Category Archives: Margaret Thatcher

Tory party fined £10,750 by Electoral Commission for not accurately reporting non-cash donations – UK politics live

Posted on by

Donations were related to an employee seconded to the party by a donor

The Conservative party has been fined £10,750 by the Electoral Commission for failing to accurately report non-cash donations worth more than £200,000.

The donations related to an employee who had been seconded to the party by a donor. The commission said:

The party under-reported non-cash donations, in the form of an employee seconded to the party by a donor between April 2020 to December 2023. The non-cash donations were under reported by more than £200,000, when the seconded employee went from part-time to full-time work at the party.

The party also reported late a single non-cash donation relating to the same seconded employee, in December 2023.

Our investigation into the Conservative and Unionist Party found a number of donations inaccurately reported or reported late. The political finance laws we enforce are there to ensure transparency in how parties are funded and to increase public confidence in our system, so it’s important donations are fully and clearly reported.

Where we find offences, we carefully consider the circumstances before deciding whether to impose a sanction. We take into account a range of factors before making our final decision, including proportionality.

Penny Mordaunt is not going to become the leader of the Conservative party with a coronation. That idea is inconceivable.

In defence of Rishi Sunak, it is quite hard for a leader to be, at this stage in his leadership, significantly more popular than the party, because the two get quite closely identified and the Conservative party’s popularity fell before Rishi Sunak did, so I wouldn’t hold him personally responsible.

I think we’ve been in office for a long time, and I agree with you that the changes of leadership didn’t help. I was not in favour of removing Boris Johnson, as you may remember, but that has happened and parties need to deal with the current situation, not what might have been.

Continue reading...

Thatcher ‘utterly shattered’ by MI5 revelations in Spycatcher, files reveal

Posted on by

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...

Kerry Packer was proposed as mediator in Thatcher’s fight to stop Spycatcher memoir

Posted on by

Counsel for ex-MI5 officer Peter Wright suggested role for Australian media tycoon but idea was swiftly rejected

The Australian media tycoon Kerry Packer was suggested as a mediator in the fight by Margaret Thatcher’s government to prevent the publication of Spycatcher, the memoirs of former MI5 officer Peter Wright, according to newly released official papers.

The offer was made by Wright’s Australian counsel – and future Australian prime minister – Malcolm Turnbull as part of a proposed out-of-court settlement, files released by the National Archives show.

Continue reading...

James Cleverly tells MPs crackdown will cut annual immigration numbers by about 300,000 – as it happened

Posted on by

Home secretary to announce big hike in salary requirement for migrants to the UK as Rishi Sunak tries to cut net migration figures

Hunt says the government wants to speed up the time it takes to get a connection to the national grid by 90%.

Zanny Minton Beddoes, the editor of the Economist, is interviewing Hunt. She says he has mentioned the 110 policies, but she wants to know what the growth strategy is.

Continue reading...

Argentina’s far-right Milei angers Falklands veterans with Thatcher praise

Posted on by

Presidential candidate calls former UK prime minister one of ‘the great leaders in the history of humanity’ during debate

Argentina’s libertarian presidential candidate, Javier Milei, has been pilloried by veterans of the Falklands war after he praised Margaret Thatcher as one of “the great leaders in the history of humanity” during the final electoral debate before next Sunday’s election.

Milei – a self-described anarcho-capitalist – has frequently expressed admiration for Thatcher’s free-market policies. But she is still reviled in Argentina for ordering the sinking of the General Belgrano cruiser, killing 323 people on board, during the 1982 war with the UK over the Falkland islands, which Argentina claims as Islas Malvinas.

Continue reading...

‘Get rid of all the green crap’: Tory PMs’ strange attitude to the environment

Posted on by

As both Labour and Conservatives ponder their green policy, we look back at the Tories’ propensity to promise much – and deliver little

Conservative party support for environmental causes has generally been vocal at election time but hesitant and half-hearted in power. On one hand, the party – with the exception of a few hardcore climate crisis deniers – has never reached the total opposition to green causes that disfigures rightwing parties in other nations, in particular the US Republicans. On the other, it has generally failed to enact the kind of legislation that would allow the UK to take a global lead in the battle against global heating, as can be seen from the records of three recent Tory prime ministers.

Continue reading...

MPs voting on report that found Boris Johnson misled parliament – UK politics live

Posted on by

Theresa May says parliament must punish MPs who break rules as Penny Mordaunt says Johnson ‘undermined democratic process’

At the Labour event Keir Starmer is now speaking. He starts with a jibe at the SNP, saying the tide is turning in Scotland.

Turning to energy policy, he says Labour wants to promote security.

Can we still achieve great things? Can we unite and move forward? Can we still change, can we grow, can we get things done, can we build things? New industries, new technologies, new jobs; will they come to our shores, or will the future pass us by?

You can put it even more starkly. Around the world people want to know, are we still a great nation? If the question is about the British people, the answer is emphatically: yes.

Continue reading...

Bernard Ingham, press secretary to Margaret Thatcher, dies aged 90

Posted on by

Family pay tribute to man they described as ‘a journalist to his bones’

Margaret Thatcher’s former press secretary Sir Bernard Ingham has died at the age of 90 after a short illness, his family has said.

Ingham was a journalist with the Guardian in the 1970s before going into communications for the government. He served as press secretary for Thatcher for almost her entire time as prime minister.

Continue reading...

Jeremy Hunt’s autumn statement promises ‘big bang’ deregulation

Posted on by

Chancellor hopes to emulate Thatcher’s chancellor Nigel Lawson with bonfire of red tape, but move had its critics

Jeremy Hunt doled out the bad news in an autumn statement laden with tax rises and spending cuts, but he sought to buoy the fairly muted Tory benches behind him with a few nods to Thatcherism.

It was not the “iron lady” herself he channelled, but rather her second chancellor, Nigel Lawson, and his famed “big bang” deregulation drive that unshackled the financial markets and let business boom in the City.

Continue reading...

‘Curse of Heseltine’: how the wheels came off Rishi Sunak’s No 10 campaign

Posted on by

Ex-chancellor was leading frontrunner in the race to succeed Boris Johnson but his dreams soon unravelled

One of the most familiar refrains of the Conservative leadership contest was candidates earnestly inviting comparisons to Margaret Thatcher.

But after his resignation as chancellor brought down Boris Johnson’s wobbling house of cards, a Tory insider said Rishi Sunak found himself with “the curse of Heseltine hanging round his neck”.

Continue reading...

Thatcher ministers turn on Liz Truss over tax cut plans

Posted on by

Chris Patten, Norman Lamont and Malcolm Rifkind warn former PM would never have approved borrowing to fund £30bn cuts

Tory grandees who served in Margaret Thatcher’s final cabinet have warned that the former prime minister would never have approved of Liz Truss’s plan to slash £30bn off taxes funded by borrowing, as Rishi Sunak denounced his opponent’s plans as “immoral”.

With a bitter row over tax emerging as the defining issue in the race to succeed Boris Johnson, three members of Thatcher’s cabinet told the Observer that she would have taken a dim view of slashing taxes at a time of high inflation.This follows repeated claims that Truss has attempted to model herself on Thatcher in her attempt to win the leadership, which she has denied.

Continue reading...

Margaret Thatcher statue egged within hours of it being installed

Posted on by

The memorial of the former prime minister in her home town of Grantham was unveiled without ceremony

Warnings that a new statue of Margaret Thatcher would attract egg throwing protests came true within two hours of it being installed in her home town of Grantham on Sunday.

The bronze statue was, without ceremony, placed on a 3m (10ft) high plinth to make it more difficult for protesters to inflict any damage.

Continue reading...

UK officials still blocking Peter Wright’s ‘embarrassing’ Spycatcher files

Posted on by

A documentary-maker has accused the Cabinet Office of defying the 30-year rule in withholding details of the MI5 exposé

The Cabinet Office has been accused of “delay and deception” over its blocking of the release of files dating back more than three decades that reveal the inside story of the intelligence agent Peter Wright and the Spycatcher affair.

Wright revealed an inside account of how MI5 “bugged and burgled” its way across London in his 1987 autobiography Spycatcher. He died aged 78 in 1995.

Continue reading...

Are the 2020s really like living back in the 1970s? I wish …

Posted on by

With queues for petrol, inflation and Abba on the radio, it’s easy to compare the two decades. But you wouldn’t if you were there, says Polly Toynbee, as she revisits the styles of her youth

Queueing for petrol, I turn on the radio and there are Abba, singing their latest hit. Shortages on shop shelves are headline news, with warnings of a panic-buying Christmas. And national debt is sky high. But this isn’t the 1970s; it’s 2021. People who weren’t born then have been calling this a return to that decade. There are similarities, of course: this retro-thought was sparked by the recent petrol queues, people as frantic to fill up to get to work as I remember back then. Elsewhere, flowing floral midi dresses are back, just like the ones I wore; Aldi is selling rattan hanging egg chairs; and, as well as Abba, the charts have been topped by Elton John. But is this really a 1970s reprise?

No, nothing like it; not history repeated, not even as farce – just a stylist’s pastiche, as bold as the wallpaper I’m posing in front of here. Folk memory preserves only the 1974 three-day week; the miners’ strike blackouts, with no street lights and candle shortages; the embargo that quadrupled the price of oil. True, I did queue at the coal merchant’s to fire up an ancient stove for lack of any other heat or light. But the decade shouldn’t be defined by this, or by 1978-79’s “winter of discontent” strikes, a brief but pungent time of rubbish uncollected and (a very few) bodies unburied by council gravediggers.

Continue reading...

Generation X are heavy, risky drinkers. Will anything ever persuade us to stop?

Posted on by

Alcohol’s allure was powerful when we were growing up and those born after us consume far less. Now booze is falling out of fashion, is it time to assess old habits?

My first job in journalism was editing a free magazine called Rasp. In 1995, we ran a competition for a year’s supply of Two Dogs lemon brew, the Australian alcopop. Two Dogs tried to send us 365 bottles, and I negotiated them up to 1,000, indignant that a bottle a day could constitute a “supply”. It is the only time I’ve ever played hardball. Nobody entered the competition because we didn’t have any readers, and nor did we have any staff. The two of us, me and the designer, drank the whole lot in the space of two months. A constant drip feed of 4.5% ABV, all day. If anybody asked – there was a much larger team upstairs running TNT, a freesheet for expat Australians – we’d say it was a British tradition, going back to medieval times, when workers would sip ale because of the contaminated water supply. “But medieval ale would have been more like 0.5%,” they might have protested, except they were also constantly drunk, and at lunchtime we’d all go to the pub, 60 people in crocodile formation marching down the street, like a misbegotten nursery outing.

So the cliche of the drunken journalist happens to be true, but in the early 90s it was also true of teachers. Dave Lawrence, 56, co-author of Scarred for Life, of which more shortly, remembers his teacher training: “There was a pub across the road and at lunchtime, all the teachers would head over there, and all afternoon they would reek of booze.” It wasn’t really sectoral – this was just generation X. Colin Angus, a senior research fellow in the Sheffield Alcohol Research Group, is 39. He’s not generation X, which is usually defined as those born between 1965 and 1980. But in his pre-academic career in electrical wholesaling, “Everyone was always talking about the good old days of long, boozy lunches.”

Continue reading...

‘Saddam Hussein’s spies in London laid a trap – and sent my son Farzad to his death’

Posted on by

Nosrat Bazoft, mother of the Observer reporter executed by the tyrant in 1990, reveals for the first time how the unreported theft of a briefcase of documents on a secret Iraqi weapon may have sealed her son’s fate.

Leaning back in a loose cotton shirt within the lobby of Baghdad’s Royal Tulip Al Rasheed hotel, Farzad Bazoft looks like a man at ease. Despite investigating Iraq’s secret arms programme in the back yard of Saddam Hussein, the Observer journalist knew that the following day he would be gone, back to the safety of London.

Farzad never made it to the UK. The picture chronicles his last night of freedom. Within 24 hours he would be imprisoned in solitary confinement. Then he would be starved and beaten, the start of a chain of events that would culminate, amid international furore, with his execution at the behest of Saddam.

Continue reading...

Mugabe’s love of cricket and Thatcher’s 70th: stories revealed in National Archives papers

Posted on by

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...

Margaret Thatcher said plan for the euro was ‘a rush of blood’, archives reveal

Posted on by

The then British PM told her Irish counterpart that the bureaucracy in Brussels was a ‘politburo’ and was tying the UK up in regulations, papers show

Margaret Thatcher branded the European commission’s plans for a single currency as a “rush of blood to the head”, according to 30-year-old documents released from the Irish government archives.

In an echo of the divisive political debate that ultimately led to Brexit, the then British prime minister hit out at the “politburo” in Brussels and vowed not to be dictated to, during talks with her then Irish counterpart.

Continue reading...

What will Boris Johnson bring back from Brussels?

Posted on by

Previous prime ministers have defined their leadership via a row with Europe – will Johnson be different?

Since the formation of the European Union, it has been a habit for British prime ministers to try to define their premiership via a row with the rest of the bloc, especially given the laudatory domestic newspaper headlines such disputes engender.

The leading exponent was Margaret Thatcher, ironically in many ways the architect of the single market from which Boris Johnson is struggling to organise the UK’s retreat.

Continue reading...

‘Charles is very stylish’: how The Crown’s costume designer brought 1980s to life

Posted on by

Season 4’s wardrobe includes Diana’s Cinderella dress and Thatcher’s power shoulders

With its power bouffants, sweetie-wrapper party dresses and alarming shoulder pads, some call the 1980s the time that fashion forgot. But in the fourth season of The Crown, which starts on TV tomorrow night, the era’s extraordinary clothing plays a pivotal role in bringing the decade’s stories back to vivid life. Some looks were faithfully recreated, while others were more loosely inspired by the actual wardrobes of the royal family, as the show’s costume designer, Amy Roberts, explains below.

Continue reading...