Margaret Thatcher, the NUM, and the mysterious Mr Deverell

We have just put online a number of documents that offer us a glimpse into a rarely seen aspect of Margaret Thatcher’s prime ministership. These documents come from folder number 494 in the PREM19 series of Margaret Thatcher’s Prime Ministerial papers. Entitled ‘National Union of Mineworkers: National Miners Left Club’, the folder gives us an insight, albeit sketchy, into the secretive work of a little-known Cabinet Office unit. 

Two items from PREM19/494 are of particular interest. The first (see here) contains two documents. One appears to be a coversheet that would originally have been attached to another document, in this case a report numbered IAG(80)10. The coversheet states that owing to the ‘very sensitive nature’ of the document in question, ‘it must not be placed on a normal Departmental file’, but must instead be returned to the Cabinet Office once it has been read. It is presumably because these instructions were followed that the report is not present within PREM19/494. Nevertheless, an annotation on the coversheet (dated 12^th March 1980) gives us an idea of the report’s content. The note, signed by Clive Whitmore (MT’s Principal Private Secretary), is transcribed below:

Prime Minister
A revealing indication of Mr Vic Allen’s influence in NUM matters.
I think that we should ask whether there would be advantage in exposing the existence and activities of the Miners’ Left Club. Shall I seek Sir Robert Armstrong’s advice?

Under this note MT writes, 'Yes please'.

This annotation gives us an idea of the content of the missing report. Vic Allen was (and is) a left-wing academic who served as the official historian of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). Avowedly pro-Soviet, in 1999 he was revealed to have passed information about the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) to the East German Secret Police (Stasi). Obviously, we cannot know exactly what the missing report ‘indicated’ about his ‘influence in NUM matters', but it clearly has something to do with the existence of ‘the Miners’ Left Club’. Another document from PREM19/494 helps us fill in some of the gaps here. In a minute addressed to Clive Whitmore, Cabinet Secretary Robert Armstrong refers to the work of ‘Communist Party activists’ within the Left Club, and a ‘sub-committee set up to plan and monitor Mr. Scargill’s campaign for the NUM Presidency’. (Scargill, of course, was elected President of the NUM the following year.) These fragments therefore collectively suggest that the missing report contained information regarding a left-wing group within the NUM that was working toward Scargill's election, that this group was linked to the Communist Party, and that Vic Allen held some degree of influence over this group.

How was this information obtained in the first place? Armstrong’s minute to Whitmore talks about the risk of ‘endangering sources’ by publicising the information, so it is natural to infer that a source or sources within the NUM were passing information out, and that this information was finding its way into government reports. Beyond this, however, we can only speculate, and speculating about such a controversial area of history is perhaps unwise. However, what we can do is return to the documents we have, and see what other hints we can glean from them. 

Let’s go back to our first item, the file containing the annotated coversheet for the missing report. Also contained in this file is a note from Whitmore to Armstrong dated 17^th March 1980, in which Whitmore does as he says he would, and seeks advice on ‘whether there would be advantage in exposing the existence and activities of the Miners’ Left Club’. Whitmore writes to Armstrong as follows:

The Prime Minister has seen the report in IAG(80)10 on the activities of the National Miners’ Left Club and she has asked whether this is not the kind of case where some publicity, arranged under Mr Deverell’s auspices, might be useful.

I should be glad to know what you think.

Who is this mysterious Mr Deverell? The aforementioned minute from Armstrong to Whitmore doesn’t help us much here, telling us only that Mr Deverell ‘has been examining the activities of the National Miners Left Club in the hope of finding a way of [publicising them] without endangering sources’. Nor can we find the answer by searching our own archive: the name 'Deverell' appears only in the two documents that we are currently looking at.

Fortunately, assistance can be found in the form of Christopher Andrew’s 2010 history of the Security Service, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5. In Chapter 7, Andrew refers to MT's having held a meeting on the 21st October 1979 to establish a Cabinet Office unit that would 'use information from both open and secret sources to try to forestall industrial disruption’ (p.671). No record of this meeting exists in our archive, presumably because any such record (if it ever existed) was highly confidential and therefore did not find its way into the PREM19 series. Nevertheless, we can see from MT’s engagement diary that the meeting was held at Chequers at 3pm, and was attended by the Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington, Home Secretary Willie Whitelaw, Secretary of State for Industry Keith Joseph, outgoing Cabinet Secretary John Hunt, incoming Cabinet Secretary Robert Armstrong, and Clive Whitmore. 

Andrew goes on:

John Deverell, then considered one of the Service’s [i.e. MI5’s] younger high-fliers, was seconded to run the unit, which Service records suggest became a one-man band. Sir Robert Armstrong agreed with Deverell that they would ‘firmly eschew any thoughts of black propaganda’ as the risk would far outweigh the likely gains. Deverell was tasked instead with submitting proposals for countering specific cases of industrial subversion for approval by the Home Secretary and, if appropriate, the Prime Minister. [pp.671-2]

Andrew then gives an account of the unit’s ‘first successful ‘ploy’ in response to a strike-call by the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers (AUEW) at the government-owned British Leyland (BL) Longbridge plant’ (p.672). The strike-call was made in response to the firing by BL of Derek "Red Robbo" Robinson, a union shop steward and Communist Party member. The aim of Deverell's Cabinet Office unit was to undermine support for Robinson, and thereby to weaken support for strike action among trade union members, leaders, and the wider public.

The ‘ploy’ was to publicise the minutes of a meeting of the Communist Party’s Midland District Committee, minutes which, according to then BL chief executive Michael Edwardes, made it ‘absolutely clear that the intention [of the joint committee of the Communist Party and BL shop stewards] was to break the company’ (quoted in the 2002 BBC documentary series, ‘True Spies’ – transcript here). This information was bound to concern those members of the trade union who wished to pursue a less radical line in negotiations with British Leyland. The minutes of the meeting (again, according to the True Spies documentary) were obtained by an MI5 agent working within the Communist Party and the AUEW (Andrew's book confirms that the Security Service ‘obtained a copy’ of these minutes, but does not explicitly refer to the existence of an MI5 agent within either the Communist Party or the AUEW), and from there came into the possession of John Deverell's unit in the Cabinet Office. Andrew explains what happened next:

…at a meeting with Thatcher and Whitelaw, Deverell obtained their approval for [the record of the meeting] to be passed to the BL chairman, Sir Michael Edwardes. To disguise the source of the minutes, they were placed inside a brown envelope with a Birmingham postmark. Edwardes showed them to the president of the AUEW, Terry Duffy, who was sufficiently impressed to postpone strike action. Edwardes also contacted the Sunday Times, whose journalists tracked down some of those mentioned in the minutes. [p.672] 

This secret information, leaked by Deverell, helped to lead to a collapse in support for strike action both among the union leadership and the union members, thanks in part to press reporting of the affair. 

With all this in mind we can now return to our newly uploaded documents with a much better sense of what they show us. The final defeat of the call to strike action in support of Derek Robinson had occurred in February 1980 (see here). Our documents, concerning the NUM, are dated March 1980. It would therefore appear that our documents indicate a desire on the part of MT for Deverell to initiate another ‘ploy’ (possibly using similar tactics), this time directed against the NUM. This new idea for a ploy comes hot on the heels of the one that was successful at BL, and, like the BL ploy, apparently depends upon secret information passed to the government from a ‘source’ (or sources) whose position would have been ‘endangered’ by clumsy handling of the information.

In the case of the proposed NUM ploy, however, there was little prospect of success. In his reply to Whitmore, Armstrong notes that ‘the material which [Deverell] has immediately available and for which there is overt collateral would not be likely to cause Communist Party activists within the National Miners Left Club much embarrassment’. Instead, Armstrong suggests that 'with the coalmining scene relatively quiet at the moment, it would make sense to keep our powder dry, and our sources of information open, until a time when they could prove particularly useful’.

As we all know, the 'coalmining scene' didn't stay 'relatively quiet' for long. So did the government ever make use of these ‘sources of information’? It’s impossible to say from the documents that we currently have, and perhaps we will never know. Nevertheless, we will keep our eyes peeled for further evidence as more documents are released by The National Archives over the coming years.

Matt Hasler, Deputy Editor

A look into the archive: The Falklands Crisis - 5th May 1982

Here at the Margaret Thatcher Foundation we are in the process of adding to our already extensive archive of documents relating to the Falklands Crisis. We have just published one such document: a memo sent to President Reagan by one of his National Security advisers, dated 5th May 1982 and concerning the US-led attempt to secure a ceasefire between Britain and Argentina. This blogpost is an attempt to set the memo in context.

The 5th May 1982 was a crucial day in the diplomatic battle for the Falkland Islands. Three days previously the Argentine cruiser ARA General Belgrano had been sunk by a British nuclear-powered submarine, while on the 4th of May an Exocet fired by an Argentine jet had hit HMS Sheffield, crippling the ship. With both sides suffering significant casualties, calls for the cessation of hostilities were louder than ever before. Writing in her autobiography, MT commented that 'the shocking loss of life' as a result of the sinking of the Belgrano 'provided a reason - or in some cases perhaps an excuse - for breaks in the ranks among the less committed of our allies' (The Downing Street Years, pp. 215-16). The German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt described himself as "very dismayed" by events in the South Atlantic, while the Irish Government issued a statement declaring its intention to pursue a ceasefire resolution at the UN. It was within this context that US Secretary of State Al Haig was desperately seeking to broker a peace deal between Britain and Argentina.

Events came to a head on the 5th of May. In a telegram sent at just after 2am UK time, President Reagan commended to MT a six point list of proposals which collectively called for an immediate ceasefire and the joint withdrawal of British and Argentine forces, as well as acknowledging 'the existence of differing and conflicting views regarding the status of the Falkland Islands'. With UK agreement, the six point list would be forwarded to the Peruvians, who would in turn communicate them to the Argentine junta. In his démarche to MT Reagan acknowledges that the US proposals fall short of 'the ideas [previously] sent to Al [Haig] by your Foreign Secretary [Francis Pym]', but argues that these ideas would not have provided a 'basis for a peaceful settlement'. Pym's "ideas" crucially included a reference to the restoration of British Administration of the Falkland Islands and a statement to the effect that the wishes of the Islanders needed to be respected (i.e. a right to self-determination). Such language being unacceptable to both the Peruvians and the Argentines, Reagan argued that the the significantly weaker US peace proposal was 'now our best hope' for a peace settlement.

MT and Al Haig in Washington, 28th June 1982 - Wikimedia Commons

At about the same time as Reagan sent his telegram, the UK Ambassador to Washington, Nicholas Henderson, was meeting with Al Haig to discuss the proposals. Haig sought to impress upon Henderson the same points as Reagan had upon MT, namely, that the US peace proposals at this point represented the only chance for a peace settlement, and that any attempt by the British to insist on any of Pym's "ideas" would lead to their immediate rejection by the Argentines. Henderson's telegram to London, reporting on his meeting with Haig, concludes with 'a final word about the mood here':

Haig is fearful of the consequences of a prolongation of the fighting, particularly if it can be represented, however unfairly, that HMG has not pursued every possible chance of a settlement. He foresees that we may increasingly come to the USA for support and that if opinion turns to believing that we have missed the opportunity of peace, it is going to be difficult for the USA to stay in the supportive position they have now adopted.

A dilemma now faced the British Government. By rejecting the US proposals the British would risk presenting themselves as the aggressors in the fight, and this would be especially damaging following the sinking of the Belgrano and the weakening of support for the British position that it had brought about. But accepting the settlement would give rise to the possibility that the Argentine government might actually agree to go along with the US plan, thereby bringing an end to the conflict on terms that were objectionable to the British government - and to MT in particular.

The War Cabinet met at 9am on the morning of the 5th to discuss the US proposals. Pym argued that it 'would be highly damaging to reject Mr Haig's proposal, given the level of fighting which had now developed in the South Atlantic and the shifting attitudes of Britain's European partners', while MT emphasised her concerns about 'the position in relation to South Georgia', the 'ambiguous provision about the local administration of the Falklands', and the 'lack of any reference to the wishes of the inhabitants or to self-determination'. A full meeting of the Cabinet followed at 11:45am, where Haig's proposals were discussed in further detail. Once again Pym argued that they should be accepted, and Cabinet agreed, pending comparatively minor amendments. In particular, since the Argentines would not accept a commitment to self-determination within the terms of the peace settlement, a weaker amendment was proposed: the suggestion that 'the interim administration [of the Falklands] must at least consult with the locally elected representatives' (see here). The minute of the Cabinet meeting concludes with MT's summing up, and portrays her as reluctantly agreeing to the peace proposals. Whether or not Argentina accepted the proposals, she said, 'the United Kingdom would be seen to have pursued in the most responsible way every chance of ending the fighting and securing an agreement'.

In her autobiography MT describes herself as having been 'deeply unhappy about the US/Peruvian proposals' (The Downing Street Years, p.217). She notes that she 'drafted a personal letter to President Reagan that revealed perhaps too much of my frustration, though I toned it down before it was sent' (Ibid.). We have both the original and the "toned down" versions of her letter to Reagan in our archive. The original version is a particularly remarkable document for it reads almost as an argument against the very peace proposals that her Government had just accepted. In the view of Chris Collins, our general Editor, the fact that MT wrote this letter suggests that 'if only for a brief time, she had effectively lost control of the diplomacy to Pym' (see here). MT begins the letter by noting that Pym is writing to Haig in reply to the US proposals, but states that she is writing directly to Reagan because 'I think you are the only person who will understand the significance of what I am trying to say'. This formulation suggests a level of frustration with both Haig and Pym, and perhaps indicates a feeling that they are operating according to an agenda that is different from her own. She then goes on to argue that the US proposals are not faithful to the 'basic principles we must protect', 'first the right to self-determination and second that aggression must not pay'. The failure of the US proposals to uphold these principles implies for MT their abandonment: 'our principles are no longer what we believe, nor those we were elected to save, but what the dictator will accept'. Moreover, by accepting a peace settlement on the proposed terms the 'military junta will be able to proclaim that through invasion, they have succeeded in ousting the British Administration, with all that that means, have subjugated the right to self-determination, and have gained a negotiating framework which...is likely to lead to substantially increased Argentine powers...And what then is to stop another invasion to achieve the rest?' For MT, a ceasefire on these terms would constitute a British defeat in all but name.
 
The "toned down" version of the letter, eventually sent to Reagan at 8:30pm GMT that evening, is strongly-worded but significantly less inflammatory. In particular, although MT emphasises her concern to uphold 'the basic principles we must protect', she does not directly accuse the US Administration of abandoning them, and instead expresses the worry that 'the present rulers of the Argentine will not respect those principles'. The focus of criticism is therefore subtly shifted from the US Administration to the Argentine government.

Our newly published document now fills in the next piece of the puzzle. It is a memo from Bill Clark (a US National Security Adviser) to Reagan, reporting on the British response to the peace proposals. Although the document lacks a timestamp, it appears that it was passed to Reagan shortly after MT dispatched her "toned down" letter to Washington. It begins:

Attached is Prime Minister Thatcher's reply to your compromise proposal to achieve a ceasefire and negotiations for the resolution of the Falklands dispute. In a word, Maggie accepts the proposal.

Following a meeting between Haig and Henderson to discuss minor amendments, Haig sent the proposals on to the Peruvians. In his memo to Reagan Clark comments on the chances of Argentine agreement:

The Argentine response is uncertain. They see Thatcher's position eroding somewhat at home. They also see some opportunity for grandstanding among their third world brothers at the UN. Still they have fewer illusions about the ultimate military outcome.

In a telegram sent to London at 10:50pm GMT, Henderson anticipated that the Argentines would indeed go in for 'grandstanding' at the UN rather than accept the proffer of peace. Henderson was proved correct by the next day's news: 'As anticipated the proposals [have] been turned down by Galtieri...The Argentines [are] now moving to the UN and that [is] the end of that' (Pym telegram to Henderson, 6th May 1982, 1545 GMT).

So ended one of the most important diplomatic battles of the Falklands War. Yet there is a definite sense that the British government, and MT in particular, had managed something of a lucky escape. She writes in her memoirs that despite having to agree to the US proposals she 'took comfort from the fact that I never believed that the Argentine Junta would be prepared to withdraw on these or any other terms' (The Downing Street Years, p.217). Nevertheless, it must have been a significant relief for her to learn that Galtieri had rejected them. As her unsent letter to Reagan shows, she would have considered any other outcome to constitute a defeat, both for Britain and for her personally.

Matt Hasler, Deputy Editor

Behind the scenes at the Margaret Thatcher Foundation (Part 2 of 2)

This is the second of a two part blog post which seeks to clarify what we do, how we do it, and what our goals are. In the first part I talked about the history of the Foundation and the creation of the website, and then went on to explain the construction of our archive. As we saw, the two main sources of documents for the archive are MT's personal and political papers, stored at Churchill College Archives Centre in Cambridge, and her official prime ministerial files (the 'PREM19s'), stored at The National Archives in Kew, but we also pull together documents from myriad other sources in order to make the archive as comprehensive as possible. In this second part of the series I will seek to explain and justify our editorial processes.

As should be clear by now, we believe that in building our website we are developing a useful and detailed historical resource. But, as any historian knows, one must always question the trustworthiness of one's sources. So can you trust us to provide accurate and comprehensive information? The Margaret Thatcher Foundation was, after all, founded by MT herself: are we not therefore providing an edited version of history in order to portray her and her premiership in the best possible light?
 
It is certainly true that we do have to make editorial decisions when administering the website. As already explained, a key source of documents for our website is the PREM19s. In their 'raw' form, the digitised versions of these folders are often many hundreds of pages long, and contain hundreds of documents. Throughout the course of MT's time as PM, thousands of these folders were produced. In order to make sense of all this, some sort of order has to be imposed. Our archive is intended not only to make documents freely available online, but also to make them searchable by tagging them in a useful way and adding them to our database. Yet if the database is to function properly it simply cannot include every document contained within the PREM19s. If it did it would become unwieldy, and every search would return hundreds of irrelevant and/or uninteresting results. It is therefore crucial that we make selections from these PREM19 folders, by determining which documents are of the greatest historical interest and adding only those to the database. And the same is of course true for documents taken from other sources. It is neither sensible nor feasible to add all of them to the database. (However, it should be noted that although only a selection of documents are being added to the searchable database, all of the 'raw' files are also going on our website in complete and unedited form - see below.) 

Furthermore, there can be no hard and fast rules for deciding which documents should be added to the database. Generally speaking, records of MT's meetings will always go online, as will minutes and letters sent to MT by key Cabinet figures (see, for example, the Chancellor of the Exchequer's and Foreign Secretary's minutes). MT's correspondence with national and international figures always goes online as well. Beyond that, case-by-case judgements are required. For example, it is usually the case that short administrative notes are of little historical interest, but in certain cases they can be revealing. This note concerns arrangements for a 1982 constituency visit, and asks MT whether she would be willing to drive a radio controlled forklift into a warehouse as part of a function. MT's scribbled annotation shows her concern that this might look 'gimmicky' given the 'current situation', the 'current situation' being the Falklands crisis. Then, in parenthesis, she adds, 'unless it is all resolved by then'. These words, written casually in a trivial private document, only make sense if she thought that there might be a diplomatic solution to the Falklands Crisis, and the note therefore provides an interesting window into her thinking at this point in time. This example demonstrates the extent to which case-by-case editorial judgements are essential for determining the interest of historical documents.

So given that editorial judgements have to be made, how do can know that you can trust our editorial judgements? 

The first thing to emphasise is that we sincerely desire that the document archive should serve as a useful historical resource for the purposes of serious and intellectually honest research. We do not want to present a narrow or distorted version of the historical record, and we certainly do not hold back or censor documents that deal with contentious or controversial topics. Some of the documents in our archive do feature redactions, but these were made by the Cabinet Office on grounds of national security. There are also documents present in the hard-copy archives that we would like to put online but cannot because we do not have the right to reproduce them. But with these exceptions, everything that is of historical interest is added to the database. Indeed, the more complicated and contentious a topic is, the more likely you are to find documents relating to that topic on our website. We are therefore focusing with particular intensity on the Falklands Crisis, and have dealt comprehensively with issues like the IRA hunger strikes at the Maze Prison. Once documents on the Miners' Strike, Hillsborough, and other potentially contentious topics are released to us, they will be given similar care and attention.

Secondly, as mentioned above, we are also making available "raw", unedited folders of documents wherever possible. This is particularly true of the PREM19s, and on this page you can find links to PDF versions of complete PREM19 folders. The obvious disadvantage to viewing the folders in this way is that they cannot be searched through in the same way as those documents uploaded to the database, but nevertheless they are (or will be) available for manual cross-checking. (NB: Uploading the complete PREM 19 files to the website is an on-going  and time consuming process. Indeed, the majority of the PREM19s are still to be released to us. But we will get there, and eventually every one of MT's prime ministerial folders will be available for download in complete and unedited form.) If even that doesn't satisfy you, then you should also bear in mind that the vast majority of the documents in our database are available to view in hard-copy form at either the Churchill Archive Centre in Cambridge, or The National Archives in Kew. It is always possible to cross-check our digital archive against the relevant paper versions.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it appears that academics of all political stripes consider our website to constitute a useful historical resource. Consider, for instance, the following description of the site by Eric J. Evans. It is taken from the bibliography to his Thatcher and Thatcherism (Routledge, 3rd Edition, 2013), a book which argues for a generally negative assessment of MT and her legacy:

Students of the Thatcher era have a distinct advantage over those working on other near-contemporary figures. The Margaret Thatcher Foundation has digitised and put online a massive amount of material, including all of Thatcher's major speeches and other primary-source material...The Foundation does not pretend to be a national archive or to represent all views equally and the brief biographical introduction is hardly a dispassionate assessment of its subject. However, the site is immensely valuable and new additions to it are regularly made. It claims, quite correctly, 'to offer thousands of documents touching on the career of Margaret Thatcher...to inform and advance understanding of the period'.

There is bound to be disagreement over the correct interpretation of the documents on our website, but it is important to us that the website itself should be trusted and valued. For that reason there is a sense in which we most value praise that comes from those who are not sympathetic to MT or her legacy. It shows that we are doing our job right.

Hopefully this two-part post has given you an idea of what we do and how we work, but if you have any further questions please feel free to contact us via Twitter or Facebook.

Matt Hasler, Deputy Editor
 

Behind the scenes at the Margaret Thatcher Foundation (Part 1 of 2)

Hello and welcome to the blog of the Margaret Thatcher Foundation website. Here we will be discussing the work of the Foundation, highlighting items of interest that we come across, and generally exploring the history of the Thatcher period.

For starters, we're going to give you a look behind the scenes at the Foundation. In this two part post I will describe what we do and how the website works, all with the aim of making our editorial processes more transparent and giving you a better sense of what our goals are. This first part will focus on the history of the Foundation and the background to the website. In the second part I'll go into greater detail regarding our editorial processes, and seek to deal with possible worries about the trustworthiness of our site as a historical resource. 

The Margaret Thatcher Foundation was founded in 1991 by Baroness Thatcher (hereafter referred to as ‘MT’), with the aim of helping to promote the values for which she stood. The Foundation's first major project was the compilation of The Complete Public Statements of Margaret Thatcher 1945-2000, a CD-ROM featuring the full text of every public statement Lady Thatcher ever made. Copies can be found at some 1,600 university libraries around the world, and a large proportion of the content of the disc can be found on our website.

Following the completion of the CD-ROM a new project began to take shape. In 2003, MT deposited her archive of private papers at the Churchill College Archives Centre. These personal and party political documents are rich in fascinating biographical and historical detail, and, given their personal and private nature, contain information that is not available from any other source. Documents from this archive are made available to the public on a rolling basis: in 2010 all documents from 1979 were opened for viewing, in 2011 those from 1980 followed, and so on. It was decided that the Foundation should make the best of these documents available online, and the archive section of our website was born. The most recent release from the Churchill Archives took place in March 2013, with documents from 1982 being made available for the first time. You can read an introductory essay about the documents contained in this release here.

The development of this archive is now the key ongoing project for the Foundation. The task is massive. After all, MT’s private papers provide just one, albeit very important, source of historical documents for us. The other is MT’s official Prime Ministerial files, originally held by the Cabinet Office and then released to The National Archives at Kew under the thirty year rule. MT’s official Prime Ministerial files (the so-called PREM19s) contain most of the documents that passed across her desk during her time as PM. These include correspondence between Ministers, minutes to MT, notes from her private secretaries to government departments, records of meetings, official reports and diplomatic telegrams, as well as correspondence between MT and MPs, business figures, world leaders, members of the public…and much else besides. The PREM19's are therefore a treasure trove of information to anyone with an interest in the history of the Thatcher period. They can be viewed in hard copy at the National Archives at Kew, but by putting these documents online in digital form we have made them far more accessible to academics, researchers, journalists, and the general public.

Like the private papers at Churchill, the PREM19s are released on a rolling basis. Up until 2012, prime ministerial and other official documents from thirty years prior were released in bulk in December of each year. For example, all of the documents from 1982 were released in one go in December 2012. That changes this year however, as the government begins its move towards releasing documents under the new twenty year rule instead. This means that in December 2013 official documents from 1983 and 1984 will be released, and this process of releasing two-years'-worth of files at a time will continue until 2022. This may be great news for curious historians, but it is also sure to make December an even more frantic month for us! 

[CORRECTION: Since publishing this blog post we have received updated information from The National Archives. Rather than releasing two years' worth of documents each December, documents will instead be released at six-month intervals. This means that documents for 1983 are being released in summer 2013, with documents from 1984 released in December 2013.]

The private papers from Churchill and the PREM19s from Kew are the two principal sources of documents for our website. But there are many others besides. You can also find on our site documents taken from the Presidential Libraries of Carter, Reagan and George H. W. Bush, from the US State Department, the CIA, and the diary of Jim Rentschler, a US National Security Council official in the Carter and Reagan Administrations. We have others from the Archive of European Integration in Pittsburgh and the European Council Archive, from the Bank of England and the Bundesbank. We have many of Bernard Ingham’s personal papers, some of those belonging to Alan Walters, and passages from Lord Hailsham’s encoded diary. Other documents come from the archive of Nigel Lawson, the Conservative Party Archive, the papers of Friedrich Hayek and the archives of the Institute of Economic Affairs. This is an incomplete list, and new documents from different sources are being added to the website all the time.

Suffice to say, we believe that by seeking out and populating our archive with these documents we are creating a valuable historical resource. But at this point certain questions may reasonably arise. Do we take editorial decisions? And if so, how do we justify them? Given the origins of the Foundation, how can we be trusted to provide you, the reader, with an accurate and comprehensive set of documents? Are we not simply seeking to write a version of history that portrays MT and her legacy in a favourable light?

I will address these questions in the second part of this blog post.

Matt Hasler, Deputy Editor