Bernard Ginns: Call for James Bond... it’s the annual Bilderberg meeting

Number withheld, it announced, as I excused myself from my two dining companions.

“Hello, is that Bernard Ginns?” said the voice, mispronouncing my surname.

“Yes, this is Bernard Ginns. Who’s calling please?”

“It’s Roger Moore,” said Sir Roger Moore, the world famous actor and James Bond star.

My hands leapt into action. Out came the notebook and pen and I started scribbling away as he shared with me the wisdom of his thoughts on the story I was writing.

It wasn’t the most exciting tale; essentially it was a planning story concerning proposals to transform Bow Street station and the neighbouring magistrates’ court into a boutique hotel.

But Sir Roger, whose policeman father served at the station, was worried about the loss of the historic birthplace of the first professionally organised police force in the world, the Bow Street Runners. He wanted to see the famous buildings turned into a museum to commemorate the history of British policing.

Unlike Ian Fleming’s super spy, Sir Roger didn’t prevail.

But the story made the paper and I added another world famous name to my treasured collection of interviewees.

The anecdote came to mind as I recalled an exchange with another internationally renowned individual.

This time, it was with another knight of the realm, but was face to face and much shorter in duration.

And while Sir Roger made his name helping Britain come to terms with her fading influence on the international stage through some heroic wish fulfilment fantasies, Sir Tim Berners-Lee helped usher in the digital revolution, a genuine paradigm shift, through his invention of the World Wide Web.

Our exchange happened backstage at the Yorkshire International Business Convention.

Sir Tim had just exited the stage and entered the green room, to be greeted by myself with notebook at the ready.

A PR person asked if he would be happy to answer some questions from the Yorkshire Post.

No, he replied. I persisted – never take no for an answer – and said just one question please. He relented.

The theme of his address had been about the importance of managing the internet in a decentralised, neutral and open way.

He had told the audience of Yorkshire business people that society needs to design new institutions on the web and “find new forms of meritocracy that will work for the future”.

Sir Tim also warned against the development of internet profiling, which could be used for sinister purposes.

“It’s very important for democracy that the web is kept open,” he said. “It’s also important they are not spying on you.”

Backstage, I asked him what represented the biggest threats from the internet.

He told me “control of the internet by a large company or a large government” and walked past me into the hubbub of the green room.

That was two years ago. His fears appear to becoming ever more real, judging by recent allegations that British intelligence services received data collected secretly by the United States from the world’s biggest internet companies.

The Guardian newspaper has claimed that the US may have handed over information on Britons gathered under a top secret programme codenamed PRISM which collated emails, internet chat and files directly from the servers of companies such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and Skype.

Sir Tim spoke out again over the weekend, describing the revelations as “deeply concerning”.

“Unwarranted government surveillance is an intrusion on basic human rights that threatens the very foundations of a democratic society,” he said.

“I call on all web users to demand better legal protection and due process safeguards for the privacy of their online communications, including their right to be informed when someone requests or stores their data.

“A store of this information about each person is a huge liability: Whom would you trust to decide when to access it, or even to keep it secure?”

THE air seems to be thick with conspiracy theories at the moment, not helped by the world’s political and economic elite gathering near London for the secretive Bilderberg conference.

Where’s James Bond when you need him?