Senior Tory Christopher Shale found dead at Glastonbury festival

[Keith Millea]

I think it was the brown acid.......

Senior Tory Christopher Shale found dead at Glastonbury festival


David Cameron pays tribute to 'a big rock in my life' after Shale is found in toilet on day his strategy documents were leaked

• Patrick Wintour and Adam Gabbatt
  
• guardian.co.uk, Sunday 26 June 2011 16.08 BST
  
• Article history
  

Christopher Shale was found dead at the Glastonbury festival

A close political ally of David Cameron has been found dead in a portable toilet in a backstage area at the Glastonbury festival.

Christopher Shale, the 56-year-old chairman of the West Oxfordshire Conservative Association (Woca), was found dead on Sunday morning.

Cameron said he was "devastated" by his friend's death, which came hours after Shale was quoted, in a Conservative strategy document leaked to a Sunday newspaper, as saying the Tories had come across over the years as "graceless, voracious, crass, always on the take" and needed to radically change.


The prime minister, whose Witney constituency is in west Oxfordshire, released a statement in which he said: "Sam and I were devastated to hear the news about Christopher. He was a great friend and has been a huge support over the last decade in west Oxfordshire.

"A big rock in my life has suddenly been rolled away. Christopher was one of the most truly generous people I've ever met he was always giving to others, his time, his help, his enthusiasm and above all his love of life.

"It was in that spirit that he made a massive contribution to the Conservative party, both locally and nationally. Our love and prayers are with Nikki and the family. They have lost an amazing dad, west Oxfordshire has lost a big and wonderful man and, like so many others, Sam and I have lost a close and valued friend."

Shale's death coincided with the publication of the article in the Mail on Sunday which revealed the contents of a document, said to be written by him, arguing that the local party needed to change to boost membership, using the codename Operation Vanguard.

The cause of Shale's death is unknown, but the Glastonbury festival organiser, Michael Eavis, told a press conference on Sunday morning that a "senior Tory party member" had died. "We're told it is a suicide situation," Eavis said. "It is very, very sad."

But later a police source indicated that ongoing investigations suggested the death was not suicide. Shale's body was taken to a local mortuary in a white private ambulance on Sunday afternoon. Police said a postmortem would take place in due course.

In a fresh statement, Eavis said: "I would like to express my deepest sympathy to the family and friends of the man whose body was found on the site early on Sunday morning." Festival officials also said privately that it was not believed that Shale had taken his own life.

Inspector Chris Morgan, of Avon and Somerset police, said: "At 9am this morning, a male has been found down by the press office in the toilet area. At the moment, we're working to establish the cause of the gentleman's death."

Eavis said teams had been out looking for Shale "through the night". Officers were seen comforting a woman after his body was found.

An area between the Pyramid stage and the Other stage was cordoned off on Sunday morning, but reopened by the afternoon with only a minor police presence.

The memorandum, reported by the Mail on Sunday, said Cameron's own association had gained only 22 members in the past year, and Shale was reported to have proposed "a transformational increase" in membership in ways that others could follow nationally.

According to the paper, he wrote that "collectively we are not always an appealing proposition".

He criticised the association's fundraising efforts, saying: "Over the years, we have come across as graceless, voracious, crass, always on the take" and concluded that people did not join because they "think we'll beg and steal from them. And they're right".

Shale added: "When we are together, we are not always a group of people to whom many of our potential members are going to be magnetically drawn.
"When we come together as a group we sometimes morph into something different, less attractive. Our [Woca] environment alters us."

The solution he offered was: "We must look different when we communicate, when we're together. We must sound different in what we say, how we say it, the language we use, our tone of voice. We must behave differently try to see ourselves as others see us."

He claimed the country could be divided into two groups, "politics-heavy" people and "politics-light" ones who are not interested in the subject except at general elections.

He calculated that 98% of the population was "politics light" and that "politics heavy is a big turnoff for politics-light people".

Shale likened changing the membership package away from political activity to what Cameron did to the national party: "It's what, pre-2005, DC used to call double ham and eggs. We've offered them ham and eggs repeatedly. They don't want it. So how can the solution possibly be double ham and eggs?"

Instead, under Shale's strategy, "Woca is, in effect, going into the event management business". He proposed the association put on events with "money-can't-buy appeal".

One idea was for "the PMQ DIY lunch: bring your own sandwiches to watch PMQs in a different fine country house in the constituency (by courtesy of a PPC member) every week; glass of wine, cup of coffee, informal discussion, yours for a fiver".
He also proposed party supporters be given access to politicians in the US in return for cash. "We might have 'Just Another Ordinary Day: we'll organise it but choose how you get there, stay where you like for as long as you like and on one of the days breakfast briefing with a senior staffer, tour of the White House, lunch with a senator ... yours for cost plus a £1,000 donation to Woca."

Shale was a successful businessman as the chief executive of Oxford Resources Ltd, a corporate cost-reduction company based in Chipping Norton. Previously, he was the chief executive of SGL Communications.

He was also a director of the Centre for Policy Studies and a sponsor of OpenEurope, the eurosceptic thinktank.

He was a donor to William Hague's office in opposition, and went to Rwanda with a social action team organised by the Conservatives. He was seen as a modernising rightwinger.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/...lastonbury

[Peter Lemkin]

What a coincidence - in fact, set of them!?!......The absence of any mention about the possibility of foul-play by the Guardian screams so loud, I can here it all the way over here! :gossip: :mexican: In the same way that Lenin thought that there were 'useful idiots' about that could be played for a larger audience, no matter how badly things turned out for them - many of the current politicians find there are also 'useful deaths' that just 'sort of happen' 'when conveniently and coincidentally are needed'.

[Ed Jewett]

publication date: Jul 7, 2011


July 8-10, 2011 -- Christopher Shale murder linked to that of Dr. David Kelly

A well-placed UK source has informed WMR that the suspicious death of Prime Minister David Cameron's friend and political adviser, Christopher Shale, found dead in a portable toilet on June 25 at the Glastonbury Festival, was, in fact, a political assassination designed to silence an emerging critic of Conservative Party policies. Shale was the chairman of the West Oxfordshire Conservative Association. Shale had written a memo containing a scathing attack on Tory policies under Cameron's leadership. The memo was due to be published in The Mail on Sunday, the day after Shale's body was found in the toilet.

Cameron later said he was "shocked" by the death of his friend. Shale's death was alternately described as a "suicide" and heart attack.

However, WMR has been informed that Shale's suspected disloyalty to the Tories resulted in worries at Number 10 Downing Street that the longtime friend of and adviser to Cameron might have decided talk about a Tory scandal dating from the late 1980s and early 1990s. Cameron visited South Africa in 1989 on a trip financed by the South African armaments company Armscor. It was the same year that South Africa began dismantling its nuclear weapons program.

As South Africa began to transition from apartheid to majority rule in the early 1990s, Shale, a British Army veteran, visited South Africa as part of a UKaid (Department of International Development) mission. After leaving the army, Shale established two companies, SGL Communications and Oxford Resources Ltd. Shale also visited Rwanda on numerous occasions as part of his work for UKaid. There is some evidence that Shale was involved with MI6 activities in Africa.

However, it was Shale's work in South Africa, establishing links with the African National Congress and other black political parties in an attempt to undo some of the damage resulting from Margaret Thatcher's support for the apartheid regime, that put him in contact with the British Ministry of Defense scientist charged with overseeing the transfer of South Africa's nuclear weapons and other nuclear materials to Western hands from South African nuclear weapons stocks at the Pelindaba nuclear research center, near Pretoria. That scientist was Dr. David Kelly, Britain's foremost authority on weapons of mass destruction, who was found dead from a reported "suicide" near his Oxfordshire home on July 17, 2003.

Kelly had questioned faulty intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, intelligence that was used to justify Britain's involvement in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Kelly was said to have committed suicide with an old pocket knife and pain killers, an allegation rejected by a number of British experts and politicians, including Norman Baker, the Liberal Democratic MP for Lewes.

WMR has been informed that Shale became aware of Cameron's role in trafficking on the international black market of South African nuclear weapons and technology that was entrusted to Britain and the United States by South Africa's apartheid government, led by President F. W. DeKlerk.

Shale, we are told, was familiar with Cameron's role in the re-selling of South Africa's nuclear materials, with the proceeds going into the political coffers of the Conservative Party. Kelly and Shale were reportedly both aware that some of the South African nuclear weapons technology ended up, via an international arms smuggling network, in the hands of North Korea, which tested a nuclear bomb on May 25, 2009.

In 2010, at a 47-nation nuclear security summit in Washington, President Obama praised South African President Jacob Zuma and South Africa for successfully abandoning the nation's nuclear arsenal. What Obama did not mention was that part of the arsenal was successfully abandoned to the international arms black market, a fact known by the CIA's counter-proliferation division, which was also aware that Obama was aware of the temporary storage of the South African weapons in Chicago and the involvement of Argonne National Laboratory in their disposal during the early 1990s, while Obama was working at the Hopkins & Sutter law firm and later as a visiting fellow at the University of Chicago Law School.

Obama was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize for his "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples," in particular his promotion of nuclear non-proliferation. In 2005, then-Senator Obama, along with Senator Richard Lugar, visited a Russian nuclear facility at Perm. There have been reports that Obama was detained briefly by Russian officials on the suspicion that he was engaged in espionage activities at the facility. Obama's long-time work for the CIA may have extended into his term as a U.S. senator from Illinois and, quite possibly, into the White House. During the 2008 presidential campaign, a CIA source who worked on the agency's nuclear non-proliferation activities, told WMR: "You have no idea what the fuck you're getting with this guy [Obama]!

With Shale "going wobbly" on the Conservatives, it was feared that he might reveal the dark past of Tory involvement in nuclear weapons smuggling, something that helped seal his fate. The Tory connection to nuclear weapons smuggling is so sensitive, British intelligence insiders believe that, if revealed, Cameron will be forced to resign and his deputy prime minister, Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg, will move into Number 10.

On February 28, 2008, WMR reported:

"[Dr. David Kelly, the British Defense Ministry scientist] knew of nuclear weapons proliferation involving three South African nuclear bombs assembled with the help of Israeli nuclear scientists at the covert South African nuclear weapons facility at Pelindaba nuclear research facility, near Pretoria. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors who visited Pelindaba and the state-owned Armaments Corporation of South Africa (ARMSCOR) Advena nuclear facility near Pretoria in 1990 and 1991 were tricked into believing that South Africa's nuclear weapons had all been dismantled by the outgoing apartheid regime. However, three South African nuclear weapons were reportedly sold to 'private investors' with the up-front money coming from British government coffers.

Note: In 2007, speaking to a Conservative Friends of Israel meeting, Cameron referred to himself as a "Zionist."

Reimbursement for the ARMSCOR nuclear weapons was made to Britain only after the three weapons, spirited out of South Africa in three 20' ISO standard containers, arrived at a private storage facility in Oman for safekeeping. The containers had a special seal on the lock of the rear door of each container along with a temperature gauge in the front of the containers that was connected to the core of the bombs to indicate that the bomb was not overheating inside the containers.

Note: According to more recent information provided to WMR, the three weapons were to be shipped with an additional three nuclear bombs to Chicago for covert storage at a furniture warehouse, a CIA front activity. The fissile material from three South African bombs that made it to Chicago was later extracted at the Argonne National Laboratory, 25 miles southwest of Chicago. However, the three other bombs in Oman "disappeared" en route to Chicago. The British official who was in charge of the warehousing of the weapons in Oman was David Kelly.

There are indications that one of the bombs was eventually sold to North Korea.

WMR has also learned that the nuclear smuggling operations involved top members of the British Conservative Party, including individuals close to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The Tory party soon received a mystery donation of £17.8 million. The donation was filed with the Tory party's Fiscal Year 1992 Annual Accounts filed with Companies House. An insider at the Tory party's Central Office tipped off a Labor Party Member of Parliament, Doug Hoyle, about the mystery donations to Tory MPs. It turned out that one of the Tory MPs in question was Tim Smith. [Smith resigned after he was discovered to have accepted cash payments from Mohamed Al-Fayad, the former owner of Harrod's and the ex-brother-in-law of internatonal arms trafficker and Iran-contra principal Adnan Khashoggi.] Smith had been an MP for Beaconsfield since 1982 when he defeated a little-known Labor candidate named Tony Blair."

http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/articles/20110708

[Peter Lemkin]

Two down, any more to 'go'?.......................