A maverick, paranoid old peer who’s lost his marbles?
Or a respected industrialist who has had a real encounter with the ‘dark forces’ who really run the world?
ConservativeHome surprisingly linked yesterday to a Sky News interview with Lord James, who describes his dealings with a secret organisation called ‘Foundation X’.
His Grace says ‘surprisingly’, because it is the sort of issue with which if one attempts to engage one rapidly loses credibility and is invariably labelled a nutter, lunatic, fruitcake, extremist, conspiracy theorist, etc., etc. But being a man-made-global-warming-denying Christian of the Protestant Anglican variety who supports retention of the Act of Settlement and favours withdrawal from European Union, His Grace is well used to argumentum ad hominem.
In the interview, the Noble Lord claims that the Foundation wants ‘to help save the world’, and wishes to lend billions of pounds to Britain, interest free – in order to support a ‘massive improvement’ in the jobs market, fund renewable energy, build schools and hospitals, and help the construction of Crossrail – for which it will begin to provide the necessary funds if it receives a positive answer from the Government within the next week.
No strings, no interest, no repayment schedule…
Perhaps the Noble Lord might introduce His Grace to these nice people?
He talks of a ‘massive supranational accumulation of funds’ ordered by ‘the most powerful and the most high-profile people on the whole world stage…at the highest level of security’.
Hmm…
Sounds a bit Dan Brown.
Or Bilderberg.
Except that Dan Brown weaves a modicum of truth into his novels and Bilderberg are real enough for Margaret Thatcher to have considered it an honour to be excluded from and criticised by them.
The Noble Lord’s speech may be rather fantastical and utterly incredible, but it is now recorded for posterity in Hansard for generations of conspiracy theorists to pore over every detail, just as they still do with the death of Diana, the assassination of JKF and the events of September 11th 2001.
Lord James certainly knows a thing or two about high finance: he is a former senior adviser to the Conservative party, whose judgment is manifestly trusted by Michael Howard and David Cameron.
But his speech has a curious sweep: it begins with Brigadoon, the mythical village that appears for only one day every hundred years; it then moves on to an admission of money laundering billions of pounds of terrorist money on behalf of the IRA and unspecified African dictators; and ends with the claim that the Noble Lord has been recruited by the mysterious ‘Foundation X’ that wishes to invest £5 billion in the United Kingdom, with an extra £17 billion for hospital, schools and Crossrail by Christmas.
Apparently ‘Foundation X’ possesses huge reserves of ‘stateless’ funds all backed up with gold bullion. Lord James dismisses the observation that such colossal sums would amount to more than the entire gold bullion ever mined from the earth: there are things we simply do not know which, apparently, the Vatican bank does know (His Grace was intrigued to know more about this, but irritatingly the Government Whip Lord De Mauley interrupted the Noble Lord the moment he mentioned the Vatican, which is a delicious conspiracy within the conspiracy: was the recent visit by His Holiness simply a potential buyer viewing a prospective property?).
With such great wealth to bestow, ‘Foundation X’ is understandably a little reluctant to make itself widely known lest they be flooded with thousands of troublesome begging letters. Only a meeting with David Cameron or George Osborne will suffice: after all, why would ‘the most powerful and the most high-profile people on the whole world stage’ want to deal with anyone less?
So, for the past 21 weeks (he keeps a very accurate diary), Lord James has been investigating and working with the Foundation, and he has come to the ‘absolute conclusion that “Foundation X” is completely genuine and sincere and that it directly wishes to make the United Kingdom one of the principal points that it will use to disseminate its extraordinarily great wealth as part of an attempt to seek the recovery of the global economy."
Right.
So convinced is the Noble Lord that he has introduced the shadowy representatives of ‘Foundation X’ to the Leader of the House of Lords, Lord Strathclyde.
Apparently, they didn’t hit it off, and there were no invitations to drinks.
The Bank of England passed the enquiry on to the Treasury, which has done what the Treasury tends to do.
Sit on it.
And so, out of frustration that Her Majesty’s Government is about to miss an unmissable opportunity to reduce the deficit and invest in much-needed infrastructure, Lord James decided to tell the world.
And he apparently has the support of Treasury Minister, Lord Sassoon.
His Grace received a request yesterday evening from the Ambassador of the Inter-Galactic Federation, imploring him to comment upon this. And he is delighted to do so.
It was Disraeli who said: ‘The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.’
But 'Foundation X' is not made up of such personages.
His Grace is sorry to spoil the conspiracy party, but this is an elaborate and very sophisticated hoax.
Lord James has neither lost his marbles nor encountered the dark forces of the Illuminati: intelligent men tend not to waste their time looking for the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow because they know the laws of physics and that rainbows are full circles. They tend not to believe in leprechauns or fairies at the bottom of the garden or little green men from Mars. The Noble Lord has simply been had, Jeremy Beadle-like, by a group who get kicks out of duping the gullible and naïve. How does His Grace know?
Wikipedia is hardly reliable, for a shadowy organisation such as ‘Foundation X’ would be certain to employ anonymous minions to deflect unwanted attention and throw obsessive freelance investigators off the conspiracy scent.
But some ‘facts’ speak for themselves:
Who is Lord James?
As Lord Strathclyde has helpfully pointed out, he is 'not important enough' to be the go-between in such negotiations. It is widely known that ‘the most powerful and the most high-profile people on the whole world stage' do not need to use minions: they simply go for a jolly to Sitges and speak directly to whomever they wish about nuking Iran, propping up the Euro or ensuring the promotion of David Cameron to No10.
It is extremely unlikely (to put it mildly) that the IRA ever possessed anything like £1bn: and, if they did, it beggars belief that Lord James would have laundered it at the behest of the Bank of England while the terrorists were blowing up Margaret Thatcher and her entire Cabinet, and murdering women and children in Manchester and Enniskillen.
If they did, Lord Tebbit would have been onto the case.
As certain members of the House of Commons have recently discovered, Parliamentary privilege does not stretch to illegal activity: the Noble Lord should be immediately arrested and an investigation into these allegations must swiftly follow. If he had ‘extensive connections with North African terrorists’, and these still present a ‘security issue’, the matter is of the utmost importance.
The Noble Lord hastened to add: “…it is no good getting the police in, because I shall immediately call the Bank of England as my defence witness, given that it put me in to deal with these problems."
Having interviewed a sitting prime minister, Yates of the Yard would not be fazed by a few recumbent bankers.
More persuasively, what supranational body seeks to give away billions of pounds interest free with no repayment schedule and no strings attached?
Lord James said they wished to do this in order to preserve their fortune. Well, it doesn’t take a degree in economics to understand that this would be the quickest way of wiping out their fortune. At the very least, it would be diminished year-on-year by the ravages of inflation. And that inflation would only be be stoked by the moral hazard which 'Foundation X' would condone by bailing out the government of a country whose government is the very cause of their financial woes.
Even more persuasively, if a benevolent and philanthropic foundation worth billions wished to pour billions into establishing schools and hospitals, it would not seek to do so through the intolerable bureaucratic frustrations of central government: it would do so directly.
Ask Bill Gates.
Why would they bother with here-today-gone-tomorrow politicians when the world is already in the filthy hands of Mammon?
At the very least, we would have ‘Foundation X’ academies and ‘Foundation X’ hospitals and hospices, not to draw attention to the organisation itself but to ensure the efficient use of funds: when you get a Treasury sold on the idea of quantitative easing and Mugabe economics, it is not credible that ‘the most powerful and the most high-profile people on the whole world stage’ would seek to subsidise the very scam of fiscal incontinence by which their own assets would be significantly devalued.
Either His Grace is right in this, or the Noble Lord should take very great care.
If His Grace is wrong, we may soon find Lord James of Blackheath swinging under Blackfriars Bridge.
With weights in his pockets.
For he has drawn attention to the laundered billions of the Vatican Bank.
And people who do that tend not to live very long thereafter.
(Cue sinister music)
(Credits to end)
