Limited Loyalties

Newly declassified papers in the Irish Republic include a note to taoiseach Charles Haughey from the Ulster Volunteer Force, claiming that British intelligence had given them his address and invited them to pay a call. As "loyalist paramilitaries" (pro-Imperial terrorists, in Oldspeak), the UVF were supposedly disinclined to do London's dirty work, having as usual misconstrued the relationship between the exalted state of Britishness and the humbler caste of colonial flunkeydom. This was in the mid-eighties, when the Barclaygraph and possibly even the Rothermere Daily Stürmer still had some pretensions to journalism; which accounts for the apparent fact that the call for assassination was delivered via MI5 rather than in a squealing 72-point screed on the front pages of the national lynch mob.