Contemporary history
The real reason Russia lost the Cold War
Lovely trailer for Phil Craig’s The Secret History of Eurovision, on Channel 4, Saturday 7 May.
The Soviet Union’s attempt to imitate the Eurovision Song Contest, Intervision, was hampered by lack of technology. Because most Soviet citizens didn’t have a telephone, voting was done by asking viewers to switch on their lights when their favourite song [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Sunday, 17 April 2011 at 6:03 pm
Michael Meacher Demands an Inquiry into Why He Was So Useless
A former minister has demanded an official investigation into his approval of a controversial nuclear fuel plant at Sellafield in Cumbria, reports The Independent.
“Tony Blair made me do it,” said Mr Meacher, 71. “Only a full public judicial inquiry into why I took a decision with which I didn’t agree would put this matter to [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Friday, 15 April 2011 at 9:43 pm
Leaning forward, falling over
Jonathan Powell has a good review of Donald Rumsfeld’s memoir, Known and Unknown, in this week’s New Statesman (not online: buy it here). The book adds little to our knowledge, except that in its “wearing” and “relentless” attempt at self-justification, in which “everyone else was to blame for what went wrong”, it confirms Rumsfeld’s responsibility [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Tuesday, 8 March 2011 at 2:26 pm
“Blairites for Browne”
Peter Mandelson had to be dissuaded from supporting the Coalition’s policy of raising tuition fees, he says in the preface to the paperback edition of his The Third Man:
It was I, after all, who had set up the Browne Review … I assumed, as the Treasury did, that the outcome would have to include a [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Sunday, 6 March 2011 at 11:50 am
Best Prime Minister We Never Had
It is an old device, but a good one, and Francis Beckett seems to have put together a fine collection of essays for a book on a variation of the theme, The Prime Ministers Who Never Were, to be published next month:
Austen Chamberlain Stephen Bates
J. R. Clynes Phil Woolas
Lord Halifax Hugh Purcell
Oswald Mosley [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Wednesday, 23 February 2011 at 6:26 pm
Denis Healey: “The figures are so often wrong”
Denis Healey came to speak at the Mile End Group last night – the video is here. He was on characteristic form, presented by Peter (Professor the Lord) Hennessy and William Keegan (right), to an audience that included Nigel Lawson, David Owen, Joel Barnett, David Miliband, Andrew Adonis and mandarins from Healey’s time at the [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Wednesday, 26 January 2011 at 3:17 pm
A Walk Up and Down Victoria Street
My entry for Embittered Plonker (I think it means Blairite) of the Year is my essay on the uninevitability of politics in The Independent on Sunday today, in which I take a sideswipe at James Callaghan.
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Sunday, 26 December 2010 at 4:24 pm
David Laws, “unreliable narrator”?
My esteemed colleague Steve Richards has an interesting column in today’s Independent on David Laws’s book on the negotiations that produced the Coalition Government. His summary of Laws’s account is succinct…
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Tuesday, 30 November 2010 at 1:04 pm
“Corrupted by his ambition”
Adding to the flood of instant history of the Brown government is Anthony Seldon and Guy Lodge’s Brown At 10. You would think that we would be sated by now. But no. After Harriet Harman’s abortive goose plot in the Mail on Sunday serialisation, there is more.
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Thursday, 25 November 2010 at 6:57 pm
The Prince and His Students
Mandelson: The Real PM?, Hannah Rothschild’s documentary and number 441 in my series of Questions to Which the Answer (Was) No, is on BBC4 tonight.
At the screening at the British Film Institute last month, it appeared that the entire Conservative Party press office – seven or eight of them – had turned out to pay homage.
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Tuesday, 23 November 2010 at 9:52 pm
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