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 […]

Tittle Tattle

Lobster Issue 62 (Winter 2011)

[PDF file]: […] Gould’s old sidekick in the ‘modernisation’ of Labour. Hill’s partner is Hilary Coffman, who previously worked for Kinnock and Michael Foot. BAP and the BEEB Hill’s sister, BBC chief editorial adviser Margaret, is a longstanding member of the British American Project (Lobsters passim) whose members now seem to fill more and more of the […]

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 […]

Holding Pattern

Lobster Issue 70 (Winter 2015)

[PDF file]: […] information you want from just about anyone, so long as it has an environmental connection. Not even the spooks are exempt from EIR and the dear old BBC, whose investigative journalism knows no depths, recently used the regulations to gain information about the energy efficiency of the headquarters of MI5 and MI6, vital information […]

The Gloucester Horror

Lobster Issue 70 (Winter 2015)

[PDF file]: […] consistency but the emerging motive is transparent. In a typed and lengthy letter dated 3 January 1973, Mr Westlake wrote concerning Mr Sargeant’s analysis of the above-mentioned BBC film of the crash: ‘George Carley and I have now had time to digest your analysis and as your draft now stands there is liable to […]

Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund

Lobster Issue 90 (2025)

[PDF file]: Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund London: The Bodley Head, 2025, £25, h/b Colin Challen One of the earlier books seeking to answer the questions of who and what Keir Starmer is and represents was Oliver Eagleton’s The Starmer Project: A Journey to the Right (Verso, 2022). […]

Is there a ‘political class’?

Lobster Issue 61 (Summer 2011)

[PDF file]: […] of social and economic liberalism, and they reproduce themselves across the generations, with the children moving seamlessly from (usually) private school to university, to political intern/private office/journalism/ BBC, to think tanks like Reform, Policy Exchange or the Centre for Policy Studies, or to polling organisations like YouGov, and thence to Parliament. If they want […]

The Fate of Abraham: Why the West is Wrong about Islam by Peter Oborne

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022)

[PDF file]: […] for the British state. He writes: I loved and was thankful for the monarchy, Parliament, the army, the rule of law, the NHS, the Foreign Office, the BBC and everything that the United Kingdom stood for. I considered liberal capitalism the best system of economics the world has had. I was a conventional Conservative. […]

Shirley Williams

Lobster Issue

[…] 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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