BiteBack Publishing

Part one of a major two-part history of Britain’s external intelligence community by the acclaimed writer, award-winning journalist and defence correspondent for The Sunday Times, Michael Smith.

This first part of acclaimed author Mick Smith’s epic unauthorised history of Britain’s external intelligence community begins with the creation of the Secret Service Bureau in 1909, charged with controlling intelligence within Britain and overseas, and establishing through spies the strength of the Imperial German army and navy. This naturally came to the fore during World War One. Between the wars the service really established itself, restyling itself the “Secret Intelligence Service”. Under the aegis of the diplomatic service, the SIS expanded its network of European spies in order to counter the threat of Russian Bolshevism. In 1918 an operation to overthrow the Bolshevik government by SIS agents failed badly. With the ascent of the Nazis, the SIS switched its focus to the threat of German aggression, recruiting sources within the German government and admiralty. SIX tells the complete story of the service’s birth and early years, including the tragic, untold tale of what happened to Britain’s extensive networks in Soviet Russia between the wars. It reveals for the first time how the playwright and MI6 agent Harley Granville Barker bribed the Daily News to keep Arthur Ransome in Russia, and the real reason Paul Dukes returned there. It shows development of “tradecraft” and the great personal risk officers and their agents took, far from home and unprotected. In Salonika, for example, Lieutenant Norman Dewhurst realised it was time to leave when he opened his door to find one of his agents hanging dismembered in a sack.

This first part of SIX takes us up to the eve of the conflict, using hundreds of previously unreleased files and interviews with key players to show how one of the world’s most secretive of secret agencies originated and developed into something like the MI6 we know today. The second part, published in Spring 2011, will tell the story from the outbreak of World War Two to the present.

SIX: A History of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, Part 1: Murder and Mayhem 1909-1939, by Michael Smith is available to buy HERE.

In the run-up to the general election of May 2010 it was universally acknowledged that whatever the outcome, this was a vote which would start a fresh chapter in British political history, one to rival 1945, 1979 and 1997. But no one anticipated just how fresh that chapter would be. Twists and turns made it an election like no other.

Nick Clegg went into the first of the leaders’ television debates derided as ‘The Other One’ – and emerged as a major player, with ‘I agree with Nick’ the campaign’s unlikely catchphrase. Mrs Gillian Duffy went out to buy a loaf of bread in Rochdale – and happened to encounter Gordon Brown, with disastrous consequences for the Labour cause. David Cameron launched the Tories’ poster campaign with a blemish-free photograph of himself – and graffiti artists turned it into the most mocked image of the election.

But none of the soap opera of the weeks leading up to 6th May could match the drama of the days following the election’s inconclusive result: the positioning, the posturing, the negotiating and the bargaining which eventually saw David Cameron moving into 10 Downing Street as prime minister in a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats.

Political theatre had been brought to a fresh level – so who better to provide a chronicle of this riveting electoral saga than Nicholas Jones, who as BBC industrial and then political correspondent covered general elections for over thirty years?

To order your copy click here

Former BBC political correspondent, Nicholas Jones, will be discussing his new book, Campaign 2010: The Making of the Prime Minister at Gants Hill Library, on the evening of Tuesday 20th July, from 7.30pm.

The venue is Gants Hill, 490 Cranbrook Road, IG2 6LA. Nick’s talk will be followed by a Q&A, and copies of the book will be on sale on the night. Entry is £2.50. Book ahead on 02087089206.

To me the most exciting part of researching and writing this book was analysing the witness statements from the Russian State Archives (GARF). Previously, authors had not in any meaningful way examined or analysed these statements. The statements of the two police officers who were on duty close to the Yusupov Palace on the night of the murder are particularly revealing. In fact, one of the officers in his statement destroys much of what Yusupov and Purishkevich, two of the main players, say about the murder. Understanding who was where and when on that fateful night and then linking this to the times that various events were meant to have occurred proves the conspiracy to pervert the course of justice committed by Yusupov and Purishkevich.

The forensics are fascinating and challenging but once you accept, which cannot now be denied by anyone, that Rasputin was shot through the forehead at contact range by a large calibre weapon, you start to see that the previous accepted version was just a tissue of lies. Of particular importance to re-investigating the case are such important details as whether it was snowing or not, whether the River Nevka was tidal and the length of the day in St Petersburg on the date of the murder. These past overlooked details were obtained easily from various organisations.

The way the book has been received by many shows that this is a ‘cold case’ review of what previously had been a grave miscarriage of the Russian justice system. As for the British SIS involvement the evidence is all there in the book including the damning Captain Alley/Major Scale ‘Dark Forces’ letter.

Richard Cullen.

Rasputin: The role of the British Secret Service in his torture and murder is out now and available to buy here.

The murder of Grigori Rasputin, mystic, healer and advisor to the Tsar and Tsaritsa, Nicholas and Alexandra, remains one of the most intriguing crimes of the last century. Rasputin was lured to the St Petersburg palace of Prince Felix Yusupov, son of the richest man in Russia, where he was allegedly poisoned by a group of leading Russian nobles, including Yusupov and the Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich. Legend has it that when Rasputin survived the poisoning, and was therefore shot a number of times before being thrown alive into the freezing Neva River.

The official truth behind the killing is that Rasputin was murdered to remove his influence over the Tsaritsa. However, in 2004 former Metropolitan Police Commander Richard Cullen helped reveal to the world that British secret services were involved in the plot to kill Rasputin, with a young British secret service officer called Oswald Rayner even firing the fatal shot. He has uncovered a story of sexual tensions, torture and murder in which MI6 was up to its neck.

An historical whodunnit, Cullen, together with forensic scientists, uses witness testimonies, contemporary police and official reports, clothing and photographs, and forensically examines the crime scene itself to uncover the truth. In this extraordinary book, an experienced former Scotland Yard detective rips apart the myths surrounding one of the most fascinating murder cases in history and proves the involvement of British spooks in the protracted torture and murder of one of the major figures of the twentieth century.

To buy Rasputin…, click here.

David Cameron, pictured here clutching a copy of Deborah Mattinson’s Talking To A Brick Wall, attempted to quote from it in PMQs, this afternoon, before being rudely interrupted by the Speaker, John Bercow, who cut him off with:”We won’t bother with that.” Cameron, who was trying to make a point about Labour spin, protested he was “only trying to boost sales” of the book, which was published last week. Thanks Dave! Deborah, who spoke in front of a capacity audience of journalists, politicos and punters at her book launch at the RSA yesterday evening, recently had her book serialised in the Sunday Times. The staff of Blackwells selling books at the event quickly sold out of stock.

Deborah Mattinson had a unique perspective on the New Labour project. As Britain’s leading political pollster, she has been monitoring public opinion since the mid-1980s, and helped transform Labour into Europe’s greatest election-winning machine of the modern era. Most recently as chief pollster to Gordon Brown as Prime Minister, she has been on the frontline of electoral politics, consistently representing the voter’s side of the story to the politicans. Sometimes, she has encountered scepticism – a belligerent John Smith made an unappreciative witness to one of Deborah’s focus groups – and she has often had to convey unwelcome results – telling a grumpy Gordon Brown he needed to spruce up his appearance cannot have been easy.

Talking to A Brick Wall reviews the New Labour years from the voter’s point of view. It tracks the ups and downs of the Blair/Brown era as seen from beyond Westminster, showing how closely political reputation correlates with voter connection. It profiles the swing voter, shows the importance of women’s votes, and what gives a politician popular appeal, and maps the voters’ views through the 2010 campaign and its immediate aftermath, showing how the electorate has been left out of political decision making and revealing the public’s recipe for rehabilitating the Labour Party and rebuilding trust in democracy.

To order Talking To A Brick Wall click here.

Francis Beckett writes in the Guardian today:

The one piece of good news in the budget was that George Osborne restored the link between state pensions and earnings, which Margaret Thatcher broke in 1980. Osborne’s decision comes just in time for the baby boomers – the children of the 1960s – to benefit.

But for the children of the baby boomers, governments offer only misery. Higher education minister David Willetts has made it clear that students’ fees are going to go up. A lot. Baby boomers, born between 1945 and 1955, paid no fees at all when they were students in the free and carefree 60s.

Today, because people are living longer, baby boomers are a much more powerful political force than 55- to 65-year-olds have ever been before. And they are exercising their political muscle on their own behalf. Any government that fails to give the baby boomers what they want, even at the expense of younger generations, is in for severe punishment at the ballot box, according to research from the thinktank Demos.

I’m a fully paid up baby boomer. My tonsils rest, no doubt carefully preserved, in an NHS hospital. When I got polio (from which I made a complete recovery) my parents did not have to worry about enormous medical bills, as their parents would have done. Aneurin Bevan’s NHS – the greatest civilising measure ever undertaken by a British government – saw me right.

When I went to university, my widowed mother being demonstrably penniless, I received not only free education, but a student grant that I could live on in term-time. For the first time, proletarian and regional accents were heard throughout the British university system, and their owners were no longer made to feel out of place. Neil Kinnock, as he famously told the Welsh Labour party conference in 1987, was “the first Kinnock in a thousand generations” to have a university education.

We are the first generation in which pretty well everyone can read and write fairly fluently. We had the freedom that comes from not having to fear starvation if your employer fires you: there were other jobs to go to, and a welfare state to fall back on. These things made possible the freedom of the 60s.

And what did we do with this wonderful inheritance? We trashed it.

We created a far harsher world for our children to grow up in. It was as though we decided that the freedom and lack of worry which we had inherited was too good for our children, and we pulled up the ladder we had climbed.

Six decades after its birth, Britain’s welfare state is in the worst danger it has known. Commentators and politicians sneer at it and undermine it while legislators chip away at it. The political will in the Labour party that created it has gone.

More and more bits of the health service cost more and more. The principle that no one should die of a treatable disease was breached long ago. For years, no politician could safely criticise the NHS without courting the severest electoral punishment, but now some top Conservatives are saying that the NHS isn’t “relevant in the 21st century”.

The welfare state is starved of money, and struggling under the weight of great, bullying, bureaucratic initiatives designed to give it the appearance of a market, because nothing that does not look like a market is apparently acceptable in the Britain the baby boomers built.

Most capital expenditure for education and health no longer comes from the present-day taxpayer, but from the next generation, because the baby boomers have been too stingy to pay for it. This trick is done by means of the private finance initiative (PFI), a scam for getting the cost of public buildings such as schools and hospitals off the present government’s books, and placing them on the books of governments 10 or 20 years hence.

The freedoms the baby boomers fought for, they deny to their children. “Hoodie” was just a name for a garment in fashion with children and teenagers, until it was demonised by people who were young and fashionable in the 60s. Teenagers under legal drinking age have a dramatically reduced range of options for a good night out. Pubs and clubs are barred to them, far more effectively and efficiently than they were ever barred to us. We force our children into the school uniforms we rejected, partly because they help the police to recognise those who ought to be at school. It is like making them wear prison uniform so they will be instantly recognisable when they scale their prison walls.

Education is no longer seen as a good in itself, but as the acquisition of the skills required to swell someone else’s profits. New Labour abolished the higher education department, and placed its responsibilities under the department dealing with business and industry, a pretty good indication of what ministers now think education is for. The new higher education minister, David Willetts, has made several speeches since the election, and has not yet once mentioned any sort of education that does not provide marketable skills.

Harold Wilson saved the baby boomers from having to fight alongside young Americans in Vietnam. When the baby boomer generation formed a government, its prime minister, Tony Blair, told lies to the young so that he could send them to fight alongside the Americans in Iraq.

Opinion polls show that the now elderly baby boomers will use their increasing voting power to ensure that when the bad times come, the young are hit first, even though it is by a chancellor of the exchequer who was not even born until the 60s were over. When the baby boomers were young, they believed society could afford student grants; now they are old, they think it can afford pensions. I say it can afford both – but only if young and old alike learn to care for each other.

To order your copy of What Did the Baby Boomers Ever Do For Us? click here

In September, Biteback Publishing will be publishing the fifth edition of the annual Total Politics Guide to Political Blogging in the UK. It will include the usual charts of best blogs, but there will also be a number of articles by blogging practitioners. This year’s volume will also include articles about the use of Twitter in politics.

If you would be interested in writing an article to be considered for publication in the book, please email jake.mitchell@totalpolitics.com by Wednesday 7 July, explaining what the article would say. Articles should be 1500-2500 words in length.

Francis Beckett, author of the forthcoming What Did the Baby Boomers Ever Do For Us…, discusses Biteback’s experiences publishing Rooney’s Gold. To read, click here.

What Did the Baby Boomers Ever Do For Us… is available from the 5th July. Click here to preorder your copy.

Buy Rooney’s Gold here.

Essential wall covering for political wonks, nerds and spods, The Weber Shandwick/Total Politics Election 2010 Map is the perfect “at a glance” visual presentation of the results by party and constituency. It also includes a chart breaking down number of seats won by party as well as share of the popular vote.

Measuring a considerable 594mm x 840mm (A1) and printed on high-quality glossy paper, the Election 2010 Map is the perfect record of this historic election which resulted in the first coalition government since World War Two.

Priced £9.99 plus post and packaging, it comes in a protective cardboard tube. To order your map, please contact the Biteback office direct on 02070911266 or info@bitebackpublishing.com.