The Iron Triangle: inside the secret world of the Carlyle Group

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Lobster Issue 46 (Winter 2003)

[…] 2001 in the presence of Saudi investors like Shafiq Bin Laden, estranged brother of Osama. In the wake of such events and in line with wider neo- Conservative foreign policy objectives, the Carlyle Group has sought to divest itself of its dependency on the querulous House of Saud in favour of the new ‘opportunities’ […]

Curried Knight: Maxwell Knight and the MI5 in-house history

Lobster Issue 39 (Summer 2000)

[…] trumped-up charges of plotting to assassinate Lloyd George. The Zinoviev Letter is mentioned, but not the fact that MI5 officers (notably Joseph Ball, who later became a Conservative Party official) were prime suspects for leaking it to the press in order to damage the Labour Party’s chances at the 1924 election. Curry implicates British […]

Digging in the Oyston archive

Lobster Issue 51 (Summer 2006)

Tons of documents and tape recordings recovered from an old manor house in Lancashire reveal the true depths of corruption in English provincial life at the end of the twentieth century. Owen Oyston was the British Labour Party’s biggest private financial contributor in the Thatcher years. The millionaire owner of radio stations and glossy magazines … Read more

Searchlight again

Lobster Issue 26 (1993)

[…] and former vice führer of the National Front, and, word has it, a range of other nazis, racists and extreme right-wingers from Western Goals to the Revolutionary Conservative Caucus. When I described him in my column as an errand boy for Patrick Harrington, the Press Complaints Commission held that this was fair comment. Not […]

The Northern Front

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Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8)

[…] July 2007, Charles Glass wrote in The Nation about what he knew well in those heady days during which he composed his diary: ‘Washington’s ideologically charged neo- conservative coterie possessed little or no understanding of the Middle East, allowing it to dismiss the easily predictable consequences of invading and occupying Iraq.’ A defensible charge, […]

A short history of Lobster

Lobster Issue

[…] Steve, and, in publishing it, we breached the Official Secrets Act in a big way. But apart from being denounced in the House of Commons by a Conservative MP – who was among those listed – nothing happened. Evidently the British state had learned the lesson that prosecution merely makes those prosecuted the subject […]

Cold War: Building for Nuclear Confrontation 1946-1989

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Lobster Issue 46 (Winter 2003)

Wayne Cocroft and Roger Thomas, edited by P.S.Barnwell English Heritage, 2003, h/b, £24.99   A very high-quality, well presented book that is considerably more appealing to look at than most of the unlovely structures which are illustrated between its large, hardback covers. It is partly because of the non-photogenic subject matter that the book is … Read more

Late breaking news on Clay Shaw’s United Kingdom contacts

Lobster Issue 20 (1990)

[…] dating from, I would guess, the early 1930s. When the Jansons sold their apartment in the late 1960s it was purchased by Sir Alec Douglas-Home, the former Conservative Prime Minister. The Jansons also sold their house in Cowes and they now live in the west of England. Olwen Janson told me the following. The […]

The death of Diana: an update

Lobster Issue 39 (Summer 2000)

[…] agreed with the Coroner and rejected the application.(5) Charles Wardle MP One of the more intriguing events occurred in March of this year when Charles Wardle, the Conservative MP for Bexhill and Battle who asked a number of pertinent questions about the crash in the House of Commons in June 1999, joined the board […]

Spook PR

Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3)

[…] cynicism masquerading as sentimentality but a perfectly worded, showering PR-missile that landed all over the Middle East, especially in Gaza where Palestinian mothers knew that Britain’s (then Conservative) government had no interest whatsoever in whether or not their children had milk too. Instead of countering the power of Saddam Hussein’s PR by the creation […]

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