[…] made membership of the Euro its principal campaigning issue. Keen single currency enthusiasts on the paper include political editor Andrew Grice, columnists David Aaronovitch and Yasmin Alibhai- Brown (see below), and political commentator and author of the pulped Mandelson biography Donald Macintyre. Still influential at the paper now taking ‘the broader view’ is former […]
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, […]
Cherie Blair: Speaking for Myself Cherie Blair London: Little, Brown, 2008, h/b, £18.99 The relentless harrying of Neil Kinnock by the Murdoch press at the time of the 1992 general election outraged Labour Party people, among them Cherie Blair. This was the general election when The Sun proudly boasted that it was its […]
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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] secondary bond market, for more than 40 per cent of global derivatives’ means that much of the chaos of the past year originated in London, while Gordon Brown and Ed Balls were in charge of the Treasury. Which makes Brown’s posturing as the man who will reform the financial world the more ridiculous. Credit […]
Ben Pimlott Harper Collins, London 1992, £20 At one level, this deserves the plaudits it has received. It is a belting good read, such a good read, in fact, that I had got as far as 1967 before I realized that there was no mention of Lord Cromer, the Governor of the Bank of England […]
[…] deep into the heart of the Blair project and into the history of its precursors. Follow Draper, the Labour student initially offered work by Agriculture Minister Nick Brown and then taken up by Trade and Industry Secretary Peter Mandelson, and we get a few insights into New Labour of the ‘stuffing my bank account […]
[…] the two men became friends. (4) A month later the leader of the Labour Party, John Smith, died, and Blair won the leadership election contest with Gordon Brown – in some accounts with financial assistance from Levy. (5) All accounts are agreed that Michael Levy then set about raising money – the figure of […]
[…] the Skull and Bones was Prescott Bush Snr., father of the first President Bush. A scion of New York’s financial establishment, Prescott Bush was a director of Brown Brothers Harriman & Company, the oldest private bank in the United States. He was also a director of the Union Banking Corporation, a bank set up […]
