Lord Ashcroft KCMG PC has had his latest “hero of the month” article published in Britain at War, the country’s best-selling military history monthly magazine.
The June issue of magazine has four pages on the life and career of Company Sergeant Major Martin Doyle VC, MM, who, within a year of the announcement of his main decoration, was fighting against the very country that had bestowed the award upon him. (more…)
First published in the Daily Express on 03 June 2019.
ON June 6 1944, more than 155,000 courageous Allied servicemen, including my own dear father, took part in the D-Day landings as part of Operation Neptune, the largest seaborne invasion in history. However, amid endless stories of courage, just one of these men was deemed to have displayed such outstanding gallantry that he was awarded the Victoria Cross (VC), Britain and the Commonwealth’s most prestigious award for gallantry in the face of the enemy. When the fighting was at its heaviest on Gold Beach, one of the five chosen for the invasion of Normandy, Company Sergeant Major Stanley Hollis showed his northern grit and determination. (more…)
Since polling opened in the European elections I have surveyed over 10,000 voters to ask how they voted, why they chose the party they did, and – at least as of this weekend – what they see themselves doing at the next general election.
Who voted for whom?
More than half (53%) of 2017 Conservative voters who took part in the European elections voted for the Brexit Party. Only just over one in five (21%) stayed with the Tories. Around one in eight (12%) switched to the Liberal Democrats. Labour voters from 2017 were more likely to stay with their party, but only a minority (38%) did so. More than one in five (22%) went to the Lib Dems, 17% switched to the Greens, and 13% went to the Brexit Party.
First published on 26 May 2019 in the Mail on Sunday.
It was dawn on Tuesday, June 6, 1944. In a landing craft filled with a sense of fear and trepidation, two officers from very different backgrounds crouched low to avoid the inevitable incoming fire. In an earlier confidential briefing, the men had been warned to expect 75 per cent casualties – dead and wounded – as they charged up Sword Beach as part of the D-Day landings.
They had, understandably, kept that grim prediction from the rank-and-file as they prepared for their role in the largest seaborne invasion in history: codenamed Operation Neptune, it involved more than 155,000 men. (more…)
Lord Ashcroft KCMG PC has had his latest “hero of the month” article published in Britain at War, the country’s best-selling military history monthly magazine.
The May issue of magazine has four pages on the life and career of Sergeant George Monk, who was awarded the Military Medal (MM) for gallantry during the post Second World War Malayan Campaign and for what his official citation described as “a brilliant little action”.
George Monk, who was born in June 1922, enlisted into the Suffolk Regiment in October 1941. During the Second World War, he served both at home and in North West Europe with his regiment and the Royal Artillery, the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment and the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. (more…)
Article in Mail on Sunday – 05 May 2019
With his glorious golden mane, magnificent Simba cautiously surveys his new kingdom as he stalks through dense bushes. (more…)
Lord Ashcroft, the former Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party, has made a series of major revelations about the captive-bred lion industry in South Africa.
In the light of his exclusive disclosures, Lord Ashcroft called on the South African Government to halt the “horrific and abusive” activity of “lion farming” and urged the UK Government to bring in new import laws to discourage the practice. (more…)
My presentation to the International Democrat Union executive meeting in Santiago, Chile, looking at what my polling shows about the prospects for the 2020 US Presidential election.
Since the midterm elections in November I have conducted further research looking at the state of play at the midway point in Donald Trump’s term – or should that be his first term? This is presented in detail in my latest book, Half-Time!, which also brings together more than two years of my work on the Ashcroft in America project. The aim is to work out where the American public is and where is seems to be heading as the battle lines are drawn for the 2020 election. I will set out some of the main points here, but do take the chance to help a struggling author and get hold of a copy either from Amazon or direct from Biteback Publishing.
Lord Ashcroft KCMG PC has had his latest “hero of the month” article published in Britain at War, the country’s best-selling military history monthly magazine.
The April issue of magazine has four pages on the life and career of Company Sergeant Major Peter Harold Wright VC.
Farmer’s son Wright, who was born in Mettingham, Suffolk, initially planned a career in the police force but he changed his mind and enlisted in the Coldstream Guards in October 1936, later joining the 3rd Battalion. He served in Egypt and Palestine as a lance corporal from 1937-9. (more…)
Divided though we are, one thing everyone in the country seems to agree on is that they are sick to the back teeth of our political class. Individual politicians still sometimes inspire support or admiration – Theresa May not least among them, it should be said. But depending on your point of view, politicians have either failed to deliver on a clear and unambiguous promise to the voters, or spent two years indulging their own obsessions at the expense of things that really matter, or some combination of the two. Whatever the outcome of the current debacle, one casualty could be the parties as we know them today, with The Independent Group – in its new guise as Change UK – in the vanguard of a new political order.