Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996)
[…] the Soviet Embassy on request. Betty Boothroyd told her boss; her boss called in MI5. But the MI5 officer misread her, and tried to recruit her to spy on some Labour MPs. She refused. MI5 did what they do so well: they bad-mouthed her at the Foreign Office and she was banned from working […]
Lobster Issue 41 (Summer 2001)
[…] concealing the identity of their agents is the reason they won’t open their files, why did they reveal Nicholson’s identity? Twitchers or traitors? In ‘Did twitchy MI5 spy on bird lovers?’ (Sunday Times 11 March 2001) Nick Fielding reported what appeared to be evidence from within MI5 of an MI5 investigation of the Royal […]
Lobster Issue 45 (Summer 2003)
NB This essay has been compressed a good deal. The longer version is at < http://www.pertier.com/demos.html > Ostensibly a left-leaning ‘think tank’, Demos’ initial Advisory Board gathered mostly those who wished to extend ‘Thatcherism’ into the ‘New Labour’ project. The Advisory Board Martin JacquesHis time in the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) has been … Read more
Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996)
Nicholas Bethell’s memoir Spies and Other Secrets (Viking, London, 1994) includes a curious section in which Bethell describes how in 1970, after he had been involved in the first publication of Solzhenitzen’s Cancer Ward in the West, he was attacked by a curious alliance of the left, Private Eye, and various people in and close … Read more