Meet the Ditchley Foundation: Bilderberg’s Obscure Ideological Kin

By Mark Anderson
STOP THE PRESSES

PHOTO CREDIT: Your writer stands outside the London office of the Bilderberg Association, a UK-registered “charity,” in 2018. No one would answer the door.

EDITOR’S NOTE:  A more detailed, comprehensive report can be found at the website of UK Column News: The Ditchley Foundation: A Lesser-Known But Strong Factor in World Governance Circles | UKColumn

Research into a rather obscure honorary position within the Bilderberg Group unearthed a far-lesser-known group— the UK-based Ditchley Foundation—which is only four years younger than Bilderberg. This writer found that Ditchley’s ideological kinship with Bilderberg closely resembles the Trilateral Commission’s relationship with Bilderberg.

These three groups evidently represent an unholy trinity of globalist organizations that reinforce one another to keep financial and political power centralized and ensure that the world’s institutions remain in perpetual service to the super rich and their deputies and water carriers throughout society. Great emphasis is placed on preventing the legacy media cartel from failing, amid sustained efforts to reinvigorate it so that it protects the money merchants and their political lackeys.

That above-noted honorary Bilderberg position is “American secretary general,” a position that Bilderberg’s opaque media department—upon answering a recent email from this writer—said has been abolished. The position was held over several years by just six people. Georgetown University diplomacy professor Casimir Yost was the last person to fill it. Yost also is one of 32 directors of the American Ditchley Foundation affiliate, formed in 1964. A Canadian branch was founded in 1981.

Sir David Wills, a descendant of Imperial Tobacco’s founding family, established the parent Ditchley Foundation in the UK in 1958. Recall that Bilderberg was founded in 1954.

INHERENT MEDIA MALPRACTICE

Yost, the former director of the Strategic Futures Group, National Intelligence Council, serves on Ditchley’s American affiliate alongside German Marshall Fund-US President Heather Conley; the Council on Foreign Relation’s Senior Vice President (and Director of Studies) Dr. Shannon K. O’Neil; American Enterprise Institute Director of Foreign and Defense Policy Dr. Kori Schake; and, among others, New York Republican State Committee Chairman Edward Cox.

Another American Ditchley director, David Sanger, a Trilateral Commission member and White House and National Security correspondent for the New York Times, isn’t the only media figure neck-deep in this plutocratic power clique, thereby abandoning the very meaning of speaking truth to power. Steven Erlanger, the Times’ chief correspondent in Europe, has ascended even higher up the power ladder, joining the 41- member Ditchley Governor’s panel—alongside former UK MI6 spy chief Sir John Sawers, a member of the Bilderberg Association charity, member of the Bilderberg Steering Committee and, of course, a regular Bilderberg conference attendee.

The Ditchley Governor’s panel, whose annual meeting takes place Sept. 25, is overseen by Ditchley’s Council of Management. The council’s members, who meet next on July 16, are trustees of the main UK-based Ditchley Foundation. So, it’s particularly improper that BBC reporter James Landale is among the exclusive council’s mere 11 members, who, notably, serve four-year terms.

PROGRAMS, PAST & FUTURE

The Ditchley Foundation’s conferences do not follow Bilderberg’s “visiting tyrants” model of cavalierly taking over a major hotel and locking down several blocks of a city or rural region; rather, the foundation’s conferences, unless otherwise announced, take place in the palatial mansion at Ditchley Park, a sprawling estate in rural Oxfordshire that has hosted royal visits.

The most recent 2025 Ditchley Conference took place June 12-14, coordinated, intentionally or not, with Bilderberg’s 2025 Conference in Stockholm that just ran from June 12-15. While Bilderberg covered 11 topics this year, Ditchley, as is usually the case, focused on a single topic. This time around that topic was: “Renewing Democracy: How to Strengthen Democratic Resilience and Outcompete Authoritarianism in Europe?”

Is Ditchley possibly a kind of Bilderberg subcommittee, or even vice versa? It’s too soon to tell. Still, Bilderberg’s 2025 topics included “Authoritarian Axis,” which intersects with the above-noted Ditchley topic. And since many of Bilderberg’s topics, such as “Europe” and “Middle East” in 2025, are intentionally and unforgivably vague, there may be more alignments between Bilderberg and Ditchley that remain unknown.

Yet, Ditchley, to be sure, is more open than both Bilderberg (the most reclusive) and the Trilateral Commission (mid-range openness) in terms of advance publicity and follow-up reports, although Ditchley’s meetings also are invitation-only with no outside, impartial press allowed.

A sampling of Ditchley’s post-conference reports going back to late last year reveals the following topics:

• December 5-7, 2024—“The Role of the Fourth Estate and Democracies: How Should the News and Information Ecosystem Evolve to Develop Resilience and Meet Audience Needs in a Turbulent Political, Economic and Technological Landscape?”
• And Jan. 30-Feb. 1, 2025—“Great British Growth: How Do We Take the UK’s Economy Forward in a Period of Geopolitical Competition?”

And while Ditchley held an April 4-5, 2025 conference about geopolitics and business in the age of Trump, and a latter-February 2025 conference on “Artificial Intelligence and National Security,” other more recent 2025 conferences include strategy matters in the Indo-Pacific region (Sept. 26-28); “Energy Security and Climate Action” (Oct. 16-18); how to pay for European defense needs (Nov. 7-9); and another “Role of the Fourth Estate” gathering Dec. 4-6, mirroring the event held one year prior.

The reports stemming from Ditchley’s past meetings indicate a solemn effort to rescue the “fourth estate” (i.e., the legacy media) and stem the growth of alternative “disinformation” sources,” while ramming home, especially in terms of reviving the British economy, the common globalist narrative about “climate change” with no apparent consideration that this worldview could be flawed, as it’s assumed that rigid climate change restrictions and economic growth are basically compatible.

All told, Ditchley’s very existence with such minimal publicity for so many years, even with its relative openness, shows that the globalist network is larger and more complex than assumed, and that Bilderberg, while it’s the center of attention, may or may not be the top boss of the one-world policies the grind onward no matter who’s in elected office.