Further proof that Harold Wilson was right about MI5 treason

[Peter Presland]

The Daily Mail has learned; The Daily Mail can reveal etc etc.

It's formulations like that that turn me right off. Frankly, apart from the bits about Brown trying to keep a lid on it, there's really nothing new in that article at all. And the source of those bits is not without an agenda that we should all look long and hard at; viz that of Professor Christopher Andrew who has a book to promote

Like most ambitious academics, he is keen to remain on the right side of The Establishment; a bit of jousting here, a bit of risqué rebellion there; and suchlike - are all grist to the mill; but on the sanctity of the the core official narratives, why, his purpose is most assuredly to bolster them.

Robin Ramsay in the latest on-line edition of Lobster (58) is interesting on the matter. After conceding the importance of the book in terms of its vastness (over 1,000 pages) with 'privileged' access to official sources with:

the book .... will be of major interest to academic students of British intelligence and political history for years to
come.

He writes:

Colin Wallace and Fred Holroyd get a sentence each. Wallace is described as a former information officer; his psy-ops role, admitted by HMG, is omitted. Their claims are not stated and Andrew merely quotes the then Director General of MI5, Sir Anthony Duff, who ‘assured staff in 1987 that Wallace’s and Holroyd’s allegations of dirty tricks were “equally baseless” ’. Andrew tells us that Duff conducted a ‘stringent inquiry’ into the allegations about operations against the Labour governments of Harold Wilson. Said inquiry: ‘examined all relevant files and interviewed all relevant Security Service officers, both serving and retired’, and it ‘concluded unequivocally that no member of the Service had been involved in the surveillance of Wilson, still less in any attempt to destabilise the government.’ (p. 642

Well, at one level – gee, agency examines itself and finds itself innocent. Who would’ve thought it?

... Andrew concludes that there was no plot, that Wilson imagined most of it because he was paranoid

...Andrew has adopted the fall-back position of the British secret state circa 1990: ignore Wallace, Gordon Winter, the private armies episode, the Crozier operations, the forgeries and the psy-ops, and focus on the John Ware interview with Wright in which he implied that the ‘plot’ consisted only of himself.

Thus there was no plot; thus Wilson was just a paranoid old fool, a conspiracy theorist. Andrew portrays MI5 in the post WW2 era as cautious, apolitical bureaucrats, defending democracy while trying to stay within their charter, and resisting the siren calls of ‘conspiracy theorists’.

When it comes to insightful commentary on our SIS's, give me Ramsey and Dorril over Gordon Thomas, Professor Andrew and all the other academics combined.

And the Daily Mail - or any other MSM outlet for that matter; any and all articles concerning alleged SIS activities are of interest more for their ostensible subject matter and timing than for any claimed revelations in their content. It's who is pulling their strings (feeding material etc) and why that interests me.

As for why GB is still trying to cover things up. Frankly, the more I see of GB, the more I judge him to be a brainless nincompoop tool. Whatever he does, he does at the behest of others so it is their motives (in this case the SIS's) for giving the appearance of trying to keep a lid on it (ie the bugging etc) that we should probably be considering.