Two years on, there are no compulsory registers, and few chief constables have bothered to declare this or any other 'special' interests or allegiances.

At the time it was hard to escape the feeling that Mr Straw was adopting his familiar role of long-stop, fielding on the boundary with reinforced gloves and pads lest fellow ministers should let through their fingers a snorter like sleeze or stag hunting or freemasonry. Indeed, even Chris Mullin MP, once the scourge of 'special' interests among the judiciary and government law servants as chair of the Parliamentary Home Affairs Committee, seems to have abandoned his concerns about masonic influence, even though he has resumed his old role on that committee after leaving government office.

Yet The Times report disclosed that failure to register and disclose such memberships would result in government legislation.

The subject assumes ever greater importance at the present moment on both home and foreign fronts, largely because of the close relationship between the police and 'security' forces such as MI5 and MI6.

Surfers of the web know that public suspicion of freemasonry has reached unprecedented heights. Recently the Lord Chancellor was described on the web in extremely unflattering terms as 'Tony's Masonic friend' among other things. An anti Masonic web site well known for publishing open letters between litigants and Masonic lawyers was peremptorily removed from the Internet by 'government order'. The incident went unreported.

But more important by far are the international ramifications of the connections between Freemasonry, the Intelligence services and Zionism. Few of us who write articles or books about international affairs escape their vigilance. MI6, working in collaboration with Mossad and the CIA, has files on virtually all of us. Only the most benign of writers escapes. My own file contains the most scurrilous accusations of invention of sources, corrupt behaviour and homosexuality (founded on the premise that I once compiled an anthology with an avowed homosexual author.

My particular joust with the Intelligence brigade began with the publication of The Illicit Adventure, an account of Political and Military Intelligence in the Middle East, in 1982, though there had been reverberation when my Captain Shakespear was published some ten years earlier, revealing astonishing battles between Whitehall and the Viceroy's Indian administration in policy matters that eventually determined the composition of the Middle East as we know it today.

But almost hysterical resentment was reserved for my allegation that there was clear evidence of collusion between British and Zionist intelligence forces before, during and after the First World War, with a heavy involvement on the part of freemasonry. It was the British ambassador in Constantinople, Sir Gerard Lowther, whose message in 1913 to Sir Edward Grey first pointed to the danger of Zionism and Freemasonry conspiring within the Turkish dominions which then ruled most of the Middle East and North Africa. Documents from Foreign, India and Colonial Office files covering the period from the 1890s to the post 1919 Peace Conference, showed that the British Special Intelligence Service (and what later amounted to Lloyd George's private intelligence service) worked in close liaison with prominent Zionists. There can be little doubt that Britain's intelligence service and Zionists have collaborated closely for the best part of a century. Now of course it is a trio with the CIA as its chief player, though Mossad and the independent Zionist service usually call the tune. Now as in the days of the Turkish Empire, freemasonry seems to have had a powerful if not dominant role in that relationship.

Of course, freemasonry is not the only prop of the Queen's dark powers. It is the adhesive force that binds the highest levels of military and civil power into that amorphous institution we call 'The Establishment'. It is surely time to take stock of all the forces that today threaten our civil liberties, that threaten unprovoked aggression against nations that refuse to submit to their arbitrary authority, and that insist of the supremacy of Israel over the nation it supplanted.

A good start may be to ask Britain's present Home Secretary to implement his predecessor's promises.