The Fortean Times Book of the Millennium

Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996) £££

Kevin McClure John Brown Publishing, London, 1996, £9.99 Subtitled ‘Doomsday Cults, Hopeless Predictions, Visions and Warning Signs How the World Will End’, McClure gives us a guided tour through some of the wackier people out there on the religious and political fringes, currently and historically, written in his beguilingly simple style. This is not […]

We The Nation: The Conservative Party and the Pursuit of Power

Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996) £££

A. J. Davies Little Brown and Co London, 1995, £20 Davies provides in equal measure a perceptive and comprehensive account of the modern Conservative Party which, hopefully, will lead to further reappraisals of Conservative history. In contrast to, for example, Lord Blake’s standard history of the Party over much the same period, We, The […]

Tittle-tattle

Lobster Issue 51 (Summer 2006) £££

[…] contract by the undiplomatic Geldof to polish the public appearances of the FCO is linked to the closeness of the former Boomtown Rat to Blair and Gordon Brown in last year’s G8 gathering is a question not likely to be asked by the many journalists now on the Geldof payroll. On Ten Alps’ books […]

The state in politics: Wallace, Holroyd and Lobster

Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996) £££

[…] asking Boothroyd to inform on four MPs was just one of many contacts between MI5 and the Parliamentary Labour Party in the sixties. Four years earlier George Brown, then Deputy Leader of the Labour Party and Chair of the Party’s Organisation Sub-committee, its policing function, approached the journalist Chapman Pincher and told him that […]

The Blairs and their Court

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Lobster Issue 50 (Winter 2005/6) £££

Francis Beckett and David Hencke London: Aurum Press, 2004, £18.99, h/b   According to Beckett and Hencke, in the late 1980s Nigel Lawson could never understand why Tony Blair was a member of the Labour Party rather than of the Conservative Party. This question subsequently occurred to a growing number of Labour Party members and […]

Denis Healey

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Lobster Issue 45 (Summer 2003) £££

Edward Pearce London: Little, Brown, 2002, £25, h/b.   Compared to the present crop of media-trained, PR-conscious, line-following, careerist pigmies who comprise the current Labour Cabinet, Denis Healey looks like a giant from a golden age. Before his well known roles as Minister of Defence and Chancellor of the Exchequer (during the Tory-induced inflation […]

Europe Inc and Blowing the Whistle

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Lobster Issue 39 (Summer 2000) £££

[…] the only honest man with any bottle on the EU staff, didn’t have to look hard to find corruption: it was everywhere he went.(5) Notes London: Little, Brown, 1999 The Tainted Source: the Undemocratic Origins of the European Idea, (London: Little Brown, 1997) which has recently been remaindered and is around for about a […]

Why are we with Uncle Sam?

Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009) £££

[…] America, along with the central economic and cultural concepts which are in our politicians’ heads: no bigger fans of all things American have there been than messieurs Brown and Blair following in the footsteps of Margaret Thatcher.(3) Since Suez in 1956 no UK government has ever tried to find out how much real independence […]

The Making of New Labour’s European Policy

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Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3) £££

[…] as if Labour, and not Edward Heath (and OPEC) had caused the 1970s inflation. I suspect that by the late 1980s Labour’s leaders – Kinnock, John Smith, Brown – had accepted as fact that it was Labour policies which were responsible for the 1970s inflation. As for ‘New’ Labour’s European policies, in opposition between […]

Defector Politics: or, grooving with Mr G.

Lobster Issue 29 (1995) £££

[…] its piece naming the Guardian’s Richard Gott as ‘the KGB’s British writer-in-residence’.(2) On 27 December the Guardian printed a photograph of Mr G being embraced by Ron Brown, the former MP for Leith, and Bill Michie MP. It was a busy day for Mr Michie, for he was also named in The Times in […]

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