Desmond Bristow with Bill Bristow Little, Brown and co., London, 1993 Shoot the marketing department. There is almost nothing about ‘moles’ in this book. The reality is a mildly interesting account of Bristow’s MI6 career from 1940-1956, most of it spent in Spain. A few names are named — but 40 years on, who […]
In February this year, unnoticed by the press, a funeral took place in a quiet Sussex village. In attendance were some famous names from London society of the fifties and sixties, and two men in regulation dark suits from an undisclosed department of the Security Services. They had been contacts for the deceased, Maria Novotny, […]
[…] it worked, another source did: Filin and Likhvintsev do business with foreign private military companies (PMCs): – «Meteoric Tactical Solutions» (South Africa) – in Angola; – «Kellogg, Brown &Root» (KBR Halliburton) – in Colombia, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Georgia, and Iraq. – «Diligence Iraq LLC» (controlled by the Kuwaiti Mohammed as-Sagar) – in Iraq.” Their cooperation […]
[…] and the installation of Jennifer Moses, former managing director of Goldman Sachs, as a special adviser at 10 Downing Street.(1) She has been brought in to advise Brown on welfare reform! If the Thatcher government had appointed someone like her to such a position, Labour MPs would have been outraged. Today, barely a murmur. […]
David Stirling: the authorised biography of the creator of the SAS Alan Hoe Little, Brown and Co, London 1992, £17.50 As the subtitle suggests, most of this book is taken up with the story of the foundation of the SAS. I didn’t read that section. I read the last third which contains lengthy accounts […]
Diana – the saga goes on and on..… Almost ten years after the fatal crash and the Diana industry still trundles along. In addition to her birthday concert(1) we are promised a slew of books(2)and a plethora of films and documentaries.(3) The main event, though, is sure to be the long-delayed but much anticipated inquest, […]
[…] much of his behaviour was irrational. He was often beyond reason with everybody, including friends, except for an extremely tight and trusted inner circle, people like George Brown of Brown and Root, and the members of the 8F group, a cabal of politicians and businessmen which ran some of Texas in the 1950s and […]
[…] public transport as an organised, planned and publicly owned endeavour. And the man himself? Agreeing (in a restaurant in Islington in 1994) that another person – Gordon Brown – would effectively be the real prime minister wielding huge power over all government policy and strategy whilst Blair concentrated on a presentational, presidential role. Scott […]
[…] letter to the Bank of England in May 1997, ‘The new monetary policy framework’, announcing the formation of the MPC and setting out its terms of reference, Brown referred to Labour’s manifesto commitment that they would ‘ensure that decision-making on monetary policy is more effective, open, accountable and free from short-term political manipulation‘. (emphasis […]
[…] we have are politicians who are driven by NuLab’s major policy imperatives: pleasing the City and following what focus groups tell them. I do not believe that Brown, Balls et al are unaware of the consequences of what E and A call the borrowing binge we have been going through in this country in […]
