FT266

Recently, I Googled ‘Bilderberg’ and got 2,700,000 hits, a moderately impressive number for one of the key elements in the English-language conspirasphere. [1] Why am I looking at Bilderberg again? Because among those 2.7 million Google hits is the organisation’s own new Website – bilderbergmeetings.org.

In the 1970s, when I first became interested in the Bilderberg Group, the major media accepted the organisation’s request for zero publicity and information was scarce. The first article about it in the UK, by Robert Eringer, didn’t appear until 1976, 22 years after Bilderberg’s foundation.

Over the next 20 years there was a trickle of information, and when I wrote to Bilderberg’s Dutch office in 1999 asking if the late John Smith, leader of the Labour Party before Tony Blair, had been on their steering committee, they replied, giving me the dates of Smith’s membership.