Her Majesty’s secret servants

Lobster Issue 62 (Winter 2011)

[PDF file]: […] fine imposed and the expenses incurred by the Telegraph dealing with the court case. Harebrained? ‘Page 8’ was a film written and directed by David Hare on BBC 2 on 28 August 2011, in which Bill Nighy played a suave, sophisticated senior MI5 officer who saves the Service from being being destroyed in a […]

Did the Mossad steal John le Carré’s cunning plan?

Lobster Issue 79 (Summer 2020)

[PDF file]: […] inserted into the PLO and then smuggled into Germany to wreck a Palestinian bombing campaign was filmed by Hollywood in 1983 and again for television by the BBC in 2018.7 Imitating The Little Drummer Girl, within months of its publication, by infiltrating a transgender Manchester-born woman into a real PLO splinter group, appears so […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 92 (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 […]

The economic crisis continues

Lobster Issue 61 (Summer 2011)

[PDF file]: […] then about government borrowing;1 3 the trade deficit,1 4 and 10 Lewis was the author of the classic account of 1980s Wall St. rackets, Liar’s Poker. 11 BBC News on-line, 19 December, 2003, ‘IMF gives Brown borrowing warning’ 12 13 ‘Brown besieged over growth and borrowing plans’, The Times, 22 September 2005 14 20 […]

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 […]

Ten Years Hard Labour by Chris Williamson

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022)

[PDF file]: […] (p. 27) Many of these New Labour MPs who had been parachuted into their safe seats by the party machine returned to Westminster after the 2015 This BBC documentary made at the time of the 2017 general election gives a flavour of the attitudes of leading figures in the Parliamentary Labour Party at the […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue 63 (Summer 2012)

[PDF file]: […] bullshit basket he calls for some global action which he knows will never take place but which he thinks sounds impressive. His latest was reported on the BBC News website: he wants a ‘global fund for education’.6 No doubt this will be next on the list after the new global financial system he wants […]

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 […]

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 […]

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