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“... it was entirely her own fault. At which point the Treasury (Major, Lamont) and the Foreign Office (Douglas Hurd) realised that Thatcher was so weak, and so desperate to avoid yet more interest rate increases, that if they wanted to push her into the ERM, now was the time to do it. In this spirit she was told that a judicious series of leaks suggesting ...”

“... on which the court intervened was that the grant was not authorised by the statute under which Douglas Hurd, the foreign secretary, had purportedly made it, because it was not capable of fulfilling the statutory purpose of promoting development. In other words, the court was doing its job of testing the legality of executive action against the ...”

“... practical. Obsessional secrecy is self-defeating. If the British media are fixated on spookery – Douglas Hurd once observed that journalists would get excited by a blank sheet of paper if it was stamped ‘Secret’ – more openness would divert their energy towards hunting out the everyday deceits of ‘normal’ politics.According to Sir Rodric ...”

“... In this sense, it still is an ‘absolute power’, yet it would be paradoxical to argue that Douglas Hurd is therefore an ‘absolute ruler’. Dr Sommerville has not grappled with the late Professor J.W. Daley’s admirable article on the meanings of the word in the 17th century. In some cases, notably his analysis of Chief Baron Fleming’s ...”

“... work – though the first Thatcher volume, highly selective as it is, is in a special class, and Douglas Hurd, who did produce a little gem about the Heath years, may yet prove himself the best memoirist of the second half of the Thatcher-Major hegemony. No Tory cabinet minister has kept diaries to equal the extraordinary raw material supplied by ...”

“... Government appears to retain a strong ego-investment in the latter two and (as John Major and Douglas Hurd have repeatedly said) would feel ‘diminished’ if they turned away from England. Ulster Unionists are right to stress the importance of such feelings. They register what is really happening – a psychological withdrawal from Ireland ...”

“... to seal her success, and that she lost her touch over the years that preceded the poll tax fiasco. Douglas Hurd mentioned on television that she should have gone two years before she did, but that he’d stuck by her as a minister till the bitter end, for her own sake and for the country’s. I’ve been talking here about contributors who wrote about her ...”

“... Washington on this matter at the outbreak of the Gulf War. In the Los Angeles Times on 18 January Douglas Hurd listed the factors that authorised Britain to use force against Iraq, giving prominence to the 12 UN Security Council resolutions against Iraq, and, in particular, to the call for a full and unconditional withdrawal from Kuwait. He ...”

“... face. For illustrations of what I mean, study the photographs of the expressions worn by Mr Douglas Hurd at any international conference involving all the Western allies.’ This recalls O’Brien’s statement, delivered just between his sacking from the UN and his writing of Murderous Angels, that ‘as a result of the policy of Macmillan’s ...”

“... many of the surviving political players from the 1980s, ministers in the Thatcher government like Douglas Hurd and William Waldegrave as well as her private secretary Charles Powell, and the late Yehudi Avner, who was Israel’s ambassador in London between 1983 and 1988. When she became prime minister a number of pressing questions faced Thatcher at ...”

“... by such issues, it is only intermittently concerned. It was, for instance, not upset when Douglas Hurd was Home Secretary, and became ‘concerned’ only when Michael Howard decided to make ‘issues’ out of crime and immigration for the same reasons William Hague did during the election. It did not work for the Conservatives this time any ...”

“... on which date the Manchester City Council also requested an interview with the new Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd, over the delay in the submission of the Avon and Somerset report. (Leon Brittan had meanwhile been helicoptered from office.) What other pressures could be exerted to force the Police to face their responsibilities? Sarah Hollis still is, and ...”

“... she lost the war. Within a year Major, working in conjunction with the new foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, got her to sign up to ERM membership despite all her misgivings.How did Major and Hurd succeed where Lawson and Howe had failed? Ever sensitive to the idea that he was Thatcher’s poodle, the new chancellor ...”

“... involving 14 defendants. At one critical moment Cardinal Hume confronted the home secretary, Douglas Hurd, challenging the adequacy of his briefing. No similar allies for the Muslim community are evident today, capable of pushing and pulling the British government publicly or privately into seeing sense. Spiritually, the Muslim Ummah is seen as ...”

“... too vain, I sort of fitted the bill,’ Patten told Dimbleby; what Major and his Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd had in mind for the transition, Dimbleby quotes Hurd as saying, was a politician ‘in tune with the world of Westminster and the British media; someone who could operate in Hong Kong in a more political way ...”