The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 81 (Summer 2021)

[PDF file]: […] was prompted to look at it for the first time in a while by seeing the headline on Gosling’s latest email collection: ‘Wife-Killer Prince Charles Flexes Orwellian BBC Mind-Control Muscle, Eyes Global Great Reset & Peace Antichrist Roles’. Yesterday’s men Two of yesterday’s men, Conservative MPs Philip Hammond, former Chancellor the Exchequer, and Alan […]

Decades of Deceit: the Stalker Affair and its Legacy

Lobster Issue 90 (2025)

[PDF file]: […] methods deployed by the RUC SB as they followed the approach recommended by Walker and Oldfield clearly caused some unease within the force. In September 2019 the BBC Northern Ireland current affairs TV series Spotlight broadcast an episode about the suspected shoot-to-kill policy. It featured Raymond White, who stated that in 1986, when head […]

The Western Union Clandestine Committee: Britain and the ‘Gladio’ networks

Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016)

[PDF file]: […] Park. 22 As good a point to start for anyone who might want to read more about ‘Numbers Stations’ would be and the YouTube upload of a BBC Radio 4 programme at . 23 An official, and very dry account is at the Intelligence Corps Museum website at A more entertaining read can be […]

Romeo Spy by John Alexander Symonds

Lobster Issue 63 (Summer 2012)

[PDF file]: […] of inaccurate tales of espionage.’ (p. 314) Symonds’ account ends with this devastating final paragraph. ‘In retrospect, nobody emerges from the Mitrokhin affair with much credit. The BBC and The Times competed against each other to see who could renege on their agreements first; MI5 tried every slippery trick to conceal Dame Stella’s stunning […]

Historical Notes on Tom Nairn and the British State

Lobster Issue 85 (Summer 2023)

[PDF file]: […] mentor, Sir Keith Joseph, commented in 1976 that ‘the pursuit of income inequality will turn this country into a totalitarian slum’. During the 1979 election Thatcher told BBC reporter Michael Cockerell, ‘I can’t bear Britain in decline, I just can’t’.18 Like the coup plotters, the Thatcher governments were determined to reverse a ‘decline’ they […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 88 (2024)

[PDF file]: […] between the country as it actually is and as it is represented in Westminster.30 If Butler and McTeague are political commentators, Libby Purves is not. Times columnist, BBC presenter for many years, Purves is the personification of the middle-of-the-road, mainstream, apolitical (but conservative) journalist.31 But things are now so bad even Purves was moved […]

MI5 speaks to the nation!

Lobster Issue 79 (Summer 2020)

[PDF file]: MI5 speaks to the nation! Nick Must ‘How MI5 is adapting to fight coronavirus’1 was the headline on a BBC news online piece by Gordon Corera. In relation to that potential change in working practices, it quoted soon-to-depart MI5 chief, Sir Andrew Parker, thus: ‘You’ll understand if I don’t go into exactly the ways […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 93 (2026)

[PDF file]: […] with the help of the joint intelligence committee . . . Due to be published last autumn it was blocked by No 10 as too negative’. The BBC discussed it on the 27th,6 so evidently Whitehall had ‘As Trump menaces Greenland, this much is clear: the free world needs a new plan – and […]

We don’t need no…

Lobster Issue 79 (Summer 2020)

[PDF file]: […] was necessary to let him make friendly things (sic) to the manufacturing people.’ 12 (emphasis added) Mrs Thatcher also bought this line. In his memoir, the former BBC political correspondent, John Cole, describes asking Mrs Thatcher for an example of how this ‘service’ or ‘post-industrial economy’ would work: ‘She cited an entrepreneur she had […]

Climbing the Bookshelves by Shirley Williams

Lobster Issue 58 (Winter 2009/2010)

[PDF file]: […] read Climbing the Bookshelves by the former Labour Cabinet minister who helped launch the short-lived SDP in 1981. Sure enough the wise words I’d heard on the BBC were there. But so was her description of how as a 21-year-old Oxford student the then Shirley Catlin was funded by the US government to take […]

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