The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] 1839. Henderson emailed on 6 April: ‘ Starmer is my MP. Mmmm . . . I wonder if I should visit him at his surgery and re mind him of the time when he was the Director of Public Prosecutions and how he refused to take action after Tony and Cherie Blair had attempted […]

The long goodbye? Taking on the consultants

Lobster Issue 90 (2025)

[PDF file]: […] ‘Britain could supply the expertise of the City of London banking sector to drive reforms and attract private capital to financing the clean energy transition.’15 Bearing in mind Mark Lowcock’s remarks above, how likely is it that the UK government will be able to deliver a good or even decent job at turning vastly […]

The Clandestine Caucus: a minor update

Lobster Issue 88 (2024)

[PDF file]: The Clandestine Caucus: a minor update Robin Ramsay I researched and wrote The Clandestine Caucus (listed on the website as CC) in the years following the publication of Smear! Wilson and the Secret State. It continued that book’s exploration of role of the spooks in British politics, with an interest in the history of the […]

Our Fight for Democracy: A History of Democracy in the United Kingdom by John Strafford

Lobster Issue

[…] Lord Falconer, Lord Chancellor at the time of the Iraq invasion, told him ‘that whatever the size of the march the Government would not have changed its mind.’ Which is what we all suspected anyway. Tony Blair, Dubya’s political catamite, knew what was expected of him and was determined to deliver it. 199 Summer […]

View from Bridge 89

Lobster Issue

The view from the bridge Robin Ramsay As always, thanks to Nick Must and Garrick Alder for editorial help with Lobster. Unbecoming American Dr T. P. Wilkinson wrote a dozen or so striking essays for Lobster. Some of them are included in a collection of his essays, Unbecoming American: A War Memoir, available from Amazon.1 […]

On getting it wrong and getting it right: Ronald Stark, LSD and the CIA

Lobster Issue 78 (Winter 2019)

[PDF file]: On getting it wrong and getting it right: Ronald Stark, LSD and the CIA David Black Is History a fiction? In his best-seller of 1991, Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair, the late John Bossy claimed that Bruno spied for Queen Elizabeth’s enforcer, Sir Francis Walsingham, at the French embassy in London. This was a […]

Consultants Challen

Lobster Issue

[…] ‘Britain could supply the expertise of the City of London banking sector to drive reforms and attract private capital to financing the clean energy transition.’15 Bearing in mind Mark Lowcock’s remarks above, how likely is it that the UK government will be able to deliver a good or even decent job at turning vastly […]

Book reviews

Lobster Issue

[…] us this about Sarah Brown and the spin doctors, Damian McBride and Charlie Whelan: ‘The demure public image was the front of a woman with a steely mind who was fiercely protective of her husband and family. She formed a strong, and to some at No 10 surprising, alliance with Damian McBride and Charlie […]

The Reinvention of Britain 1960-2016: a political and economic history by Scott Newton

Lobster Issue 74 (Winter 2017)

[PDF file]: […] and economic underperformance spurred a search for more modern tools than public ownership and strong trade unions. That is fair enough, but it should be borne in mind that social democracy, as practised from Macmillan onwards, was to the right of the 1945 settlement. Hence the impatience of Labour romantics such as Michael Foot […]

Accessibility Toolbar