Lobster Issue 23 (1992) £££
[…] of the bug was for fear that Stalker might discover that MI5 had also bugged the car in which McTerr, Toman and Burns were killed. According to BBC reporter Chris Moore, ‘the security forces involved in the covert surveillance operation were able to listen to the conversation going on in the car.’ (21) An […]
Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007) £££
Tony Blair will be remembered not just for the slaughter in Iraq, and the subsequent collapse of Labour in Scotland in face of a resurgent SNP, but as the Labour leader who could have forged common links across Europe but chose to side with one of the continent’s most despised figures. Charles Clarke, one of […]
Lobster Issue 21 (1991) £££
Introduction There are a couple of interesting chapters in Chapman Pincher’s recent The Truth About Dirty Tricks, (Sidgwick and Jackson, 1991), especially the one about Harold Wilson’s ‘spymaster’, the late George Wigg; but, despite the usual shower of interesting fragments, mostly it is junk. Pincher’s primary strategy is clear enough. During the mid 1970s bureaucratic […]
Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007) £££
[…] study: Murphy’s Law……. Notes Robert Verkaik, ‘The Freedom of Information Act misused’, The Independent, 22 March 2007. The complete text can be read at . For a BBC version of the original ‘Israeli art students’ story from 2002 see . Or, rather, don’t see that URL for it evoked a 404 when I tried […]
Lobster Issue 46 (Winter 2003) £££
Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real Role in the World Mark Curtis London: Vintage, 2003; p/b, £7.99 This latest analysis of British foreign policy by Mark Curtis could not be better timed. With more than a million Britons on the streets of London protesting against the Iraq war earlier this year there is a potentially large […]
Lobster Issue 46 (Winter 2003) £££
[…] movements were gathering strength everywhere, Omo was being sold all over the Caribbean, Africa and the African Middle East with the advertising strapline ‘Omo washes whitest…..’ 2 BBC 6 O’clock News, 3 October 2003. The high profile launch of the American doughnut chain contrasts with the non-existent one in many London suburbs of the […]
Lobster Issue 20 (1990) £££
[…] a peace agreement with Germany in 1941. Thomas’s theory was examined in a highly critical film by Dr Christopher Andrew of Corpus Christie College, Cambridge, for the BBC 2 history programme Timewatch in January. Andrew maintained that Hess was Hess after all and that he had probably committed suicide. The Thomas story was, Andrew […]
Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007) £££
[…] perhaps the biggest obscenity of them all. Faced with the death of David Kelly he managed to turn the Hutton Inquiry into a witch hunt of the BBC. Blair’s legacy? Well, Tony saved the Tory Party from oblivion through his failure to deliver the socialist goods. He also enabled the BNP to appear radical […]
Lobster Issue 36 (Winter 1998/9) £££
[…] Presumably this refers to the Economist’s Foreign Report, among whose editors were Brian Crozier and Robert Moss. ‘Crucial to the IRD’s success was its relationship with the BBC.’ (p. 29) What is wrong with Mayhew’s account is his ignorance of the way IRD developed long after his involvement with it; he remembers it simply […]
Lobster Issue 52 (Winter 2006/7) £££
[…] and campaigning journalists such as John Pilger. Their main, but not exclusive, focus is on the liberal newspapers, such as The Guardian and The Independent and the BBC. This is because the papers are allegedly writing from a viewpoint that is in some way critical of the powers that be, and the latter because […]