Election fraud Further to ‘How to fix an Election’ in Lobster 43, more news on the gentle art of perfuming a skunk. First Pick Your Voters Some strong contenders here. But first out of the hat is the Labour Party for performance during the all-postal voting experiments that were tried across the country in the … Read more
The story in The Guardian of 12 November, ‘Diplomat’s “slave” can stay in UK’, was the tip of an iceberg. The story concerned the allegations made that a Sudanese diplomat had kept a ‘slave’ in London. Allegations of slavery in the Sudan have been made – and denied – for years. (A summary of the … Read more
Some reflections on the life, times and politics of Sir James Goldsmith The Clermont Set The Clermont Club was opened in 1962 by John Aspinall after the gaming laws had been liberalised by the MacMillan government.(1)During the 1950s Aspinall built up a personal fortune providing premises for exclusive gambling sessions in London, much of which … Read more
Wishing and hoping I met Tony Benn only once, while researching Smear! He’s a lovely man with a big blind spot about the politics of the early 1980s in general and the Militant Tendency in particular. Here’s Benn in the course of an appreciation of Arthur Scargill on his standing down as President of … Read more
In this article I amplify and update my account of the crash that killed Diana, Princess of Wales, Dodi Fayed and Henri Paul which appeared in Lobster 37. Since it was written there have been a number of interesting developments – the publication of Trevor Rees-Jones’ book; James Hewitt’s impromptu recreation of the fatal car … Read more
Kenneth De Courcy Kenneth de Courcy buffs will be pleased to know that they can now visit a website with some interesting further information about this maverick figure. The site can be found at < http:// www.pharo.com/intelligence >, and is run by the team which produced Double Standards, last year’s interesting study of the Hess … Read more
Cloak and Dollar: A History of American Secret Intelligence Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones London: Yale University Press, 2002, £22.50 Know Your Enemy: How the Joint Intelligence Committee Saw the World Percy Craddock London: John Murray, 2002, £25 Jeffreys-Jones is Professor of American History at Edinburgh University and writes on the American intelligence services. His book’s subtitle … Read more
Stephen Dorril London: Viking, 2006, £30 In his 1975 biography of Oswald Mosley, Robert (now Lord) Skidelsky very much celebrated the old fascist on his own terms, contributing, wittingly or not, to his attempted rehabilitation. Mosley, we were told in all seriousness, was always driven by his concern for ordinary people and a desire … Read more
William Blum New York: Soft Skull Press, 2002, $15 www.softskull.com The working lives of writers, especially writers of non-fiction like Blum – or me – are rather dull. To produce Lobster and my other bits and pieces I have to stay in one place, read e-mails every day, books, newspapers, visit libraries, go to … Read more
See also Part 1 in Lobster 5 Ian Macgregor and AMAX We have followed one of Macgregor’s leads into the British Establishment; now we return to the man himself. He was born in 1912 in Kinlochleven and graduated from Glasgow University with a BSc in metallurgical engineering. He was a trainee manager at the British … Read more
