Joe Haines tells the Times of relationship with Janet Hewlett-Davies before Labour leader resigned from No 10
Harold Wilson confessed to an affair during his final year in Downing Street, one of his closest surviving aides has revealed for the first time.
The former Labour prime minister had a secret affair with Janet Hewlett-Davies, his former deputy press secretary who was 22 years his junior, towards the end of his time in No 10.
Continue reading...Sixty-six MPs who already plan to stand down at election have 987 years between them, analysis shows
The Conservative party will lose almost 1,000 years of Commons experience just from MPs who have already announced they are standing down, a Guardian analysis has shown, amid an exodus likely to be even greater than in 1997.
So far, 66 MPs elected as Conservatives in 2019 have announced they will not stand again – this includes four who have since lost the whip and sit as independents – which is close to one in five of the total.
Continue reading...National Archives papers show prime minister tried in vain to avoid inquiry over Peter Wright’s memoirs
Margaret Thatcher was “utterly shattered” by the revelations in Spycatcher, the memoirs of the retired MI5 officer Peter Wright, files released publicly for the first time reveal.
The files also reveal the dilemmas faced by Thatcher’s government in its futile battle to suppress the book, including whether to agree to the Australian media tycoon Kerry Packer mediating an out of court “solution”.
Continue reading...Then PM was advised to ‘encourage’ British Museum to agree long-term loan in return for Greek support
Tony Blair considered a “long-term loan” of the Parthenon marbles to Greece in the hope of support for a London 2012 Olympic Games bid, newly released documents reveal.
Twenty years before Rishi Sunak cancelled a meeting with the Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, over the ownership question of the sculptures, Greece was lobbying Blair, the then prime minister, for a long-term loan, bypassing the issue of ownership.
Continue reading...Then PM thought move ‘would be excellent’ but Northern Ireland secretary Mo Mowlam was sceptical
Newly released state papers show that the former prime minister Tony Blair backed proposals for Wimbledon FC to move to Belfast but his Northern Ireland secretary Mo Mowlam was more sceptical.
Previously confidential state papers include a note from 1997 described as “following up earlier informal discussions about the possibility of an English Premier League football club relocating to Belfast”.
Continue reading...Sir Charles Trevelyan was Treasury official during great famine in 19th century when potato crops failed
The former BBC journalist Laura Trevelyan has said her family would consider paying compensation to Ireland because of an ancestor’s role in the Great Famine of the 19th century.
Her great-great-great-grandfather Sir Charles Trevelyan, a senior British government official, was among those who “failed their people” during the humanitarian catastrophe in the 1840s, she said.
Continue reading...National Archives documents show concerns raised over Scottish National Portrait Gallery’s proposal
Downing Street feared that a group portrait of Tony Blair’s cabinet that the Scottish National Portrait Gallery wanted to commission to mark New Labour’s 1997 election victory would look “triumphalist” and be unlikely to win votes in Scotland, newly released documents reveal.
The gallery proposed a portrait by Peter Howson, a distinguished member of the new wave of expressionist artists who emerged from the Glasgow School of Art in the 80s, and was willing to pay. With the fee likely to be “substantial”, Downing Street aides were also concerned about negative coverage if any public funds were used, the documents released by the National Archives show.
Continue reading...Files on Russian intelligence officer and ‘lady-killer’ Eugene Ivanov littered with reports of drunkenness
Eugene Ivanov, the Russian spy at the centre of the 1963 Profumo scandal, was a philandering alcoholic whose weakness for women and drink M15 hoped to exploit to get him to defect, but who ended up toppling the Macmillan government by chance, according to newly released intelligence files.
He arrived at the Russian embassy in London as assistant naval attache in 1960 but M15 suspected he was an intelligence officer, partly because he didn’t seem to know much about ships and also he carried an umbrella.
Continue reading...Notes from late 1990s show UK government believed it was due contract in recognition of defence of Kuwait
Tony Blair urged Kuwait to buy the UK’s latest artillery as payback for supporting the country during the Gulf war, newly released papers reveal.
Blair lobbied Crown Prince Sheikh Sa’ad between 1998 and 1999, including calling in on him during a brief stopover on a flight home from South Africa.
Continue reading...Archives reveal David Blunkett voiced concerns about overturning ban on ‘promotion’ of homosexuality
Tony Blair was warned about his government’s commitment to overturning a ban on the “promotion” of homosexuality in schools in the run-up to the 2001 general election, previously classified records show.
David Blunkett, then the education secretary, twice wrote to the prime minister to voice his concerns regarding the furore over section 28. It followed months of debate over potential changes to same-sex education in schools.
Continue reading...Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson was assassinated by IRA gunmen 100 years ago and then all but forgotten
On 22 June 1922 Sir Henry Wilson, an army field marshal turned MP, unveiled a plaque to railway employees who had died in the first world war before returning to his stately home in Belgravia, central London.
He was a distinctive figure – tall, in uniform, with a facial scar that had earned him a nickname as the “ugliest man in the British army”.
Continue reading...The UK signed an arms deal with pre-revolutionary Iran that it never fully delivered on. Will it finally pay the refund it owes?
The former UK foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt has said that practicalities, not principles, are holding back the payment of a £400m British debt to Iran, seen as a precondition of the release of British-Iranian dual nationals held in Tehran, including Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe.
Continue reading...Then US leader also turned down Chequers dinner because he wanted to ‘be a tourist’, archives show
Bill Clinton turned down tea with the Queen and dinner at Chequers because he wanted to “be a tourist” and try out an Indian restaurant during his first official visit to the UK with Tony Blair as prime minister, formerly classified documents reveal.
Downing Street wanted to pull out all the stops for a visit seen as crucial to “establishing a good working relationship” between the new prime minister and the then US president. Buckingham Palace contacted No 10 to say “HM the Queen would be very pleased” to invite the Clintons to tea at 5pm on their brief one-day detour from summits in Paris and The Hague.
Continue reading...Leave campaigners behind project only won charitable status by vowing it would tell balanced story
Leave campaigners have begun raising funds to open a Museum of Brexit after the long-awaited project was granted charitable status.
The trustees are seeking to generate £400,000 to buy a home for the museum – possibly in a pro-Brexit town such as Dudley in the West Midlands – plus another £250,000 to set up the institution and a strategic financial reserve of £350,000.
Continue reading...Proposed MCC membership for Mugabe and Thatcher’s birthday party plans among stories kept under wraps – until now
John Major vetoed a Foreign Office idea to offer honorary membership of the MCC to Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe, saying it was a “dodgy precedent”, records released by the National Archives reveal. The FCO proposed the offer for Mugabe’s 1994 state visit to the UK, stating he was “reportedly keen on cricket”.
Continue reading...Sir Keir Starmer faced off with Boris Johnson during prime minister's questions for the second time since he became Labour leader.
Starmer pushed Johnson on the UK's care home death rates, the removal of international comparison data and the lack of PPE and testing
Continue reading...Sinn Féin won the popular vote in Ireland’s recent elections shaking up a two-party system that has been dominated by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael for decades. The success was described as a youthquake but was that really the case? We meet some of the activists, politicians and voters to ask them what the result says about Ireland and about their hopes for a government as coalition talks continue
It should have been a normal family chat in late midsummer in Berlin. Kerstin Falkner, 22, and her new partner, Andreas, eight years her elder, were sitting in the back of Metzer Eck, the corner bar run by her mother, Bärbel, discussing where they might go for their holidays.
Only one thing was out of key: instead of joining in, Bärbel was sitting in the corner next to me, trying to keep back her tears. She simultaneously feared and hoped for the same thing: that they might not be coming home.
Continue reading...Magistrate’s message released to mark 200th anniversary may be first account of bloodshed
It was a defining moment in British political history, paving the way in the long struggle for democratic representation of the disenfranchised working classes.
Now, 200 years on from the Peterloo massacre in which peaceful protesters were cut down by sabre-wielding cavalry, a hastily scribbled note has been unearthed to reveal what could be the first account of the bloodshed.
Continue reading...17 May 1971: Mr Wilson and Mr Callaghan succeeded in persuading both pro- and anti-Market groups not to insist on firm decisions on either tactics or principle
Labour Party leaders last night came to the sensible conclusion that it was not worth splitting the Labour movement wide open over the Common Market when Mr Heath and the Conservative Party were already faced with the even more immediate and difficult problem of rallying a respectable Parliamentary majority for entry on the basis of Tory votes without the aid of Labour MPs.
That was, to all intents and purposes, the outcome of a full afternoon session of Labour’s national executive committee and the Shadow Cabinet of the Parliamentary Labour Party, at which Mr Wilson and Mr Callaghan succeeded in persuading both pro- and anti-Market groups not to insist on firm decisions on either tactics or principle. For the time being, the heat is out of the European issue inside the party.
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