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 […]

Recent JFK (and related) literature

Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996) £££

BROWN, Walt. Referenced Index Guide to the Warren Commission. Wilmington (Delaware): elmax, 1995. 303 pps. An essential work of navigation for anyone sailing the seas of the Report and the Hearings and Exhibits. Supplements rather than replaces the search facilities on the Warren Commission CD-ROMs. COLLOM, Mark, and SAMPLE, Glen. The Men on […]

US involvement in the Fiji coup d’etat

Lobster Issue 14 (1987) £££

[…] co-chairing a PDU meeting at Pacific Harbour outside Suva. At this meeting were Brian Talboys, Sue Wood and Barry Leay, all of the National Party, and Neil Brown, Australian Liberal Party deputy leader and foreign affairs spokesman. The PDU meeting provided a kind of alibi for Mara, and both Talboys and Brown lent support […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

More Book Reviews

Lobster Issue 28 (December 1994) £££

[…] interesting anecdotes in chapter 7 about Kaiser’s time in Britain as the number 2 at the US Embassy during the first Wilson government. There’s this on George Brown while Labour’s Foreign Secretary: ‘….he was also particularly friendly to America. Several times he went along with Washington’s proposals even though he didn’t fully agree with […]

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