Ron McKay: Plotting the New World Order, the man from the CIA, stravaiging with Rory and getting Dizzy with BoJo

Bilderberg distils just about every conspiracy, from the killing of Diana, to 9/11, to launching the Arab Spring. The event, convened in 1954 under the leadership of Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, was first held in the Bilderberg hotel in Oosterbeek. The only year a meeting hasn't been held since was 1976, when it was cancelled as Bernhard was embroiled in a scandal over accusations that he took a bribe from US aircraft manufacturer Lockheed. He did. It was $1 million.

Participants at the meeting are barred from revealing who said what during it and the group does not release any notes or summaries of discussions. Journalists are not allowed to report on the event, though some attend as participants. The organisers claim this isn’t about secrecy but privacy so that participants can speak freely. Among those who have taken part in the past are crowned heads of state, presidents and prime ministers, Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown among them.

Future president Bill Clinton attended and this year the Trump administration is represented by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and The Donald’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. From this side of the Pond there’s Labour peer Lord Adonis, Bank of England Governor Mark Carney and Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary, so the language will have been fruity, although we’ll never know.

In this country Bilderberg is a charity. The trustees are Zanny Minton Beddoes, Editor in Chief of The Economist and Sir John Sawers, the former head of the Secret Intelligence Service MI6. Beddoes is the first female editor of the capitalists’ bible, and an interesting fact about Sawers, who is 63 – apart from that he’s an alumnus of St Andrews University – is that he still holds his secondary school record for the 440-yard hurdles, although that may be because they’ve now gone metric, even in Bath.

A breaking (and entering) tale

An odd encounter in Kazakhstan. My old chum George Galloway was peacefully asleep in bed with his wife Gayatri in a posh hotel in Almaty, after a verbal bout with Steve Bannon at a conference there. In the early hours they were wakened by someone trying to get into the room, the efforts growing exceedingly noisy and forceful so much so that the door began to give as a shoulder was put to it. The couple stacked furniture behind the door and called security, George hurling threats of Dundee vengeance if the man – he could tell it was a man because he could see a bald head through the door’s spy hole – did not cease and desist. When help arrived and grabbed the guy, Galloway opened the door and recognised the would-be intruder, or assassin. Dressed all in black, he was Jim Woolsey, a virulent neoconservative who favours invading Venezuela among other to-dos, and who was head of the the CIA under Bill Clinton. As he was led away he kept repeating the mantra, “I am Ambassador Jim Woolsey”.

I don’t know about you but I always assumed the CIA would be a little more subtle and efficient at breaking and entering.

You'll have had your indyref2

Trending on Twitter is the site #PermissionFromSajid, a humorous and cutting rejoinder to the Home Secretary, one of the innumerable Tory candidates who vowed not to allow a second independence referendum. MPs, MSPs, SNP supporters and others are posting requests like the one from MP Carol Monaghan: 'Have given my husband a long to-do list for today but he's not willing to get started until he has his #PermissionFromSajid.' And on top of a picture of the lengthy queue to get to the top of Everest a post asks, 'Whit's the haud up getting to the summit Tam?' They're waiting on the go ahead from Javid of course. Most of the hundreds of posts also copy in @sajidjavid so his mailbox is probably bust by now.

Inhale to the chief

“Politics is show business for ugly people.” Never was that old line more appositely refreshed than when MP Rory Stewart launched his bid for leadership of the Tory Party and – as an added and unelected bonus – Prime Minister. He’s all over social media as he stravaigs the country collaring poor dupes on camera (I hope they’re being paid!) and telling them how he’d solve Brexit, which is essentially to re-present the failed May plan, with added, if unexplained, legerdemain. People are locking their doors, refusing to walk the dog or go to the pub or the book group, for fear that Rory will lurch out of the dark with an iPhone, grab them and subject them to an on-camera selfie about his boundless merits, or his exploits sleeping on dirt floors and nursing blisters in the Hindu Kush.

Rory has done a lot of walking in the past. The Borders, the Middle East, he was one of our apparatchiks in Iraq after the invasion but now thinks it was wrong. He’s Scottish in the way that anyone who went to Eton and enjoys a family estate in Perthshire is. His late father Brian was a senior official in the intelligence services and Rory does not deny that he was once on the books of MI6. During the week, perhaps trying to reach the notoriously difficult druggie vote, he volunteered that he has smoked opium in Iran. He’s such a full-on British patriot is Rory that he even inhales the poppy.

Dizzy with the facts

“There are three kinds of lies – lies, damned lies and statistics.” The phrase was attributed to Benjamin Disraeli, although he almost certainly wasn’t the original source. Disraeli is also credited with fathering one-nation conservatism, for electoral and ethical reasons. Which takes us, with one massive historical jump, to Boris Johnson who knows much about bending facts for electoral means but who has scant acquaintance with the second of Dizzy’s imperatives.

Boris is due to appear in court to answer the charge that he’s guilty of misconduct in public office when, as London mayor on the Leave beat, he claimed Britain was paying £350 million a week to the European Union. Leaving aside whether such a spurious claim should be tested in law – and it shouldn’t, or the courts would be clogged with politicians tasked over truthfulness – there’s no doubt it had considerable traction in the campaign.

And traction was unveiled three years ago this month when BoJo launched the Vote Leave battlebus – on whose side the £350m a week was plastered – and railed against the EU for “telling us how powerful our vacuum cleaners have got to be, what shape our bananas have got to be and all that kind of thing.”

It’s true that vacuum cleaners use less electricity than they did, but the manufacturers were consulted and backed the new rules, as did the UK Government which actively supported the measures and, like every member state, could have blocked them if it wanted to. The Brussels ban on bendy bananas, propagated by the Sun and Telegraph, is one of the most persistent myths and is, of course, a nonsense.

An alleged ban on prawn cocktail crisps has inflamed Boris for almost 20 years now and on the Brexit stump he cited the“great war against the British prawn cocktail flavour crisp” as part of his evidence of Brussels gone doolally. Except the EU has never banned the crisps. The UK failed to include the flavour when the EU was drafting a harmonised list but when the mistake was noticed by Westminster the list was immediately amended.

Among the other EU myths that Boris hasn’t yet got around to are, that barmaids cleavage had to be covered. In fact the directive was about outdoor workers who shouldn’t suffer over-exposure to the sun and risk skin cancer. Which caused the newspaper of the same name, in its usual tasteful way, to tell readers to “lift your jugs to the Sun” for saving Britain’s barmaids.

It’s also not true that the EU wanted to ban double-decker buses – oddly BoJo didn’t throw that one in when he launched the battlebus – or that there would be a one-size-fits-all Euro condom. And fortunately we won’t be called on to order a Melanogrammus aeglefinus in the chippie, because it was never an EU plan to force restaurants and takeaways to list fish, like the haddock, by their Latin names.

Expect more of this as the Tory election campaign cranks up.