Lobster Issue 55 (Summer 2008)
[…] career, to Roy (now Lord) Hattersley. Lord Cashpoint’s memory A Foreign Office colleague of McShane and Foulkes under Blair was Michael Levy whose memoirs attacking Blair, Gordon Brown and the state of the Labour Party were serialised in The Mail on Sunday just before the May municipal elections. A Question of Honour was ghostwritten […]
Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007)
[…] the Mafia notoriously say, ‘things change’ but it looked, by May Day, that deadlines were being set. Blair has set a framework for terrorism and security that Brown might well adapt to his requirements but is unlikely to change fundamentally. Intelligence-based policing, the framework for an eventual introduction of investigating judges, a culture of […]
Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8)
[…] the Democrats and – by implication – how British politicians would compete for office in the future. Weston’s book, we were told, was being read by the Brown team during the parliamentary recess. Except Bush didn’t beat the Democrats: the Republicans stole both elections; and the fascination this book has apparently roused is just […]
Lobster Issue 33 (Summer 1997)
[…] former Conservative Central Office researcher who was then editorial page editor of the Independent newspaper was one of two British journalists present, the other being Yasmin Alibhai Brown, then an editor of the New Statesman and now a freelance writer whose work appears widely. The purpose of the 1988 gathering – as of all […]
Lobster Issue 46 (Winter 2003)
[…] limited success no thanks to the rather naive approach to business of the Leader’s immediate circle. Geoff Mulgan was then (1992) a research assistant to Gordon Brown and LFIG was close to the John Smith/Gordon Brown Scots network, though Blair was very much in the frame even at that time as a rising […]
Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996)
[…] and who knows which other scum-bag regimes; hence the huge subsidies of the arms industry by the British state. In the Public Interest Gerald James Little and Brown, London, 1995(1) Some of these events are described in great detail by Gerald James. This is an important book, perhaps a very important book, and it […]
Lobster Issue 45 (Summer 2003)
In 1997 Robert Henderson, a retired civil servant, wrote to the then leader of the Opposition Tony Blair to ask for his help. Eventually he wrote a dozen or so letters to Blair and Cherie Booth. Blair then tried to have him prosecuted but the legal authorities refused to act. Blair or someone close to […]
Lobster Issue 56 (Winter 2008/9)
[…] secondary bond market, for more than 40 per cent of global derivatives’ means that much of the chaos of the past year originated in London, while Gordon Brown and Ed Balls were in charge of the Treasury. Which makes Brown’s posturing as the man who will reform the financial world the more ridiculous. Credit […]
Lobster Issue 49 (Summer 2005)
[…] fascinating insight into the American military-industrial complex though there seems little point in discussing the actual content of the book: the activities of Halliburton, its subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root, or its infamous CEO, the vice-president of the United States, Dick Cheney. For those who read Collin Challen’s article in Lobster 47 it’s a […]
Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999)
Seymour M. Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot (Boston: Little Brown, 1997) Seymour Hersh is one of those figures with no real equivalent in British journalism. For one thing, the budgets, the armies of fact-checkers and, indeed, the market for this sort of extended politico-analytical foray just does not exist over here. Writing from […]