[…] that, had Heath won a subsequent election (and become prime minister in, say, 1975) he would have been given a peerage and a significant government position. Supporting Thatcher While these discussions took place, Goldsmith was funding a UK political project implicitly hostile to Heath, the Centre for Policy Studies, launched in June 1974 with […]
[…] used very deliberately. In the period covered by these diaries, Wyatt was Rupert Murdoch’s fixer in London and, in particular, acted as his go-between, first with Margaret Thatcher, and later with John Major. This material is extremely interesting, providing, among other things, an insider’s account of Murdoch’s embrace of Tony Blair and New Labour. […]
[…] world as we know it in this country. No doubt books and TV programmes are being prepared. The most striking account of the first part of the Thatcher events is John Hoskyn’s Just In Time: inside the Thatcher revolution (London: Aurum Press, 2000). Hoskyns was an army officer who became a businessman. He is […]
[…] get to the right people), luck (the Argentine bombs were wrongly fused), authentic British ruthlessness (sinking the Belgrano), and large dollops of near-racist, sickly patriotic guff, Mrs Thatcher won the war, duly dispersed the ‘wets’ and the would-be peace-makers, and duly won the election which followed. Having thus spent a vast amount of money […]
[…] thus: The rise of the state executive at the expense of parliamentary democracy and debate.This began with the economic seminar established by Callaghan but rapidly accelerated under Thatcher. Landmark developments include the decision, made at Cabinet committee level, to replace Polaris with Trident and scrap the GLC and metropolitan councils without first consulting Parliament, […]
[…] corporatism, as it became known, proved difficult to implement, though the economic results of those years in terms of output and employment were infinitely better than the Thatcher experiments which followed them. Under Thatcher, Howe and Lawson, the overseas sector was given everything it had always wanted – no exchange controls, high interest rates […]
[…] its relationship with the Economic league’, in which the assertion ‘must have’ hardly compensates for the lack of evidence; and fourthly in the comments, discussed below, about Thatcher and Joseph. This Wilson chapter, a short rehash of some of the extant information on the plotting and paranoia of the period, contains many omissions – […]
[…] the cause of high employment had obviously evaporated. So after 1979 there was indeed ‘no alternative’ to a reassertion of laissez faire, pursued with zeal by Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher sought to recreate the liberal synthesis of free markets, liberty and greatness which (she believed) had characterised Britain in 1851. Yet this could not be […]
[PDF file]: […] as Robin Ramsan. Duncan Campbell is mentioned twice, en passant, but is missed by Bloom’s indexer. The book is in two distinct sections: the 1974-1979 period, before Thatcher took office, and her period at No. 10. The 1974-79 period is the most interesting to me and about which I know most, and it is […]
[…] depths of corruption in English provincial life at the end of the twentieth century. Owen Oyston was the British Labour Party’s biggest private financial contributor in the Thatcher years. The millionaire owner of radio stations and glossy magazines had bailed out both the left-wing News on Sunday newspaper and his beloved Blackpool Football Club […]
