Garrick Alder for editorial help with Lobster. *new* Oh-oh By some distance the biggest story I have seen recently is that told on CBS’s 60 Minutes series recently, Scott Pelley’s ‘Havana Syndrome mystery continues as a lead military investigator says bar […]
