The Watergate break-ins and the Howard Hughes connection

Lobster Issue 87 (2023)

[PDF file]: […] extremely narrow loss to Kennedy on the Hughes loan story.28 The same scandal haunted Nixon again in his 1962 gubernatorial campaign in California.29 In fact, Gov. Edmund Brown, father of the current governor, reportedly ‘credited his election victory’ over Nixon that year to a magazine article about the Hughes loan.30 That should have been […]

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 In one instance, a major rail franchise tender was withdrawn because the […]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 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 In one instance, a major rail franchise tender was withdrawn because the […]

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 […]

The crisis: an historical perspective

Lobster Issue 67 (Summer 2014)

[PDF file]: […] as a result flowed via corporate tax and asset and bond purchases to governments (so helping to finance the expansion of the welfare state under Blair and Brown) and, via banks, building societies and finance companies, both to businesses and to millions of private citizens. Lending expanded, personal and corporate borrowing mushroomed. The most […]

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 […]

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 93 (2026)

[PDF file]: […] be believed until reliable other sources have confirmed it as real. *new* Broon Despite being the unapologetic co-parent of the financial disaster of 2007-9, 1 1 Gordon Brown still has access to the Guardian’s columns for his banalities. In a recent piece,2 he wrote: the US has abandoned its longstanding championing of the rule […]

In the Thick of It: The private diaries of a minister Alan Duncan

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021)

[PDF file]: […] Balls from Morley and Outwood in 2015 after the New Labour machine had found a second ‘safe’ seat in Yorkshire for the friend and ally of Gordon Brown. Jenkyns, ‘the brainless nothing’, now sits on a Tory majority of 11,267. 1 2 comment . . . . He is an egotistical showman who just […]

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