[…] Lord Falconer, Lord Chancellor at the time of the Iraq invasion, told him ‘that whatever the size of the march the Government would not have changed its mind.’ Which is what we all suspected anyway. Tony Blair, Dubya’s political catamite, knew what was expected of him and was determined to deliver it. 199 Summer […]
The view from the bridge Robin Ramsay As always, thanks to Nick Must and Garrick Alder for editorial help with Lobster. *new* Oh-oh By some distance the biggest story I have seen recently is that told on ABC’s 60 Minutes series recently, Scott Pelley’s ‘Havana Syndrome mystery continues as a lead military investigator says bar […]
[PDF file]: On getting it wrong and getting it right: Ronald Stark, LSD and the CIA David Black Is History a fiction? In his best-seller of 1991, Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair, the late John Bossy claimed that Bruno spied for Queen Elizabeth’s enforcer, Sir Francis Walsingham, at the French embassy in London. This was a […]
[…] always easy meat for the orthodoxy of the City.) What was inflation between 1945 and 1970, 2-4% per annum on average? Who, in his or her right mind, would not trade off 4% inflation for full employment and 2% growth? Vaisey’s vision Another version of the same basic perception that a great watershed had […]
[…] past 30 years or so.3 He quotes a South African report from 1991 describing it as ‘an informal forum of influential representatives of a “conservative cast of mind“’ – which is what Pinay/Le Cercle was and remains. Among recent British participants are former Conservative MPs Norman Lamont, Rory Stewart and Jonathan Aitken.4 Three pages […]
[…] us this about Sarah Brown and the spin doctors, Damian McBride and Charlie Whelan: ‘The demure public image was the front of a woman with a steely mind who was fiercely protective of her husband and family. She formed a strong, and to some at No 10 surprising, alliance with Damian McBride and Charlie […]
[PDF file]: […] and economic underperformance spurred a search for more modern tools than public ownership and strong trade unions. That is fair enough, but it should be borne in mind that social democracy, as practised from Macmillan onwards, was to the right of the 1945 settlement. Hence the impatience of Labour romantics such as Michael Foot […]
The view from the bridge Robin Ramsay As always, thanks to Nick Must and Garrick Alder for editorial help with Lobster. *new* By their omissions . . . Michael Gove, the outgoing Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, passes for an intellectual in today’s Conservative Party. In May he delivered a speech […]
