[…] thought crossed my mind during the phoney leadership war in the days before the Labour Party conference when Toynbee switched her allegiance to David Miliband from Gordon Brown. (We are talking ancient history, of course: of times BC, Before Crisis, when the PM had not become saviour of the economic world.) In the same […]
[…] on the influence and power in the Blair government wielded by MPs representing seats in the North East: Blair himself, Peter Mandelson, Stephen Byers Alan Milburn, Nick Brown, Hilary Armstrong, Marjorie (‘Mo’) Mowlam and David Miliband being good examples. There would seem to be some connections here that might be worth tracing or making […]
[PDF file]: Contents Lobster 60 Gordon Brown: in the country of the blind……. Simon Matthews N ot so long ago the end of a government would be marked by the publication of a couple of ministerial diaries and some memoirs trickling into the public domain within 2-3 years of its demise. Today any change of administration […]
[PDF file]: […] ‘the day of consultancy government had arrived… Downing Street came under the influence of the McKinsey mafia’.2 As late as February 2009, the New Labour government (Gordon Brown was prime minister and Alan Johnson was minister of health) commissioned a report on the NHS from McKinsey that recommended a modest 137,000 job cuts, a […]
[PDF file]: […] Man Who Played With Fire: Stieg Larsson’s Lost Files and the Hunt for an Assassin Jan Stocklassa, Seattle: Amazon Crossing, 2019, £13.15 (h/b) The Man in the Brown Suit: MI5, Edward VIII and an Irish Assassin James Parris (Harry Harmer) Cheltenham: The History Press, 2019, £14.00 (h/b) The Stocklassa book is about the killing […]
[…] true. An abbreviated version of the story can be found in Robert Marshall, ‘Wartime Spies and the Web of Deception’, The Listener, 1 May 1986. Anthony Cave Brown, C: The Secret Life of Sir Stewart Menzies, Spymaster to Winston Churchill (New York: Macmillan, 1987), p. 511. Brown covers the story on pp. 498-513, and […]
[…] to the Italian case against Berlusconi. This was quickly dismissed by the two appeal judges, of whom the senior one is now the Right-Honourable Lord Justice Simon Brown. The second defence ground was more interesting. It concerned the papers which the Italian authorities held would help sustain the case against Berlusconi that he had […]
[…] Executive (BRE), previously part of the Cabinet Office.’ This generated another question: what was the Better Regulation Executive (BRE)? BRE’s arrival was heralded by then Chancellor Gordon Brown in 2005. He said this about it in his press statement on 24 May 2005. ‘The modern enterprise challenge is to enhance the flexibility needed for […]
[…] and putting aside the usual small-scale training and special ops activity that the UK has often provided to keep the Western Alliance in working order, Prime Minister Brown inherited two significant engagements that placed the UK firmly back in the East for the first time since its final departure as sovereign power had been […]
[…] a jumbled story at the centre of which was his recruitment by a man called simply ‘Wallace’. Wallace was ID’d for them by LBJ’s former mistress, Madeleine Brown, who, when they met her, had named Malcolm ‘Mac’ Wallace as the probable killer of JFK in her then unpublished memoir, Texas In The Morning. (4) […]
