[…] for his comment about the collective raspberry blown through Whitehall at Tony Blair’s talk of Iraq being a threat (see ‘Iraq’, above), made some further comments on BBC Radio 4. ‘There was a culture of news management which came in after 1997 which I had not seen before and intelligence got swept up in […]
[…] Gurwin p. 193 Sterling p. 142 Italian TV pictures of this – including the piles of guns and bags of (it was said) heroin, were shown on BBC 2’s Newsnight. At the time (innocently) I assumed that a story of such magnitude would appear shortly in the British press. It didn’t and I forgot […]
[…] survivor’, op. cit. Jonathan Dimbleby interview, op. cit. Comments made by Rees-Jones in an interview on France 2 television. (Quoted in ‘Paparazzi’s role in Diana accident’ on BBC News Website at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/wales/newsid_707000/707445.shmtl) Larry King Live interview, op. cit. Tim Reid, ‘Al Fayed accuses Duke of plotting to murder Diana’, The Times 23 November 1999. […]
Introduction There are a couple of interesting chapters in Chapman Pincher’s recent The Truth About Dirty Tricks, (Sidgwick and Jackson, 1991), especially the one about Harold Wilson’s ‘spymaster’, the late George Wigg; but, despite the usual shower of interesting fragments, mostly it is junk. Pincher’s primary strategy is clear enough. During the mid 1970s bureaucratic […]
Tony Blair will be remembered not just for the slaughter in Iraq, and the subsequent collapse of Labour in Scotland in face of a resurgent SNP, but as the Labour leader who could have forged common links across Europe but chose to side with one of the continent’s most despised figures. Charles Clarke, one of […]
[…] study: Murphy’s Law……. Notes Robert Verkaik, ‘The Freedom of Information Act misused’, The Independent, 22 March 2007. The complete text can be read at . For a BBC version of the original ‘Israeli art students’ story from 2002 see . Or, rather, don’t see that URL for it evoked a 404 when I tried […]
Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real Role in the World Mark Curtis London: Vintage, 2003; p/b, £7.99 This latest analysis of British foreign policy by Mark Curtis could not be better timed. With more than a million Britons on the streets of London protesting against the Iraq war earlier this year there is a potentially large […]
IRD, home and away The creation of the Information Policy unit in HQ Northern Ireland in 1971 may have been the last occasion on which the classic IRD psy-war operation was created. Evidence of previous examples is hard to find, but skimming through Charles Foley’s Legacy of Strife: Cyprus from rebellion to civil war (Penguin, […]
[…] twenty years ago Ken Livingstone took a sustained interest until the researcher who was generating the questions he was asking in the House of Commons joined the BBC. Now we have Norman Baker, the Liberal-Democrat MP, who has kind of inherited the ‘awkward squad’ mantle from Tam Dalyell. He has had a short Commons […]
A small section of this appeared in Lobster 12. Although this is incomplete and under researched, we thought it worth putting out now. The origins of IRD 1947 saw the creation of the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department (IRD). It is generally accepted that IRD was the brain-child of the then Labour M.P. Christopher Mayhew, […]
