Lobster Issue 49 (Summer 2005) £££
Peter Oborne London: The Free Press (Simon and Schuster), 2005, £7.99, p/b Before his minutely detailed account of some of New Labour’s lies Oborne gives us a potted history of lying in the past 25 years to show us how relatively truthful New Labour’s predecessors were. This old nag won’t run. For example, he […]
Lobster Issue 56 (Winter 2008/9) £££
From Thatcher to the Third Way: think-tanks, intellectuals and the Blair project Robert Carl Blank Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2003, ISBN 3-89821-277-7 This illustrates the hazards of Amazon’s ‘search inside the book’ feature: I read an interesting couple of pages of this and bought it for about $30 and it isn’t worth the money. This is […]
Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2) £££
En route to their crushing general election victory in 2001 the Prime Minister and his colleagues found time for a private working breakfast with some of the big movers and shakers in UK corporate capitalism – Glaxo Smith Kline, HSBC, Unilever, Tesco, Royal Bank of Scotland, Centrica and many others – ‘to reduce the risk […]
Lobster Issue 26 (1993) £££
[…] an informal action committee, without reporting to the Council.’ (3) Parallel to the Freedom Association, with Stephen Hastings MP, Crozier formed the Shield Committee to brief Mrs Thatcher while Leader of the Opposition, on the ‘subversive menace’. He claims Mrs Thatcher ‘was listening …. because was telling her things nobody had yet mentioned to […]
Lobster Issue 48 (Winter 2004) £££
The Christie File part 3, 1967-75 Stuart Christie p/back, £34 (inc. p and p) from Like the first, reviewed in Lobster 44, this third volume (300 pages, indexed) in Christie’s autobiography is done on A4 pages with the central text bordered with photographs of the people and incidents concerned, newspaper clippings, posters, cartoons etc. With […]
Lobster Issue 26 (1993) £££
A Wapping mystery I noticed with some interest that Sunday Times editor, Andrew Neil, was described in the Guardian on May 27 as having been labour correspondent of the Economist in the 1970s. Was he, I thought, one of the correspondents recruited by MI5 in the big F branch expansion circa 1973-5? Did that explain […]
Lobster Issue 12 (1986) £££
[…] reported to be the largest Tory Party grouping at Westminster, with over 80 MPs. The ‘New Right’ discovered by the media in the late 1970s (essentially after Thatcher came to power), is little more than an expression of the media’s complete lack of interest in the British Right prior to Mrs Thatcher. This ‘New […]
Lobster Issue 52 (Winter 2006/7) £££
[…] that they were going to be pro-American, pro-NATO, pro-business, anti-union and media conscious. What we did not know then was just how completely they had internalised the Thatcher ethos, how hostile they were going to be the public sector and, as a result, what a complete bunch of schmucks they were going to be […]
Lobster Issue 52 (Winter 2006/7) £££
Mr Tony was a spook? Issue 7 of Larry O’Hara’s Note from the Borderland () includes a section from the Anne Machon and David Shayler book, Spies, Lies and Whistleblowers (reviewed in Lobster 49), which was apparently dropped by the publisher. The key section is this, from an unnamed MI5 officer: ‘Blair was recruited early […]