Hope & Despair: Lifting the lid on the murky world of Scottish politics by Neil Findlay and But What Can I Do?: Why politics has gone so wrong, and how you can help fix it by Alastair Campbell

Lobster Issue 86 (2023)

[PDF file]: […] If the current line is held to the election, the ducking and diving of Labour will become as big a turn-off as the deceit and dissembling of Conservative ministers.’ 2 He promptly backed the election of Tony Blair as Labour leader and left journalism to work for him as spokesman on a salary we […]

Keynes, social democracy and the Great Moving Right Show

Lobster Issue 90 (2025)

[PDF file]: […] of post-war British society. A range of political and economic philosophies and traditions went into the version embraced by the Attlee government and indeed successive Labour and Conservative administrations all the way to 1979. Nurtured by over a century of humanistic and religious teaching, and a respect for the rights of the individual citizen […]

A Spy Alone by Charles Beaumont

Lobster Issue 88 (2024)

[PDF file]: […] reports, while lawyers provide litigation support. . . . What’s missing from those paragraphs (and the report generally) is the millions the Russians have given to the Conservative Party.4 Why is it missing? The Intelligence and Security Committee has a Conservative majority. Add those Russian millions to the more than ten million given to […]

That option no longer exists: Britain 1974-76 by John Medhurst

Lobster Issue 69 (Summer 2015)

[PDF file]: […] could be persuaded to embark on this journey – even though most of the senior leadership of the unions would probably have welcomed it – with a Conservative government. (And it is absolutely bizarre that anyone in the Heath government associated with this could ever have thought otherwise.) The author writes: ‘For a brief […]

‘To Stand against Israel is to Stand against God’: Zionism, Trump and the US Christian Right

Lobster Issue 83 (Summer 2022)

[PDF file]: […] standard of living may not be sustained’. Falwell singled out Margaret Thatcher, who had just become Prime Minister in Britain, for particular praise. Having thus established his conservative credentials, he went on to address the ‘culture wars’ agenda with chapters attacking Feminism and the Equal Rights Amendment, ferociously condemning abortion, defending the Christian family […]

The News Machine: Hacking,The Untold Story by James Hanning with Glenn Mulcaire

Lobster Issue 69 (Summer 2015)

[PDF file]: The News Machine: Hacking,The Untold Story James Hanning with Glenn Mulcaire London: Gibson Square, £12.99, p/b T he Conservative Party had already lost the Rochester and Strood by-election in the hours before its former director of communications left prison early on the morning of 21 November. Whether the timing of Andy Coulson’s release was […]

Hoodwinked by the Department of Health? Frank Dobson and the 1997 Jimmy Savile report

Lobster Issue 74 (Winter 2017)

[PDF file]: […] the 1997 General Election’ in Lobster 73.1 What happened to the external management review of Broadmoor highsecurity hospital that Health Secretary Stephen Dorrell had commissioned, once the Conservative Party had left office? The report was sent to his office in April 1997, shortly before the Conservatives lost power at that year’s General Election. The […]

We don’t need no…

Lobster Issue 79 (Summer 2020)

[PDF file]: […] appreciation of the pound expected from its imminent status as a ‘petro-currrency’, the government would raise interest rates to ‘control the money supply’. Which is what the Conservative government elected in 1979 did. Increased interest rates made the pound attractive, pushing up the value of sterling. Frank Blackaby noted that, during the great rise […]

Olivia Jayne Frank, 1956-2023

Lobster Issue

[PDF file]: […] serve five years in prison for handling £440,000, allegedly part of a vast fortune stolen from Polly Peck International by her client Asil Nadir. Nadir was a Conservative Party donor who had fled to Northern Cyprus during his pre-trial hearing on theft and fraud charges before that very same Mr Justice Tucker. When it […]

The Hess flight: still dangerous for historians – even after 75 years

Lobster Issue 73 (Summer 2017)

[PDF file]: […] the Mistress of the Robes; her brother-in-law, Lord Eustace Percy, was several times a member of the Cabinet and is still today an influential member of the Conservative Party There was hardly one of those named who was not at least occasionally in favour of a German–English understanding. . . . I wrote a […]

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