The Bilderberg Group: Fiendish plots are a-hatching in Watford I begin with this scene, featuring two of the stalwarts expected at the imminent annual meeting of the Bilderberg Group, in honour of those who believe that this infamously secretive outfit is Ian Fleming's S.P.E.C.T.R.E. brought to life. Since its inception in the Netherlands in 1954, so many have come to regard it as a deeply sinister organisation bent on worldwide domination that it seems almost cruel to reprise one of the very few facts we do know: that the venue for Thursday's gathering is not a subterranean cavern staffed by boiler-suited drones tending stolen nuclear warheads, but a hotel, more commonly patronised by England footballers, in Watford. Is it credible that a truly evil network would meet in an unglamorous suburb famous as Elton John's birthplace (wrongly, he was actually born in Pinner)? Those convinced that Watford is no bar to the hatching of fiendish plots will pitch up at The Grove on Thursday to shout abuse at the predominantly Anglo-European Goliaths of statesmanship, commerce, academia, media, intelligence and the military. In accord with solemn Bilderberg tradition, the hotel and its grounds (in which Bilderbergians are thought to bond primally by communally peeing against trees) will be off-limits to all but the members. The perimeter will be heavily guarded lest protesters distress the poor loves with their chants. To this end, fellow taxpayers, you and I will be stumping up a couple of million quid for the policing. While that equates to a few pence each, it does seem a bit rich to be subsidising a jolly for the extremely powerful about which we will learn precisely nothing. No outsider is ever permitted to attend the talks, formal and informal, and no Bilderbergian to divulge a word of what is said. Why such an organisation provokes such suspicion is beyond me. Yet for no sounder reasons than the omerta and the rarefied nature of the yearly-changing gang, it excites a vast range of conspiracy theories from both the bananas Left and the crackpot Right. Some posit that, despite guest lists having featured Margaret Thatcher and a smattering of European royalty (the Princes Philip and Charles included), Bilderberg exists to impose Marxist totalitarianism across the globe. Disregarding the occasional attendance of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Shirley Williams, others see it as a fascist powerhouse pulling the strings of its puppets in citadels of democratic power in pursuance of - yes, I think you guessed it - a New World Order. Among its fiercest critics is Lyndon Larouche, a serial US presidential wannabe turned shock jock, who is convinced that the worldwide drugs trade is controlled by our Queen. Sane people have their concerns too, and there is something weird and unsettling about a network of massively influential people so dedicated to guarding its privacy. In 2001, in a rare breach of the code of silence, founder member Denis Healey admitted this: "To say we were striving for a one-world government is exaggerated, but not wholly unfair. We couldn't go on forever fighting one another for nothing and killing people... So we felt that a single community throughout the world would be a good thing. Lord Healey is a mischievous man (he used to answer his telephone claiming to be a Chinese laundry), so perhaps we should take the world government schtick with a tub of Saxa. But if true, is the peacenik pipedream of a utopian crypto-oligarchy formed in the early days of the Cold War so terrible? Or was that a clumsy cover story for the real-life S.P.E.C.T.R.E.? So many questions, so few answers. Although the Group has yielded to criticism this year by appending a press office, the mysteries will endure. If they are to be penetrated, we need not 007, but a George Smiley figure to turn the Bilderberg Karla. But who is the giant spider at the centre of the web? Is it Dr Kissinger, cast to type, or Ken Clarke, hiding in plain sight as a cuddly centrist? Could it be Bill Clinton, the liberal philanthropist George Soros, or a former director of the CIA? Might the mastermind, as Mr Larouche must suspect, be the woman who tomorrow celebrates the 60th anniversary of her Coronation? For all the peculiarity, the Bilderberg Group provides a useful public service. It is all things to all manner of paranoiacs, and an equal opportunities offender of every brand of conspiracy theorist. What they discuss in the woods, we will probably never learn. But I have a feeling it would be a grave disappointment if we did, and that a microphone hidden in Urination Ash Tree 17 would relay nothing more blood-chilling than Mr Clarke asking Dr Kissinger if he knew how Notts were getting on in the county cricket, or Peter Mandelson sharing a Mary Berry cake recipe with ex-Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands.