Thatcher's Secret War E-Book

Clive Bloom

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 751

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

'Scary but enlightening' - Christopher Stone Margaret Thatcher remains one of the United Kingdom's most polarising prime ministers. This provocative investigation sheds light on the secret, internal 'cold war' that she waged against 'the enemy within'; everyone she could not see eye to eye with. It was a campaign fuelled by paranoia on both the left and right of the political spectrum and fought with corruption, black propaganda, dirty tricks and even murder. Expertly juxtaposing notable events with today's political arena, this new and updated edition of Thatcher's Secret War surmises that although Thatcher's ideals seem to have vanished, one remains: the power and importance of the extra parliamentary state and its surveillance methods and hidden powers in a new age of terrorism.

Leseprobe

Praise for Thatcher’s Secret War

‘A timely reminder that behind the facade of democracy there is an entire state apparatus, wielded by the rich and powerful to defend and advance their interests.’

Professor Hakim Adi, University of Chichester

‘Bloom is especially compelling when he describes how many of the men around Thatcher combined an outspoken fealty to a supposedly free market with a deep authoritarianism. The book is provocative in the best sense: not just accepting disagreement but encouraging it. A generous, well-paced and lively read.’

Aditya Chakrabortty, Senior Economics Commentator,

The Guardian

‘Strange tales of nasty goings-on, in the shadow-world of anti-democratic forces. Scary but enlightening. There are no definitive answers in this book, only patterns, but the patterns are convincing enough.’

Christopher Stone, author, columnist and feature writer

‘A comprehensive and sobering introduction to how the weapons of Thatcher’s secret war became the tools of today’s public policy, and how criminalised dissent, security theatre and engineered patriotism led to a diminishing role for the rule of law.’

S.I. Martin, author and historian

Prospero: You do yet taste

Some subtleties o’ th’ isle, that will not let you

Believe things certain.

William Shakespeare, The Tempest V.I

Next to these public things were the dreams of old women, or, I should say, the interpretation of old women upon other people’s dreams; and these put abundance of people even out of their wits.

Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year

The truth is an acquired taste.

Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon,The Assassination of Robert Maxwell

Government is not about truth.

Clive Ponting, Whitehall: Tragedy amd Farce

In a democracy, government claims that only the guilty have anything to fear are as insidious as they are specious.

Andrew Neather, Evening Standard, 15 May 2014

When the world has once got hold of a lie, it is astonishing how hard it is to get it out of the world. You beat it about the head, till it seems to have given up the ghost, and lo! the next day it is as healthy as ever.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, England and the English

For Matilda, Avery, Amber and Sienna; our fourlittle musketeers, who will sort this mess out whenwe’re gone.

Cover illustrations, from top: Margaret Thatcher in 1985. (mark reinstein / Shutterstock.com); Poll tax riot, 31 March 1990. (James Bourne / Wikimedia Commons)

First published 2015

This paperback edition published 2021

The History Press

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Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

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© Clive Bloom, 2015, 2021

The right of Clive Bloom to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

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ISBN 978 0 7509 5800 4

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

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CONTENTS

About the Author

Preface

Acknowledgements and Permissions

1 Monster Time

2 The Fat Spider

3 Clockwork Orange

4 A Colditz Warrior in Whitehall

5 Shining Like Spun Gold

6 Brian Crozier’s Shield

7 Knowing You are Right

8 Operation Barmaid

9 The Show Trials of Old England

10 The 20 June Group

11 Smells Like Teen Spirits

12 Taking Pot-shots at Arthur

13 The Great Endeavour

14 A Manual of Basic Training

15 Over the Rainbow

16 White Noise

17 The Intelligence of Sleeping Dogs

18 Those Heavy People

19 The Fat Controller

20 Zeus and the Anglian Satanic Church

21 Voodoo Histories

22 Friends in the North

23 The Red Escort Comes to the Highlands

24 The Hooded Men

25 Zulu Delta 576

26 The Old Iron Woman

27 Vicarious Victimhood

28 Mummsie Time!

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Clive Bloom is Emeritus Professor of English and American Studies at Middlesex University, UK, and currently holds two other professorial posts: He is both Visiting Professor at The Larkin Centre for Poetry and Creative Writing at Hull University, and Adjunct Professor at Notre Dame University, South Bend, Indiana. A broadcaster and a widely published writer, he has been quoted in both Pravda and the Washington Post for his work on public order. He is the author of Restless Revolutionaries:A History of Britain’s Fight for a Republic (History Press, 2010). www.clivebloom.com

PREFACE

On the day the hardback of Thatcher’s Secret War was to be published in 2015, my publishers received a solicitor’s letter threatening legal action regarding some of the comments made in the book. The offended party had not read the book, but instead had received the information from a third party; yet, page references quoted by the solicitor were incorrect and references to comments made by me in the text were misquotations. The threat was withdrawn the next day. It demonstrates, however, the defensive nature and the peculiar insecurity of those who worked, many years ago, in the various security services. Their ‘dirty’ secrets are often exposed thirty years after the events and often when key players are already dead. Yet, the memories of private grievances remain. Another hostile review suggested that a history book such as this should deal with ‘facts’, although I make it clear that there are no facts in a history of innuendo, rumour and suggestion from which one has to untangle a coherent narrative and a sense of objectivity as best one can.

This is a book about secrets and lies. It is not strictly about the secret services that work for the ‘state’. There has been a plethora of books written on various aspects of the secret services within the last five years or so and some of these are mentioned in the bibliography to this preface. This preface will not rehearse their detailed and well-researched arguments. Suffice to say that they uphold the findings of this book (I believe), although they may be less cynical as to conclusions. They support my argument that the United Kingdom is one of the most secretive of Western nations, and that during the administrations of Harold Wilson, James Callaghan and Margaret Thatcher, elements within those services, tacitly – but with the approval often at the highest levels – systematically undermined democratic processes by surveillance on high-profile politicians and ordinary members of the public who were members of left-wing or liberal groups, or who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Despite caveats regarding Wilson’s ‘paranoia’, it seems he was the subject of surveillance and that this was somehow attached to operations in Northern Ireland; some highly secretive army intelligence operations in the country may or may not have once been known under the codename ‘Clockwork Orange’, but the revelations regarding the running of a variety of agents inside the Irish Republican Party (IRA) is now extensively documented. These revelations finally gained full attention with Martin Ingram (real name Ian Hurst) and his exposé of the Force Research Unit controlling ‘human intelligence’, as well as being responsible for the running of ‘Stakeknife’ and the collusion of the British Government indirectly in the murder of ‘expendable’ collaborators and innocent bystanders. Not only did Ingram accuse the British Government of wilfully encouraging terrorism, but also that it ‘participated in state-sponsored murder’.1 Ingram alleges that Thatcher also seems to have compromised agents to ease the Anglo–Irish Agreement.2 The players in Clockwork Orange became the dangerous agents provocateurs of a later date.

As we move into an era long removed from the events described in this book, a writer of alternative political histories soon realises that many memories remain raw and certain actions cannot be spoken of above a hint and a whisper. It remains in the interests of the government to defend the permanence and stability of the state and to defend the status quo. The Oath of Allegiance (and the concept of Defence of the Realm), which demands loyalty to the Crown, was created in its modern form in the Promissory Oaths Act of 1868, but goes back to the Magna Carta. It promotes both loyalty to the government and to the people. That oath defends the legitimate business undertaken by civil servants, military personnel, police and the justice system, but also self-legitimises actions by individuals whose interpretation of the oath allows them to go ‘rogue’ as patriots. This was the hidden nature of the Thatcher era.

Thus, the absolute conviction that the state requires secrets as its raison d’être is founded on the belief that public scrutiny is unstable and incapable of making decisions, and, furthermore, that it undermines good governance (not good governments). The ‘state’ remains outside the values of democracy and is not required to uphold the rules. In order for liberal democracy to flourish, as this book argues, it requires illiberal activities to go unmonitored and undiscovered. The state must always be seen as benevolent, wise and stable. The stability of the monarchy and the sacred promise this implies (or the oath becomes merely partial and particular) is the keystone to an invisible network that stretches upwards from family units to the highest reaches of political power. Mavericks are ‘encouraged’ in order to disguise the fabric of permanence.

This permanence and benevolence becomes most threatened when a problem arises from within the system itself, and is attached to those who are trusted to uphold the system and what it stands for. Nowhere does this become more obvious than if private interests of the members of the establishment are exposed as morally corrupt, thus bankrupting the system they uphold. Every effort must be employed by their peers to suppress the problem so as to avoid bringing the whole edifice under scrutiny. This is not undertaken to suppress the activity, but to suppress access to knowledge of the activity. Naked power, disguised as wise governance, must be retained. Any threat needs containment.

Yet threats sometimes occur. Perhaps the worst was the establishment paedophile cases ‘exposed’ by an informant called ‘Nick’ (real name Carl Beech) and championed by MP Tom Watson. Beech was convicted of twelve counts of perverting the course of justice and one of fraud at Newcastle Crown Court. He was sentenced to eighteen years’ imprisonment; Watson was discredited and retired from political life in 2020. Nevertheless, doubts linger. We know that Cyril Smith was under secret service scrutiny and that his actions had been reported to the police in the 1960s. We also now know that senior politicians were aware of what was occurring in Rochdale even as he got a knighthood. The exposure of his crimes did not take place until after his death, and Lord David Steele did not resign until after these revelations were made official. The same inquiry that identified Smith as a predator exonerated others who had been accused. Such actions are calculated to create the sense of ‘one bad apple’, whereas most paedophiles act in secret concert. Thus, those who might have information regarding these cases or be involved in some other way are sidelined or ignored. The case of Beech and his accusations does not, however, remain closed, despite the trial.3

For such a fabric of secrecy to work smoothly, it is necessary to create sufficient surveillance mechanisms to prevent dissent and to carefully cover the tracks of those in power who may have erred. This may include covert actions (usually by the intelligence agencies, police or their associates), the creation of private companies or organisations as fronts (such as the American/German organisation Crypto or a British organisation such as Keenie Meenie Services (KMS Ltd)), and the deliberate actions of deep cover provocateurs, either abroad or at home.4 Once earlier historical priorities have diminished the intelligence service’s desire for institutional security, new targets have to be sought and expanded as major threats.5 Such new targets – surrounded by secrecy and ‘honourable’ (sometimes fictional) dealings with government and, occasionally, with the public – ensure a steady increase in personnel and funding. In 2021, these threats are fear of right-wing terrorism, Islamic terrorism, Russian and Chinese infiltration and, to a lesser extent, left-wing ‘terrorism’ (eco-protest, etc.).

These priorities, more often than is comfortable to admit, endanger the public, such as when intelligence-gathering (especially with regards to terrorists and terrorism) is deemed more important than prevention. Indeed, this seems to have been the case with the perpetrators of 7/7 (7 July 2005), the killing of Lee Rigby on 22 May 2013, the Westminster Bridge attack on 22 March 2017, the Manchester Arena bombing on 22 May 2017, and the Streatham attack on 2 February 2020, not to mention the case of Khairi Saadallah, a 25-year-old man from Libya who was later arrested under the Terrorism Act for his attack in Reading on 20 June 2020. Whilst there are approximately 40,000 potential targets under some sort of interest by the security services, these failures remain significant. The story of these intelligence ‘failures’ is best summed up by the case of Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the 7/7 bombers, who, apparently, was only of interest to MI5 as a ‘petty fraudster’. Why MI5 should have trailed a person for such an offence remains a mystery.6

This book is about the secret state during the Thatcher era. Tony Blair extended the secret state under a smokescreen of democratic process and moral purpose, as have later prime ministers. The relevant laws began to be passed in the Thatcher era, but have been expanded ever since, and have often been muddied by the Home Office to prevent the threat of a spontaneous demonstration or the blocking of a road, with major threats from terrorists suggested to prevent attendance. The particular laws are the Public Order Act (1980); the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (1984); the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act (1994); the Crime and Disorder Act (1998); the Anti-Social Behaviour Act (2003); the Terrorism Act (2000); the Prevention of Terrorism Act (2005); the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (2005), once used to prosecute the lone protester Brian Haw. In 2020, more such laws were passed or used (see p. 15).

All of these, in part, or combined, continue to strip away rights that were never granted willingly by any government, but fought for over centuries by libertarians, radicals and simply reasonably minded people. Again, in 2020 both the Scottish Assembly and Westminster were discussing revised and more draconian police powers: the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Bill and the Covert Intelligence Sources (CHIS) Bill respectively. The trial of Julian Assange, possibly the most important ‘political’ trial in Britain since the Profumo Affair, was conducted with tightly restricted access to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and journalists and with virtually no mainstream reporting. Only after a prolonged trial was Assange’s extradition to the United States rejected on the morning of Monday, 4 January 2021.

As I write, we have just emerged from a second and tougher pandemic lockdown situation under the Coronavirus Act (2020); an emergency powers act, in effect, which passed all stages in ten hours, has had no parliamentary oversight and is only to be reviewed at a future date. On 21 April, the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England) Regulations 2020, under the umbrella of the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984, was quietly amended to clarify the law for the police. But it effectively created more police powers rather than just defining those already granted. These amendments had no apparent parliamentary oversight; 6-(1) the Public Health Act states, ‘during the emergency period, no person may leave the place where they are living without reasonable excuse.’ To whom (the police) and why an ‘excuse’ or explanation is required is not given, except that only a police officer is likely to ask and therefore interpret what they consider an excuse. Why an excuse as opposed to a reason is required is not stated, although the words ‘specific reason’ has in most official announcements replaced ‘excuse’.

The nebulous ideal of civil liberty, coupled as it is in most people’s minds with ‘British freedom’, is simply one that is granted by authority as a privilege rather than a right. This is the ‘old’ new normal, now revealed as naked power, but with a subtle twist: popular acquiescence. This has not always been the case, nor was it generally realised in 2020 to 2021 that in some cases warrants were no longer needed to enter and search private property (your home). In Scotland, during 2020, the present crisis allows for a suspension of a warrant if the police believe you have a party of sixteen or more on your premises, and whilst the law remains unaltered in England and Wales, the police are allowed to enter your home if they believe ‘exigent circumstances justify the intrusion’, something the police were left to decide for themselves.

David Cameron was faced with curbing surveillance excesses. Yet, Cameron opposed reforms and safeguards to surveillance methods such as phone and internet tapping. The authorisation of warrants by ministers rather than judges retained for Cameron sufficient accountability to be robust. During 2015, Home Secretary Theresa May authorised 2,345 interceptions. Authorisation under a new bill was aimed to restrict warrants for defence or foreign policy purposes, which was already quite wide enough. The question of abuse by those who are meant to safeguard national security is unanswerable, and those who are authorised to carry out such security, in effect, have even less scrutiny.

Opposition voices are quickly demonised, made peripheral or ignored. Such governmentally driven policies (under the pressure of the Civil Service and state players) means that considered and legitimate protest is pushed to the margins and ridiculed. Rational opposition is quickly silenced, which allows only eccentric opposition to take to the streets. The protests against lockdown during 2020 led by Kate Shemirani and David Icke in Trafalgar Square actually allowed for conspiracy theory objectors to validate their views, led by speakers whose own attitudes are seriously suspect. Thus, it is relatively easy to ‘plant’ an opinion piece in the news that discredits the whole opposition. This indeed occurred in a curious ‘news’ item on BBC News (26 October 2020), in which one of Shemirani’s estranged sons spoke of the dangers of his mother’s strange world view. Whether Shemirani and her followers are misguided or deranged conspiracy theorists does not answer why the BBC ran an item for informational purposes rather than newsworthiness. One suspects such interventions are Home Office-driven and have no relation to public interest.

Protest under authoritative legislation has not gone away, but it has been more carefully, if sometimes cack-handedly, handled. Police negotiate both the handling of ‘illegal’ public demonstrations and the press, as well as politicians who both congratulate and condemn police actions to prove that they themselves are caring. The rule of ‘order’, even the very notion of civic order, is now confusingly used to mean keeping the streets quiet and voices silent.

Nevertheless, despite the pandemic there were numerous protests (giving the notion of a free society where protest is welcomed and tolerated) between 2020 and 2021 – from the Black Lives Matter disturbances to the Sarah Everard vigil – but the policing of such protests under the extraordinary circumstances of the new public health laws has shown the possibilities of greater control of gatherings in public spaces, especially as the majority of the population is still fearful of the concept of a ‘crowd’ packed together in a confined space. These fears are almost replications of the eighteenth-century fear of the ‘mob’.

We are becoming used to lives lived indoors and masked existence at a distance outside. As the situation has changed, more police oversight of public displays of dissent are set to come into force, with the possible passing of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill (2021). Authority now has no limits and is defended both by public inquiry (the acceptance of police action at the Sarah Everard vigil by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services) and the police and judicial systems. Laws that back a police force in which the whole population is criminalised are now gaining momentum.

Who determines a national threat to security and for what purpose is data gathered? Thatcher effectively criminalised the entire population by relying on the advice of paranoid agents who saw the red menace in every comment by those who did not agree with her aggressive war on global communism. The revelations of Edward Snowden, showing the clear complicity between the (National Security Agency) NSA and Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), exposes a fine line between defending freedom and democracy, spying on allies, gathering economic data and gathering raw information in bulk that simply criminalises whole populations. It is the actual operations of the secret intelligence agencies that are both collusive and potentially criminal.

We have moved from the opening of sealed envelopes of possible royalists during the Commonwealth (actually a family business lasting until the mid-nineteenth century) to the regular, but often dubious, phone-tapping of the late 1970s, to electronic surveillance so sophisticated that it effectively criminalises everyone by eavesdropping in order to gather ‘useful’ data. People who do not want to be part of such data collection, and anyone who wishes to keep their privacy intact by encrypting their messages, is now someone who acts suspiciously and is therefore de facto a potential criminal. The scandal over Cambridge Analytica suggests the extent of the privatisation of surveillance methods and the complicity of government departments and deep state players. The general public are the victims of surveillance – not our ‘enemies’.

Both Thatcher’s and Blair’s worlds were ones where secrecy was paramount and obfuscation and deceit were the necessary weapons to get the public on their side for decisions which would have been considered doubtful or criminal if all the facts of the case had been known by the very people the government was trying to convince. The Official Secrets Act (1989) created a more trustworthy and legal basis for secrecy and security, whilst at the same time exempting huge areas of state action from scrutiny and criminalising other areas previously exempt from prosecution. Blair’s open policy that was intended to democratise security ended with the Freedom of Information Act (2005), which Blair himself considered a blunder and which was simply sidestepped when his government wanted its policies endorsed and its actions screened off from public view until it was too late to avert and too late to prosecute offenders.

The subversion of democratic procedure, the ruler of law and of transparency, are the alchemical black arts known only to a privileged few in the Home Office and the secret services. Within those organisations, the protection of the state from invisible enemies was, and remains, paramount. The so-called ‘enemies within’ worked like a virus to undermine the order of things; and the traditions of power built over decades in Whitehall, the army, the police, the judiciary, the government and elsewhere in those private agencies organised by operatives and bureaucrats in the deep (and unelected) state pledged to continue to hold power, unchallenged.

The coronavirus pandemic of 2020–21 and the actions of Western governments, including that of Boris Johnson, weaponised illness and changed the nature of state secrecy and state coercion. It proved an easy step for government as an instrument of state to implement coercion without opposition. A propaganda period that suggested the pandemic was a world catastrophe equal to the Black Plague or Spanish Influenza enabled the government to bring in the most coercive measures ever used in peace time. The Home Office and secret services were supplanted by an unexpected agency of coercion: the National Health Service. The crisis of health provision was neatly turned into a crisis of health. Fear of imminent death or of inadvertently causing the death of a loved one forced the population to voluntarily self-isolate (actually self-imprisonment).

Yet the government’s measures were carefully orchestrated to create a self-directed and obedient public that is now psychologically wired in to produce paranoia regarding one’s neighbours and traitorous hoarders, a suspicion of international conspiracies – Chinese or otherwise – and fear of others, including close family members. This bred reliance on governmental measures, not suspicion of them.

The invisible enemy, the enemy within, was a virus so dangerous it could destroy the world order. This disease was subversive of our way of life, dangerous to the economy, destructive of global stability and capable of being secretly hosted by a life-long friend or a sibling, spouse, child or parent. To object to this idea or to raise doubts was subversive activity.

The language to describe coronavirus was that of the anti-communist rhetoric of the 1980s repackaged as a health warning. That the virus started in China emphasises the point. In the age of the image, this virus attacks invisibly, its only trace the weary faces of doctors and nurses dressed in personal protective equipment (PPE) ‘anti-radiation’ suits. Thus the age of fake news broadcast as images is subverted by invisibility itself. The filming of post-event crises is the fuel that keeps coercion alive, shown incessantly through the news, special programmes, government statements and apps such as Facebook, Instagram, House Party, Twitter, Telegram, WhatsApp and YouTube.

Conspiracy theories feed the chaos of public response and make the job of experts and government easier as they disseminate the ‘facts’, as if facts are without context, or experts provide actuarial nuance in the name of a monolithic scientism. Comparisons with other diseases, or with such deaths as those caused by common flu and drug abuse – which are both, in different ways, contagious and without cure – are ignored in order to put forward a ‘pure’ message that can be trusted.

Trust is based on expert opinion, and science becomes a moral compass for action. Yet the technician and the scientific expert have been used since the beginning of the twentieth century in regimes that distrust democratic debate and dissension. The expert with his graph and predictions has been the driver of change in the fantasies of authoritarians from the extreme right and the extreme left. Rule by experts replaces rule by law and democratic process and replaces it with dictats and obligations; rights are suspended by ‘the committees of public safety’ and amateur vigilantes are recruited to enforce the will of science (local governments used uniformed personnel to call door-to-door). Those who theologised this crisis as some spiritual retribution by an abused earth fall into the trap of liberalism, unable to realise that the authoritarian measures taken are undertaken as both directed by reason and humanism. Instead, the virus (a value-neutral disaster) and the government’s response (filled with the morality and values attached to family life) suggest we are to blame and that the original sin of inherent human wickedness, laughed at by secularists since the eighteenth century, is a reality which, ironically, only science can defeat. Without God we are left with only a scientific explanation that can be spiritualised to make guilt universal and obedience essential if we want redemption.7

Coronavirus is, in essence, ‘anti-Western’; not because of its origins, but because the disease has mutated into ideology. It has allowed unprecedented authoritarian measures to be imposed without a murmur. Democracy has been suspended, the economy threatened, individuals criminalised for over buying or standing too near each other, and paranoia and depression have become the psychological scars that run so deeply they may be re-awakened at a moment’s notice as the sort of apocalyptic and existential nightmare that was, for earlier generations, the threat from nuclear war. Who knew that it was health that destroyed the deep state and its machinations? The state no longer has to coerce through secret channels. It only needs to broadcast the concept of fear to gain compliance.

The age of Wikileaks and Edward Snowden seem a faded dream of an antediluvian world of state secrets and lies. Nevertheless, despite reports to the contrary, free speech has survived and is alive and well; yet it has been made wholly peripheral by the number of platforms that serve it. Instead of concentrating opposition voices, these platforms diffuse the message into innumerable soundbites. The many European anti-lockdown protests and riots have largely been ignored by mainstream media and left to amateur journalists and Russian-sponsored YouTube streams watched by almost no one. Such sources are, of course, another possibly dangerous form of gaslighting.

By managing the language of the debate in mainstream newspapers, magazines, television and talk radio stations, government and its allies can effectively counter such language by refusing it a voice. The voices of free (i.e. oppositional) speech then become just one noise amongst many and may be categorised as belonging to a conspiratorial margin that includes both left-wing commentators and right-wing broadcasters. Those whose first stop for information is now the internet and who do not wish to engage with the news on television are thrown into the baited world of YouTube broadcasts by fanatics – those with an axe to grind – or news platforms whose agenda is not liberal. Free speech has effectively been emasculated. The state has grown up and the secret machinations of state operatives have created the psychological internalisation of fear and trembling, only alleviated by the bitter pill of continuous state intervention. We have finally learned to trust those for whom we should be most suspicious.

This new edition now includes updated information, incorporated comments by helpful readers and an enlarged bibliography. The arguments in the book have never been substantially challenged and I stand by them; the facts have all been scrupulously checked, but my conclusions are at the mercy of the reader.

Thatcher still remains a divisive figure. On 23 February 2021, Grantham teacher Mark Robla created a sculpture of Thatcher’s head on a spike and erected it on the plinth set aside by the local council for a more respectful statue.8

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND PERMISSIONS

I would like to thank The History Press for permission to reprint an extract from my book Restless Revolutionaries: A History of Britain’s Fight for a Republic (Stroud, 2010).

I would like to thank Gerry Gable; James Goddard of the TUC Library at the London Metropolitan University Archives; the Margaret Thatcher Archives; the archivists of the Scottish National Party and those of the National Archives of Scotland; Maria Castrillo, curator of Political Collections at the National Library of Scotland; the librarian, the Library and Museum of Freemasonry; John McGill, founder of Scotland-UN; David Powell, archive manager at D.C. Thomson for the Sunday Post; Professor Warren von Eschenbach of the University of Notre Dame; Lesley Kacher; and Mark Beynon, Lauren Newby and Rebecca Newton at The History Press.

For this edition I should like to thank Paul Manning for his legal clarifications, researchers including Dr Stephano Bonino and for discussions with those former policemen and journalists who came forward with information that is sometimes not in the public domain.

I need to mention numerous correspondents from the mining community, including William Evans, who worked at Woolley Colliery (Darton), near Barnsley, with Arthur Scargill. Others I met whilst giving talks. At one talk Valerie Martin gave me a picture of Thatcher in her early days at a dance in Welling, Kent, in 1949. Although there were a large number of guests in fancy dress, Martin recalls Thatcher was haughty and talked to no one. Thatcher’s gracious attitude to minority groups was taken as a given by me when I started writing. Nevertheless, this is not entirely true. BBC2’s programme Young Margaret: Love, Life and Letters, which was broadcast on 28 October 2013, revealed a letter she had sent from her honeymoon in Madeira in which she writes of ‘tatty tourists, Jews and novo[sic] riche’. Sam Wollaston of the Guardian concluded that she was ‘a bore, a boaster and a bully, friendless, joyless, loveless, demanding, controlling, snobbish, racist and mean’.

1

MONSTER TIME

What machinations brought Thatcher to power and what secrets helped sustain the Thatcherite revolution? This is the story of the state-within-the-state which warped Thatcher’s premiership from its inception. How was the population convinced to support an ideology designed to defeat those whom Thatcher defined as the ‘enemies within’: those with whom she could not see eye to eye? It is also about how her supporters recognised whether a civil servant, journalist, union leader or simple member of the public was ‘one of us’ rather than ‘one of them’: the subversive and unwashed socialists of whom her government was so wary. It led to a world of dirty tricks and murder.

The central argument of this book is that there was an undeclared and internal ‘cold war’ fought throughout the 1980s in which rogue elements in the government, military and secret services seemed to have free rein to distort facts and even kill opposition voices under the camouflage of black propaganda.

Everything in this book is true; everything is false. It all depends on which side of the looking glass one is standing. There will be those who might be sceptical that the evidence represented here is only a multiplicity of coincidences. Nevertheless, the coincidences do start to make patterns – a matter of point of view, perhaps.

This is not another book on the story of Thatcher or a history of her premiership; nor is it a retelling of the long (and often secret) war with the Irish Republican Army (IRA). However, it is about aggression and the world that partially grew from the Irish Troubles, much of which was exported to mainland Britain and much of which was kept secret.

My central argument is that there was not only a secret and undeclared internal ‘cold war’ fought throughout the 1980s (a war that had started in the 1970s), but that the consequences of the decisions and events that occurred in those years had huge implications for the importance and role of the state as it has evolved into the twenty-first century. It is in the years between the mid 1970s and the early 1990s that the state became a direct arm of government policy; one which pursued an undeclared agenda unexamined by parliament or voters. This led, by degrees, to the secret bureaucracy of the state metamorphosing into the real and uncontrolled hidden political power in Britain in the early twenty-first century – a power no longer decided or directed by parliamentary process.

This was a particularly contradictory situation, as Thatcher always seemed opposed to the ‘wets’ of the old boy network who made up the servants of the state. Indeed, after the final exposure of Sir Anthony Blunt’s role as a double agent in 1979, Thatcher was apparently prepared to expose the system and destroy it. Sir Bernard Ingham, Thatcher’s Press Secretary, recalled her attacking the duplicity of those controlling MI5: ‘I believe she did it because she didn’t see why the system should cover things up. This was early in her prime ministership. I think she wanted to tell the Civil Service that the politicians decide policy, not the system. She wanted them to know who was boss.’1

It was not, however, without irony that Thatcher came to rely more and more on the secretive and American-inspired free-market experiments of economists such as Milton Friedman. Free markets (about which Thatcher insisted, ‘There [was] no alternative’) were needed if individual enterprise was to be revived in Britain. Yet the free-market system would have to be created against fierce, entrenched, organised and mainly socialist (and liberal) opposition. To achieve the changes required for the correct social engineering (although ‘There [was] no such thing as society’), Thatcher needed conservative-orientated state organisations and government policies to face down the perceived ‘enemy’ (the unions, militant activists, the anti-nuclear lobby, anti-cruise missile feminists, New Agers, gay people) and destroy them in the name of freedom of choice. This would be achieved through the narrowing of the political framework and the growing authoritarianism of state decisions.

Thatcher’s years saw the growth and frequent deployment of the Special Air Service (SAS), the Security Service (MI5), the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), Special Branch, GCHQ surveillance and police powers. All were increased to deal with internal threats to perceived security. The ‘enemy within’ was to be interpreted far beyond the miners to include the real fear of the break-up of the United Kingdom through the defeat of British forces in Ireland and the potential victories of secret ‘Trotskyist’ cells planted inside unions, GCHQ and the Labour Party. Enemies grew to include Greater London councillors, Scottish nationalists, ecological protesters, poll-tax activists, inner-city youths and, it seemed, most of the population of Liverpool.

This story follows the many accusations of conspiratorial politics in the late 1970s until the early 1990s, from those of the paranoid right to those of an equally paranoid left. Because the right ultimately won the political battle, this story is framed in terms of those who were cast into the wilderness for over ten years and whose tales were dismissed as the ravings of lunatics and renegades. For the most part, the stories of murder, cover-ups, lying and institutional corruption that emerged at the time have never been proven. Nevertheless, taken together, they provide a hidden story of an era; one that, because there was prosperity and economic well-being, could be dismissed as a fantasy as long as the cash flowed. By the time the cash ran out, the stories had gone cold, or, like the miners’ strike, had become the stuff of legend, or even, like the Irish troubles, fallen on deaf ears because things needed to be forgotten if peace was to be achieved.

The period that stretches from Harold Wilson’s last term to Margaret Thatcher’s three terms in office was perhaps the most authoritarian since the first two decades of the nineteenth century, and the most secret in modern history. In effect, this is the story of the emergence in Britain of two forces: that of economic regeneration and that of Britain as a nuclear (-energy) state entangled with the United States and paranoid about communist subversion. These two propositions have immensely important significance if taken together. To achieve one of these aims required the other coming into play. Economic regeneration was intimately tied to the international arms trade which, in turn, was tied to the centrality of nuclear fuel for a modern, regenerated and internationally significant United Kingdom.

The 1980s were not just a story of yuppie success, defeated northern workers and the rise of Estuary English; they were also a tale of secret machinations, top-secret civil defence bunkers, the ever-present fear of nuclear annihilation and the overwhelming belief that Britain had been penetrated by dark forces bent on destroying the British way of life.

The United Kingdom is rapidly changing, and Thatcher’s ideals seem to have vanished – all except one: the power and importance of the extra-parliamentary state and its surveillance methods and hidden powers in a new age of terrorism. This narrative is, therefore, an exploration not only of the myth of Thatcher, but also a reminder of the real and perceived threats in a period which has been remembered in recent histories as a story entirely to do with surface matters, and sanitised and mythologised in films such as The Iron Lady.

In her beginnings were her ends. In 1971, Margaret Thatcher was voted ‘the most unpopular woman in Britain’ by readers of the Sun which even asked, ‘Is Mrs Thatcher Human?’2 On 29 October 1986, Tam Dalyell broke parliamentary rules and accused Thatcher, when she was prime minister, of being a ‘bounder, a liar, a deceiver, a cheat and a crook’.3 A reckoning of sorts occurred at The Ritz on 8 April 2013 when the Iron Lady passed away, aged 87. By the time of her death, Margaret Thatcher had already reached a type of international sainthood, especially with the release of numerous films and documentaries. Her funeral on 17 April 2013 was called ‘ceremonial’, but was a state affair by another name. It had been planned before her death and was sufficiently grand to give the British people pause for thought. No commoner had had this type of funeral since Winston Churchill. The crowds watching the military procession began arriving the night before, the occasion was packed with dignitaries and there was full television coverage.

On the whole, the day was dignified. Yet all was not well. The wounds from thirty years before were opened and examined again; Thatcher’s divisive nature was revisited. In northern towns, people built bonfires in celebration of her demise as they had done hundreds of years before for other folk demons. There was a small but vocal demonstration at the funeral; someone threw something from the crowd as the bier passed and the song ‘Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead’ almost reached number one in the music charts.

All the evidence presented here is verifiable from sources elsewhere. The facts, such are they are, have accumulated in books, articles, newspapers, television programmes, government reports, parliamentary debates, individual letters, memoirs, and on the internet. This is the first time it has all been brought together in one volume and various patterns have emerged. The evidence paints a picture of an almost lost world. Most of the books I have used for research are out of print and many hard to find; the documentary programmes are now forgotten or half-remembered; the news just yesterday’s tittle-tattle. Nevertheless, these tales paint a certain picture of Britain that appears, in hindsight, both more violent and certainly more authoritarian than is usually remembered, something recognised by those in the headlights of the authorities at the time. The history that emerges is of a country not just in deep crisis before Thatcher came to power, but in a crisis that lasted throughout her three terms and continued into those of John Major – a crisis managed by unseen and dangerous people, wholly unelected and nameless.

Many of the relevant books from the 1970s and 1980s have long been out of print, and each was directed at only a single injustice. I have endeavoured to gather the numerous arguments and put them back into public view to be read alongside long-forgotten reports and pamphlets mouldering in archives and the new proliferation of internet material. The book is a compendium, of sorts, of wrongdoing, bad management and lies. It is not a particular attempt merely to put new evidence on the table, but to act as a synthesis for the great babble of competing voices which urgently need to be heard in a format easily available and in one place, where all the evidence may be impartially judged.

As such, what is recorded here is the disparate investigations of different people often working in isolation and never quite sure of what was true or false. In a sense, these pages represent speculation of a rather particular research type, half history and half the innuendo from which history is made. I am only too aware that different registers of significance will be attached to the various pieces of the jigsaw which I offer. I am also aware that conjecture does not make for facts, but my point is that in the scenarios described in this book there are few facts, if any, and the investigator is forced to make a pattern out of fragments and hearsay.

The stories are sometimes garnered from testimonial evidence, which occasionally lacks forensic corroboration. Yet testimony can be powerful, and testimony joined by logic and the overwhelming coincidence of events becomes evidence, especially when squared with the documents available and the conjectures made by political historians, investigators and journalists.

This was a world where records regularly went missing and documents were too often shredded and the media fed misinformation and reproduced it as fact. When ‘details dovetail neatly with those of others’ (to borrow a phrase from a notorious series of articles in the Independent in 1987, which were allegedly fed to journalist David McKittrick by British intelligence sources to blacken the name of whistle-blower Colin Wallace),4 we might be rationally inclined to agree that the pattern on the wallpaper is wholly produced from a willingness on the part of readers to fill in the blank spaces with shapes that don’t exist.

This refusal to accept that there is no pattern except in the reader’s head is what David Aaronovitch of The Times calls ‘voodoo history’.5 Yet the intelligence services will regularly feed stories to a newspaper in order to defuse accusations that the pattern does exist and that the dots could and should be joined; evidence dovetails because it has the traction of not being co-ordinated. It is the rational denial printed in the quality media or reproduced on the news which proves to be the false decoy by embarrassing readers and viewers into believing that they have been duped by their own credulity.

On the whole, I have used investigations into particular events and works interpreting those events to provide a micro-history which concentrates on the unfortunate men and women, some half remembered, some almost forgotten, who formed what came to be known as the ‘enemy within’, people who wittingly or unwittingly found themselves bunched together as unacknowledged conspirators in a war of ideologies, which they lost. Their defeat was the triumph of the state machine. These oppositional voices have never been fully vindicated and they probably never will. The villains of the piece were universally crowned with laurels, their crimes securely hidden and guarded, their motivations largely unknown. Officially sanctioned villainy is at the heart of this book, whether it be policy towards parliamentary procedure, the safety of British citizens or the protection of state ‘secrets’.

I have also looked at the many half-remembered actors who formed a Thatcherite right even before Thatcher knew she stood for an ideology: ideologues on both sides determine this debate. Those right-wing thinkers are not, however, characters from the fringe, but figures from the centre who, for one reason or another, have been expunged from the record or have faded into the background. By revisiting the documents relating to their activities, the reader can check every fact as well as every ‘fact’ and make their own mind up about those years leading to the end of the Cold War and just beyond.

I have tried to use only information in the public domain, being increasingly distrustful of memoirs, Thatcherite hagiographies and reminiscences that seem to skirt vital connections, or books on espionage that clearly only tell the particular ‘truth’ of those who are granted access to the information in the first place. I have also avoided those synoptic histories of the period which pour everything into a mix which includes high politics and pop music, excellent though they are.

The book is not just about Thatcher, and to blame her premiership for all that is said in the following pages would be absurd. As always, this is a story of accumulation and adaption. Nevertheless, the book does concentrate on Thatcher’s time in office, as well as on her time as leader of the opposition. To complete the story, I have strayed beyond either end of her premiership. To me it seems clear that, despite the numerous books written about her and the different aspects of the Conservative government’s decisions in office, much of the sense of the period still needs to be joined up. Unfortunately, the right’s flattery and the left’s opprobrium have left much of the field still to be explored. Indeed, the paranoia felt by the left was matched by paranoia on the right, and the usual suspects in socialist opposition may be matched by a host of figures on the Conservative and traditionalist right who felt embattled and almost defeated during the run-up to Thatcher’s first premiership.

What interests me is the activity that seems to have fallen through the net or been sidelined or ignored as if it was all merely a matter of conspiracy theory and pseudo-history. Even the nature of paranoia in the period is worth its own special study, and much of that paranoia is itself based on the deliberately disseminated half-truths and distortions put out by the Home Office, police, intelligence services, Ministry of Defence (MOD), Atomic Energy Agency, Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and army. It is hardly surprising that official versions of events, many of which appeared to the public ephemeral at the time, are distinctly more interesting when put into a pattern. It is for the reader to decide if the patterns I have identified are mere fantasy or not. They can check the records. I have tried to apply a certain logic which I hope is not false, but may seem exaggerated to some.

The debate over the role of Thatcherism’s influence on the state and the state’s influence on Thatcher has, for the most part, been ignored in the histories, but, for me, these things are central to the period and make us think again about the truth of the world around us. Thatcher’s years in office were determined by three areas of principle: the need to curb union power (and its apparently communistic corporatism); the need to create wider liberty (through authoritarian means); and the need to keep Britain central to Cold War diplomacy (by the maintenance of nuclear weapons, civil nuclear technology and military exports). The government and its servants were not always as particular as they might have been over the means to achieve these principles.

In this respect, the issue of ownership of the Falkland Islands which had festered for a long time before Thatcher came to power and caught her government by surprise is central to the distortion of ideas relating to the period. Because the resultant war was successfully concluded, it not only skewed the overall aims that Thatcher professed, but also seemed to confirm them to voters. It was a most fortuitous accidental symptom of her politics, but not fundamental to them. In this respect, investigative journalists and nosy politicians at the time have proved more powerful voices than recent historians in uncovering state abuses and systematic obfuscation.

Many of the situations described in this book were originally there to deceive and, in order to cover them up, more lies had to follow. Many of the circumstances occurred before Thatcher came to power, but she was not merely the guardian of those who lied; she also had to lie in turn to protect herself. Thatcher was aware of deceits which made the difficulties over the sinking of the General Belgrano or the Westland affair seem trivial. This other register of deception went to the heart of modern Conservatism and later fatally infected New Labour. It concerned activities during a time when those who wanted an authoritarian and strictly conservative (and Conservative) government were devising ‘Thatcherism’ and were still looking for the person who would bear the name of the ideology they had created. Indeed, Alan Sherman, one of her closest advisers, believed that, ‘Mrs Thatcher never “thunk” [sic] any thoughts,’ rather her instinct was ‘to do’, that is, put into effect the various ideas that were coalescing around her.6

This book charts the significance of government policy and state action across four prime ministers: Edward Heath and Harold Wilson, who feared those who ran the secret state; Jim Callaghan, whose government unwittingly ushered in the rule of the new politics; and Margaret Thatcher, who was the protector of the secret state and its greatest beneficiary. This was politics by other means. A new term for hidden state activities had to be invented. The term ‘parapolitics’ was first used by Raghaven Iyer in 1979. Peter Dale Scott, however, used the term as a manifestation of ‘Deep Politics’. Founded in 1983, the cover of the second issue of Lobster Magazine used the word ‘parapolitics’, which Stephen Dorril and Robin Ramsey reworked as ‘para-politics’ in 1983. It was militaristic and aggressive from the start, an assault on legitimate political parties and political figureheads as well as union leaders. It was, in effect, a crusade against unionisation, liberals and the welfare state carried out on both an economic and a military front. The result was pure conspiracy come true, a coincidence of intention by person or persons unknown and social and economic circumstances:

Brutally summarised … Mrs Thatcher and Thatcherism grew out of a right-wing network in this country with extensive links to the military-intelligence establishment. Her rise to power was the climax of a long campaign by this network which included a protracted destabilisation campaign against the Labour and Liberal Parties – chiefly the Labour Party – during 1974–1976.7

Is such a thesis to be believed and is it credible? Was there one plot, or many, that seemed to overlap and intertwine? In the late 1980s, there seemed a case for thinking so. The scenario seemed, at face value, to be improbable, but everything about what was revealed by whistle-blowers such as Colin Wallace, Cathy Massiter, Fred Holroyd, Gary Murray, Clive Ponting and Peter Wright seemed bizarre and it was only the similarities and coincidences of their stories that gave credence to their arguments. Investigative journalists such as Martin Dillon, Paul Foot, Duncan Campbell, Gerry Gable and Judith Cook pursued stories which corroborated evidence. Amateurs such as Peter Green would not let explanations lie, however plausible, and continue even now to search for the flaws. Members of Parliament such as Tam Dalyell were tenacious. Against these voices must be taken the millions of voters who did not know, did not understand, did not concern themselves or did not care. In one or two instances things are now clearer.

These tangled stories are linked by reoccurring patterns or reoccurring names whilst some only appear to be tangential. Political machinations are often hard to follow, and information is complex and contradictory. Simply stated, this history offers a view of much of what had been already been investigated in the late 1980s regarding the secret state as revealed by whistle-blowers, former army information officers, the nuclear authorities, rogue intelligence officers and journalistic and private investigators. These stories are linked to the central thesis that Thatcher was privy to secrets and circumstances that it was convenient to ignore in the name of the ideology that satisfied and reassured so many and allowed the Conservatives to hold onto power for over a decade.

Only in the twenty-first century are some of the secrets kept by the security forces at the time coming to light. Only in the last seven years, for instance, has the continuing story of alleged paedophilic activity been revealed, although MI5 certainly seemed to know that certain MPs, such as Cyril Smith, were paedophiles as early as 1974. This was also the year when the mysterious file relating to the Wilson ‘plot’ known as ‘Clockwork Orange’ (perhaps named as such by a wag who knew it was about aversion therapy) appeared for the first time and which would have so much impact on later revelations.8

Yet, did the corruption and machinations of politicians, secret service personnel and police carry on much later into the 1980s and beyond? Did the forces of subversion and deception unleashed in the 1970s sink into the very fabric of the Thatcherite state to a point where corruption and deceit could not be recognised as corrupt because they served the ends of power and the interests of a certain party line? At the end of his 1989 book, Who Framed Colin Wallace, on the man whose revelations predate all the rest regarding contemporary state corruption, Paul Foot concluded:

from the early 1970s onwards, and particularly in Ireland, the British secret state stepped far beyond any line which should be tolerated by a democratic and civilised society; and that if such things, once exposed, are ignored or covered up by the authorities, the one certainty is that they will continue, to excesses even more horrific.9

By 1985, it had become quite clear to many that the cover-ups and the deceits of the 1970s, especially those in Northern Ireland, were now embedded in numerous cancerous ways in such diverse fields as mainland policing, Scottish independence, the Falklands War, the economic fight with the miners and, above all, the centrality of secrecy concerning both the civil and military nuclear industries.

Although I have known at least three of the participants in this book for many years, I have never knowingly met a member of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), Security Service (MI5), Special Branch, the RUC, the SAS, the Fourteenth Intelligence Company, ‘E Squadron’, Group 13 or the secretive – and possibly fictitious – ‘The Increment’. (The Increment appeared to be a group of serving SAS soldiers employed in black ops abroad. It was reborn as E Squadron in 2007 and noted by the BBC as operating during 2012.) Nor have I met the numerous bankers or security and arms consultants who started life as intelligence agents before receiving knighthoods and moving into the private sector.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the men (and occasionally women) who formed the intelligence network were a cadre and followed a profession which was, in their eyes at least, an honourable one. For the most part, their peccadilloes and eccentricities were their own: they were all (whatever their private tastes) socially conservative and traditional, and their allegiance was primarily to the Crown (unless they had switched to the Soviets). A government dedicated to fighting leftism could count on their necessary support so long as that support was unaccountable and certainly unattributable.

Generally, such mandarins were beyond criticism, leaving lesser men and women to take the blame. To question such people and expect an indiscreet answer is relatively pointless and so I have confined my research to written or recorded comments. Nevertheless, much of the tangible evidence has vanished, sometimes in mysterious circumstances, and some has occasionally miraculously reappeared. The written evidence has, at one time or other, been challenged or discredited. The physical evidence has been literally reduced to rubble or left as mouldering files in archives. Most of the men and women recorded in these pages have died and so are beyond questioning anyway, and those who haven’t are unlikely to face justice so many years later. Few records may be trusted at face value as to their intentions or origins.

Intelligence work is meant to be dull and unglamorous, but the very nature of unthinking routine may breed indifference to active abuse and encourage those who have the energy for plots to work unheeded by the multitude of their pen-pushing colleagues. The worst abuses may be those committed by overzealous persons working in an indifferent atmosphere where their activities may be carried out in full sight but remain invisible.

The murky world of secrecy and conspiracy that these worlds represent during the period is of sufficient interest, however, to allow an inquirer to question the fashionably bland histories and biographies of the period that litter the bookshelves, and dig up those accounts of forgotten intrigues and scandals that surfaced briefly, but seemed to evaporate with the passing of time. There is at least prima facie evidence of all sorts of black propaganda and smoke and mirrors to suggest that Parliament and voters were deliberately deceived for long periods and that there certainly seemed to lurk deep in the darkest unrecorded bowels of the state certain organisations that did the intelligence service’s dirty work, which, on occasion, would entail burglary and intimidation, and possibly even murder.

Too much thinking like this (one hears the reader say) leads straight down the Pont d’Alma road tunnel with Princess Diana and the ‘confessions’ of soldier N, but thinking like this may also lead to the Straits of Gibraltar, which provided the scene for the most controversial of all the army’s actions in the period, and to possible clandestine operations designed to destabilise government, re-engineer the social fabric and remove anyone who got in the way.