blech:
posted on 2006/03/15 14:18
A little bit of politics, for once, as Janathan Freedland writes on the new Guardian comment site about Harold Wilson's resignation 30 years ago.
He's convinced that there really was an establishment (Army, secret services, to some extent aristocracy) plot to stage, in the words of Chris Mullin (who presumably was not entirely uninspired by these events) a very British coup.
Listen to the former intelligence officer Brian Crozier admit his lobbying of the army, how they "seriously considered the possibility of a military takeover".
Watch the archive footage of troop manoeuvres at Heathrow, billed as a routine exercise but about which Wilson was never informed - and which he interpreted as a show of strength, a warning, even a rehearsal for a coup.
I have a lot of time for Harold Wilson, if only for this:
[Wilson] may have publicly backed LBJ, but privately he rejected the president's repeated request to lend even a symbolic British military presence to the war in Vietnam; Wilson refused to send so much as a marching band. Johnson punished him for it, but the PM held firm.
We hate you all. Yes, especially you. Sod off and DIE