[…] 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 […]
[…] Nott London: Politico’s, 2002, £20 John Nott was a junior minister in the Edward Heath government of 1970-74 and a not quite senior minister in the first Thatcher regime. He has written a rather interesting, occasionally amusing and unconsciously revealing memoir. There is an account of the City, in which he worked in the […]
[…] look at Churchill Matrix got shut down in a hurry. One of the reasons is because of Mark Thatcher’s connection to it. Churchill Matrix kept financing Mark Thatcher deals. Mark was a young guy, but these were the go-go 80s and his mother was Prime Minister and he figured he could do whatever he […]
[…] the 1974 so-called ‘Ridley plan’ (2) was revived in the media. This made it clear that the miners had been pushed into a strike for which the Thatcher wing of the Tory Party and the state had been preparing for a decade – Miners’ Strike 2, the Showdown with the Left – and thus […]
[PDF file]: Wilson, MI5 and the rise of Thatcher Covert operations in British politics 1974-1978 Robin Ramsay and Stephen Dorril Introduction: Kevin McNamara MP Any person who lived through the anguished days from November 1973 until Wilson’s resignation will recall the high level of anticipation, expectation, surprise and wonder about what would be the next story […]
[PDF file]: Killing Thatcher The IRA, the Manhunt and the Long War on the Crown Rory Carroll London: Mudlark (HarperNonFiction), 2023, £20, h/b Simon Matthews It’s nearly 40 years since the IRA tried to kill Margaret Thatcher. Written by Rory Carroll, Ireland correspondent for The Guardian, this book seeks to establish what actually happened. In doing […]
[…] socially and professionally, was also probably keeping an eye for him for MI6. Rees only knew for certain that Blunt had been a Soviet agent when Margaret Thatcher confirmed it in the Commons. Ayer had known it since at last 1963. He never told Rees. Before the war Ayer had not only been a […]
[…] and Norman Scott instead. The second significant snippet was the news that Jonathan Aitken had been hand-carrying messages from James Angleton, CIA’s head of counter-intelligence, to Mrs Thatcher, then leader of the opposition. What these said we don’t know but I think we may presume, as the programme did, that they contained some version […]
[…] infrastructure for sustained economic growth. Rather, Fianna Fail favours the kind of boom and bust that has at least been abandoned in Britain since the demise of Thatcher. Fianna Fail is also a byword for corruption and gangsterism. In the run up to the election, a perverse form of spin doctoring has been taking […]
[…] – a complete court transcript of the ex parte PII hearing. As soon as McGrath read this transcript he perceived that back in the days of Margaret Thatcher, his political opponents had been studying his income tax returns. The transcript showed how prosecutor Shorrock explained D909 to the judge: ‘It is old. It has […]
