Publications
Origins of the Vigilant State: the London Metropolitan Special Branch Before the First World War
Bernard Porter
(Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1987)
Porter is an academic historian working an interesting new seam, and this is really very good indeed. If anything his account of the SB’s fabrication of an ‘anarchist’ and ‘Irish threat’ in the 1880s and 1890s is the more convincing for the extreme caution he displays in handling the material. Porter shows, in enormous detail, that not a lot has changed in the last 100 years: the SB was set up without political control.
Working his way through such original material as there is, Porter has opened up a number of interesting subsidiary trails. One is his discovery that ‘Nigel West’s’ book on the Special Branch is junk. In a paper in Vol.1 No.3 of Intelligence and National Security (see journals in this issue) Porter describes ‘West’s’ book as “the most unreliable history book ever written by anyone who has not deliberately set out to deceive.” (Would we share Porter’s assumption that ‘West’s’ deception was mere incompetence?)
The other interesting area that is being forced on Porter is what might be called the methodology of British historical research. In researching his book Porter found he couldn’t get access to SB files, not even for the 19th century (and maybe had his phone tapped for the attempt). In an article in Times Higher Educational Supplement (24 April 1987) he wonders:
“Does Britain really have a secret conspiratorial history which nobody is to be allowed to get wind of? The scraps of intelligence that have got through the fence suggest that it may be of some importance …. As a nation, our history may have been more subject to conspiratorial forces than we ever credited.”
It may not sound like much to the hard-core paranoids reading Lobster, but for a senior academic, that is close to heresy, and rather a bold step to take.
Honeytrap by Anthony Summers
and Stephen Dorril
Honeytrap
Anthony Summers and Stephen Dorril
(Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London 1987)
This isn’t really the place to do more than mention this. I think it’s great, really very important, chiefly for what it shows can be done in recent history if the work is done. Most of the reviews it received were sloppy, non-comprehending or egocentric. The best of a poor lot was David Sexton’s in the Spectator (31 May 1987) which at least had the intelligence to see that the rival version by Kennedy and Knightley was pretty poor.
A Putney Plot
Peter Hain
(Spokesman Books, Nottingham, 1987)
In which Peter Hain reads Lobster 11, goes to see Colin Wallace and re-examines the attempt to frame him for bank robbery. A very good summary of both the Wallace material and the South African (BOSS) connections to the plots in the 1970s. Hain, who unfortunately failed to unseat the dreadful David Mellor in Putney at the General Election, made some forthright and astute comments on the Labour Party’s failure to take all this on board in Time Out (15 April 1987).
Vague No 18/19 Programming Phenomena and Conspiracy Theory
Not really a book, but not a magazine either, this is 147 A4 pages of borrowed, ripped-off articles, graphic and assorted fragments on everything from the Bilderberg 1986 meeting personnel to an essay from Lobster 8, encompassing Quigley, Situationist slogans, right-wing US conspiracy theories, JFK assassination, Charles Manson and P2. The whole thing has been slung together by ‘Tom Vague’ who has apparently spent the last 15 years mourning the loss of OZ and IT: every page is overprinted in various colours, which looks nice, but makes it hard to read. Full of interesting bits and pieces, none of them evaluated, this is a kind of psychedelic conspiracy theory soup. £2.00 from BCM Tanelorn, London WC1N 3XX
Robin Ramsay