On the front line at the Bilderberg Group summit – Watford (photos)

THE Bilderberg Group summit has rolled into Watford. The annual meeting of royalty, politicians, billionaire investors, banking and corporate CEOs, policy-makers and media moguls from all over the world is in Elton John’s hometown. For three days, Watford isn’t all about hot hatchbacks, smoking in Cassiobury Park and Harry Potter World. It;s about money and power meeting in secret behind police protection.

If you’re looking for a conspiracy to believe in, the Bilderberg Group is a good place to start. US radio host Alex Jones (pictured below) says of the BG: “The Devil is trying to create an artificial, omnipresent system. If you don’t believe in the Devil, folks, you haven’t studied. Everything these people do is to try to become God.”

David Aaronovitch says the group is no big deal:

Those such as the former broadcaster and self-proclaimed messiah David Icke, whose psyches populate the world with lizard princes and power Jews, are in no doubt, as he wrote at the weekend, that this is “a sinister and despicable organisation”. But his case isn’t really helped by the fact that the rumpled British face on the Bilderberg steering committee belongs to Kenneth Clarke, arguably the least sinister politician in Britain. Nor by the decision of the group to meet not on a nouveau-Smersh island off Dubai, but in Watford…

The boring truth about Bilderberg is that it is a form of international Rotarianism, in which important people like to get together to feel even more important. My bet is that the real highlight won’t be a discussion of the timing of a coup in China, but when the hired magician performs after dinner.

Really? The Press area is about half a mile from The Grove. Michael Meacher MP was stood in it:

“I cannot think of any other gathering in the course of this year which is more important than this one, and we are kept out,” said Mr Meacher. “They can decide as much as they want to but we want to know how we, the people, are going to be affected by it. We want our chance to give our opinion, and to hold them to account.”

What do the Bilderberg illuminati want? Lord Healey told the author Jon Ronson for his book Them: Adventures with Extremists:

“To say we were striving for a one-world government is exaggerated, but not wholly unfair. Those of us in Bilderberg felt we couldn’t go on for ever fighting one another for nothing. So we felt that a single community throughout the world would be a good thing.”

Ronson gave us some background:

They have been ruling the world in secret since 1954, Jim said, when a man called Joseph Retinger, whose name rarely appears in the history books, decided to create them. One of many mysteries is how Retinger – a Polish immigrant employed as secretary to the novelist Joseph Conrad – had the wherewithal and the contacts to organise such a mighty endeavour. Their first meeting took place in the Bilderberg Hotel, Holland, which is why the secret rulers of the world go by the name of the Bilderberg Group.