Liddle and Lobbygate: reflections on a Downing Street drama

Lobster Issue 36 (Winter 1998/9)

[…] be Mandelson’s next-door neighbour in West London) and within a day Draper had lost his lobbying job. Soon thereafter he was shorn of his weekly ‘Inside the mind of New Labour’ column in The Express which Draper claimed to have had regularly vetted by the then Minister Without Portfolio. In the next few days […]

Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History

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Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009)

[…] most subtle and successful conspiracies…….to embroil us in a foreign war’ But, unknown to Aaronovitch, there was such a conspiracy (though not the one Flynn had in mind) – and it involved not just Flynn’s hate figure, Roosevelt, but the British government. Part of the conspiracy was a series of covert operations in America […]

Watergate revisited: Hougan’s ‘Secret Agenda’

Lobster Issue 9 (1985)

[…] as the Nixon people knew that the CIA knew, they (the White House) must have known that it was all going to come out. With this in mind we should perhaps not so readily accept Hougan’s assertion that the Agency couldn’t have foreseen the outcome. Indeed, we need not assume – as Hougan does […]

Everything is going to change

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Lobster Issue 56 (Winter 2008/9)

‘Everything is going to change’ JFK and the Unspeakable: Why he died and why it matters James W. Douglass Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2008, h/b, $30.00   I am writing this immediately after Barack Obama’s victory in the US Presidential election, almost half a century after John Kennedy became the first, and thus far … Read more

Where’s Ware?

Lobster Issue 39 (Summer 2000)

[…] believe he ingeniously plays fast and loose with facts but because my memory of such exchanges that we had suggested to me that you had a closed mind on this issue. Baa Baa White Sheep! Simon Matthews Local government — and local politicians — generally get a bad press, some of it deserved, some […]

Welcome to Mars: Fantasies of Science in the American Century 1947-1959

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Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009)

[…] were the other stories. Some were the horror stories with which we have become familiar: for example MK-Ultra and Ewen Cameron’s insane experiments with reprogramming the human mind which Hollings discusses. But also: by 1959 Cary Grant had taken LSD over 60 times as part of a Hollywood set who were using it with […]

Policing Politics: Security Intelligence and the Liberal Democratic State

Lobster Issue 27 (1994)

[…] out no operation, investigation, surveillance or action against any individual otherwise than for the purposes laid down in its directive.’ The words ‘lying’ and ‘bastard’ come to mind, as they say. Gill takes a deep breath and contents himself with observing that ‘such an inquiry, to be carried out properly, would have taken many […]

MI5 and the threat from the left in the 1970s

Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007)

[…] that the root cause of all the trouble in the UK was Watergate, the CIA and a few spook-spotters and critics of the police in London. Never mind the British labour movement, the Heath government’s attack on the independence of trade unions and the roaring inflation caused by Heath’s ‘dash for growth’, it was […]

Defrauding America: a pattern of related scandals

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Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996)

Rodney Stich Diablo Western Press, USA, 1994 The first thing to be said is that this is a huge (650 pages), fascinating book; and I recommend it. It is really three stories interwoven. The first section describes the author’s experience of trying to alert the American civil aviation industry, then the politicians and then the […]

Demos – fashionable ideas and the rule of the few

Lobster Issue 46 (Winter 2003)

[…] were trying to raise lots of relatively small sums of money at great effort from traditional Labour networks which had no money. You have to cast your mind back to a time when Thatcherism was culturally triumphant. The wealthy middle classes, let alone the rich, were little interested in the ‘men in brown suits’ […]

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