Mandy’s place in things On 12 June 1999 The News, Portugal’s weekly English-language paper, ran this comment on the Bilderberg meeting which had then just taken place in Portugal. The 47th Bilderberg Conference has come to an end. Members and one-off participants have departed as discreetly as they arrived. Lines of black limousines, unmarked except … Read more
The first of three essays in this issue are about New Labour and its origins. I put mine first because of its general, context-setting nature. The subsequent essays, on the Successor Generation and the operations in the British Unions, deepen and thicken the section towards the end of the opening essay which discusses New Labour’s … Read more
See also: Part 1 in Lobster 36 ‘Certainly I do not think that the answer to communism is a counter-faith, equally fervent, militant, etc; to begin with, nothing is less likely to create a faith, than perpetual reiteration of the fact that we are looking for one, must find one, are lost without one, etc … Read more
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 a … Read more
At 00:20 on Sunday 31 August 1997 a black Mercedes S280 carrying four people left the Ritz Hotel in central Paris. Shortly afterwards at 00:25 it crashed into the thirteenth pillar of the Concorde-Boulogne lane of the Pont d’Alma Tunnel in central Paris. The driver – Henri Paul – was killed instantly. The front passenger … Read more
Malcolm Kennedy believes his telephones, email and post are being interfered with. His attempts to obtain answers have met with brick walls, and his situation has been described as Kafkaesque. Soon his complaint will be one of the first to be heard by the recently established Investigatory Powers Tribunal. Background Last Summer, Lobster drew attention … Read more
‘Britain, 2005. Saddam Hussein, still the ruler of Iraq and possessor of a long-range nuclear missile, seeks revenge on the west. Warned by intelligence reports of Saddam’s plan, the United States deploys a space-based missile shield, which will catch the Iraqi rocket before it gets to Washington. The key installation is based in Yorkshire — … Read more
Bilderberg Originally given as a paper at the British Association for American Studies 2002 Annual Postgraduate Conference, this draws on newly available archival evidence to document the origins of the Bilderberg Group. It also considers the various conspiracy theories which have attached themselves to the Group. Is it a CIA plot to undermine socialism or … Read more
Free Ride Department Meanwhile the Rand Corporation (that liberal think tank in Santa Monica which helps decide which Russian cities should be atom-bombed) has declared that the federal government must continue to support an obscure military satellite system known as Global Positioning Network. Much beloved by high-tech hikers and rental car enthusiasts, the GPS supposedly … Read more
MI5 and the Wilson Plot The MI5 website (www.mi5.gov.uk) has a section called ‘myths and misunderstandings’, which features, among other things, ‘the Wilson Plot’. The paragraph it devotes to this episode is worth studying. It refers the reader to Spycatcher and Peter Wright’s allegation that ‘up to 30 members of the Service had plotted to … Read more
