[…] increased arms expenditure – overseas expenditure paid for by domestic cuts – proposed by Labour Chancellor Gaitskell which led to the resignation of Aneurin Bevan and Harold Wilson from the government in 1951. The Tories return The arrival of the Conservative Government in 1951 saw the return of interest rates – that is, putting […]
[…] the future.’ Mountbatten later recollected that ‘…King was a man filled with folie de grandeur…I said, “This is rank treason. Out.” ‘ King continued to rail against Wilson through the columns of the Daily Mirror but without support from other public figures he became a figure of fun.(2) Although his own ‘coup’ failed, King […]
[…] the Limitation of Secret Police Powers which produced two reports on the activities of MI5. To the probable distress of the Security Services, in May 1976 Harold Wilson made Mayne a member of a committee to ‘review the rules governing the active participation by civil servants in national and local political activities’. (Attlee had […]
[…] between 1970 and 1974, it opposed membership. In an attempt to rally the public and the Labour Party behind continued membership, the 1974 Labour Government under Harold Wilson pledged to renegotiate the terms of entry and consult on the outcome through a general election or a consultative referendum. Although there was significant opposition to […]
[…] of Sinn Fein. Churchill took great delight in hearing about these activities first-hand, much to the disgust of the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Henry Wilson. If this had become public knowledge at the time it would probably have ruined him, but historians take a much more generous view of such minor […]
[…] without recourse to conspiracy theory. The Group was formed out of the merger of a small group of business interests who had supported the private offices of Wilson and Callaghan with a much broader group of pro-Labour Keynesian academics and economists the sort who were thoroughly dished by Geoffrey Howe’s determination to push […]
[…] May 1988 issue of Middle East International carries an interesting article on the rise (but not yet fall) of a former high-ranking MOSSAD officer who, like Edwin Wilson, has turned his previous clandestine experience into profit through shady arms dealing. Mike Harari, leader of MOSSAD’s Munich revenge hit-squad exposed in 1973 after the Lillehammer […]
[…] this is Pencourt revisited. But revisited by Freeman: this is his reworking of the Pencourt material. Pencourt – Penrose and Courtiour – had been commissioned by Harold Wilson to investigate the plots against him but, unable to get to the bottom of that, they ended up doing the Thorpe/Norman Scott story. I would guess […]
Geoffrey Goodman London: Pluto Press, 2003 hb £18.99 As a conventional political memoir, this is quite an interesting read. The big figures march by: Bevan, Wilson, Callaghan, Healey, Robert Maxwell; and there are interesting stories about all of them. The best anecdote has Denis Healey, as Chancellor in the House of Commons in […]
[…] off the left’s challenge over unilateralism.. Unfortunately Hugh Gaitskell died, the Labour right couldn’t decide on a single candidate, and the leadership election was won by Harold Wilson, who had never been part of this network; who had spent the cold war travelling to Moscow, not to Washington. The Wilson era The Wilson years […]
