Is It The Bilderberg Conference Or Conspiracy?

The chairmen from Goldman Sachs and Lazards will perhaps reflect on how their investment banks “advised” Whitehall over the controversial flotation of Royal Mail, which left the UK taxpayer £1bn out of pocket.

Keeping a discreet eye over the exchanges will be the intelligence chiefs such as Mr Alexander from the United States and Sir John Sawers, the head of MI6, who was pictured on Facebook in his swimming trunks in 2009.

Items on the agenda include “The future of democracy and the middle-class trap”, “The new architecture of the Middle East” and the major geopolitical crisis of the moment: “Ukraine”. The secretive nature of the Bilderberg Conference has triggered suspicions that the event is used to shape global policy at the expense of democratic oversight. The idea of the euro was said to have been spawned at one meeting in the Nineties.

Paul Flynn, Labour MP for Newport West, asked a series of parliamentary questions about Bilderberg last year when the conference was held at a five-star hotel near Watford. He told The Independent: “I don’t regard the Bilderberg as a great threat but we would all like to know what is going on with these things. Secrecy inspires concern.”

Despite its new efforts at transparency, the conference is still acutely sensitive about radical infiltration.

On Tuesday night, three journalists – self-styled “InfoWarriors” – were arrested by Danish police after they tried to ambush the organisers outside the Marriott.

Unfortunately for Hannah Borno, a British freelance journalist staying in the hotel, she was spotted