[…] at all costs any possibility of hitting a police officer with the predictable and very costly consequences for the Libyan regime and economy? And why did the Thatcher government allow the 22 employees of the embassy to leave the country without hindrance? Hints from Ministers The then Home Secretary, Leon Brittan, was so unhappy […]
[…] to jail after she leaked confidential documents to The Guardian. Many at the time – the height of the renewed Cold War under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher – thought the editor of The Guardian would resign, a course of action over failure in civic duty his newspaper’s leading articles have frequently urged on […]
[…] as being a ‘link with the foreign office’, he was trusted by the Foreign Office mandarins even more than security overlord Sir Maurice Oldfield, appointed by Mrs Thatcher in 1979. The appointment in 1980 of Sir Brooks Richard, an ex-diplomat, as Security Co-ordinator in Northern Ireland, was seen as giving the Foreign Office ‘game […]
[…] ten pages of it; and he later confirmed, to the Times Diary, that he had got the idea from MI5. Presumably it is this section that Mrs Thatcher finds so interesting. During the House of Commons debate on the Official Secrets Bill on 15 February 1989, Norman Buchan MP mocked the Prime Minister for […]
[…] too convincing. The problem is he doesn’t give precise dates for this supposed event. One is left to suppose that it all revolves around the ‘rise of Thatcher’ – a formula he rightly refuses. The historical perspective he brings to bear down-plays the decisive significance of the 1980s. It all looks, in retrospect, as […]
Say it ain’t so, Joe Joe Haines’ 2003 Glimmers of Twilight (London: Politicos, 2003) got a fair bit of attention when it appeared, most of the comments noting either former Harold Wilson press officer Haines’ allegation that Marcia Falkender claimed to have had an affair with Wilson in the 1950s, or the claim (supported by […]
[…] beyond normal 30 yrs. Remarks by Lord Donaldson, Ch’mn Advisory Council on Public Records in 24 th Annual Report of Public Records Office. (Guardian 1 July 1983.) Thatcher personally stops publication of two books: official histories of war-time MI5 and war-time counter intelligence operations. (Guardian 25 November and 8 December 1983) Anthony Lester QC […]
[…] was a sign that Atlanticism in the UK was now bipartisan. After 1979 the two major political parties had gone separate ways on the special relationship: under Thatcher the Tories had drawn closer to the USA than they had been under Heath; while Labour under Foot and Kinnock had adopted a stance critical of […]
[…] in Northern Ireland, what amounts to a revisionist history in miniature of WW2 intelligence operations on the British side, and a sardonic post-script on the Falklands: “Mrs Thatcher postured absurdly in the immediate aftermath …an illusion about an independent almost an imperial role comparable to that which regards nuclear weapons as deterrents to every […]
[…] began in 1983 there seemed every point in collecting and publishing every available scrap of information on the British security and intelligence services: we had Reagan and Thatcher, a resurgent British imperialism on the coat-tails of America, and a repressive, authoritarian regime at home. Publicising what the British state most wanted kept in the […]
