I didn't want to talk about my cancer. But then I got to the party...

Searching the web for information about the enigmatic Bilderberg group, I came across a website called Who Controls America? It’s a simple site to navigate: you click on ‘White House’ or ‘Wall Street’ or ‘Hollywood’ and you get a list of the main players and a big colour photo of each from the neck up. (You know where I’m going already, don’t you?) Each face is identified as belonging to a particular race or, if you prefer, heritage. At the bottom of each list is a tally of the percentage of Jewish people on that list, the percentage of Jewish people in the US population at large (2 per cent, it says), and the factor by which Jews are therefore overrepresented. On the White House list, for example, 9 out of 11 of the ‘current or former senior advisers’ to President Obama are identified as Jewish. The implication being, presumably, that this overrepresentation of this minority is evidence of a world conspiracy to shaft the goyim. Leaving that aside, however, and assuming the list doesn’t disingenuously include cleaners and tea ladies, I still found the preponderance a little surprising.

Apart from the lineage of bullocks, we don’t know anything here in Devon. We don’t even pretend to know anything. So I carried my small surprise up to London last week, to this year’s very wonderful Spectator Summer ‘At Home’ party. And at the start, while I was still sober, I brought the question up in the first conversation I had, which happened to be with Mr Con Coughlin, executive foreign editor of the Daily Telegraph.