The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 59 (Summer 2010)

[PDF file]: […] his was sent by Dan Atkinson, who wondered what was ‘out of the question’? From recently-declassified US discussions about the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974. General Brown: I have one minor point that sort of parallels what we have been talking about. This Turkish opium issue. Secretary Kissinger: Let’s shut up a week […]

The long goodbye? Taking on the consultants

Lobster Issue 90 (2025)

[PDF file]: […] highly technical areas of public services, such as environmental monitoring, finance and digital technologies. This became apparent in the United Kingdom in the aftermath of the Blair/ Brown years, during the period of the Coalition government’s policy to slash spending on consultants. In one instance, a major rail franchise tender was withdrawn because the […]

The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ by Roger Stone with Mike Colapietro

Lobster Issue 66 (Winter 2013)

[PDF file]: […] burying the bodies” of the murders of Lyndon Johnson that Caro will never tell you about. For 20 years Robert Caro never interviewed key LBJ mistress Madeleine Brown or Billie Sol Estes who planned murders with LBJ. Caro never mentions the revelations of LBJ lawyer Barr McClellan nor will Caro address the transcendently important […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 89 (2024)

[PDF file]: […] $2.07 at its peak in 2007). A strong pound is bad for the British manufacturing economy, making exports expensive and competing imports cheap. But Blair (and Chancellor Brown) didn’t care about manufacturing – or simply didn’t understand the impact the value of sterling had on it – or both. After all, we had the […]

Consultants Challen

Lobster Issue

[…] highly technical areas of public services, such as environmental monitoring, finance and digital technologies. This became apparent in the United Kingdom in the aftermath of the Blair/ Brown years, during the period of the Coalition government’s policy to slash spending on consultants. In one instance, a major rail franchise tender was withdrawn because the […]

View from Bridge 87

Lobster Issue

[…] thought this. Jackie Kennedy and her mother. JFK’s secretary Evelyn Lincoln. KGB officer Oleg Nechiporenko. The KGB office in the USA. CIA officer E. Howard Hunt. Madeleine Brown, LBJ’s mistress. Barr McClellan, a Dallas lawyer. Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. Gen. Joseph J. Cappucci, the head of Air Force Counter Intelligence. And yet barely […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 88 (2024)

[PDF file]: […] that just after the election of the original NuLab, in 1997, I commented that Labour was led by three ‘not very bright Thatcherites’.7 One of them, Gordon Brown, is still talking about poverty here without betraying the slightest awareness that he had any role in this country’s economic decline.8 6 or . Peter Mandelson […]

I helped carry William Burroughs to the medical tent

Lobster Issue 59 (Summer 2010)

[PDF file]: […] also meant that Phun City was highly disorganised: sanitation was poor and there was nowhere to shelter from the constant rain. The poetry festival (fronted by Pete Brown and William Burroughs) was due to be held in an inflatable dome but the dome failed to inflate and the event was held instead in a […]

Britain alone The Path from Suez to Brexit by Philip Stephens

Lobster Issue 81 (Summer 2021)

[PDF file]: […] could never be met. Assuming they thought about it, the creation of such pseudo-intellectual formulae, by an unelected adviser, was actually quite an insult by Blair and Brown to the UK’s many natural European allies. One of the book’s endorsers, Lawrence Freedman, had a hand in devising the 1999 Blair Doctrine, which set out […]

View from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] free market moves since 1979 have all been a mistake. Even if Mr Starmer thought it, this would entail criticising Mrs Thatcher’s acolytes, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and he won’t do that. To judge by Chancellor Reeves’ Mansion House speech in November, she isn’t going to entertain any deviant ideas.43 It was all […]

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