As the delegates of the Bilderberg Group rolled away from The Grove hotel in their darkened Audis and Mercedes on Sunday, they brought to a close a bruising week for most involved with the conference.

Top of the list of losers was the Bilderberg Group itself. It was dragged from its preferred secrecy into a greater gaze of public scrutiny and even had some of its members questioned in Parliament about its goings-on.

The Grove was left with its nascent reputation as a clandestine venue for sinister conclaves tarnished. And the people of Watford had endured the inconvenience of holding a snap demonstration for thousands of people.

There were also a few winners to emerge from Bilderberg’s fleeting stay in Watford, notably the two principal Bilderberg-baiters and self-proclaimed truth-seekers: Alex Jones and David Icke.

The US shock jock and the former BBC presenter both garnered a huge amount of attention and possibly even a few more devotees from their time in the Bilderberg limelight.

I’ve watched this pair online for a while now, but it was intriguing to see their antics live as they headlined the motley procession of speakers at the Saturday Bilderberg protest.

Conspiracy theorists and their specious techniques are much more fascinating than their theories.

The modus operandi of Icke, who has spent the last two decades being widely dismissed as a kook, is to highlight already widely-perceived injustices and point to them as proof it is the system, not him, that’s bonkers.

For example, the fact that banks cause the global financial crises and taxpayers suffer the consequences of bailouts and austerity.

Once Icke has illuminated the inherent madness of the situation, he retorts that it’s the world that’s insane, not the audience (or him). Only then does he hit you with his “it’s all the fault of an invisible race of intergalactic reptilian puppet masters” shtick. That’s the payload.

Icke leaves the impression he is a genuinely disturbed individual, who has never really recovered from his televised breakdown on the Terry Wogan show in 1991.

But at least he appears to sincerely believe his extra-terrestrial overlord theories.

Jones, however, provided a more unedifying spectacle. In his on-stage rant he accused Bilderberg of, among other things, continuing the Nazi plan for global domination by founding the EU and then plotting to cull 80 per cent of the world’s population by inventing new cancers.

While this perspiring demagogue rattled off his Bilderberg charge sheet, he also managed to generously plug his website which, coincidentally, is choc-full of items its visitors can purchase to help fight off the globalist trans-humanist attempts to enslave or bump them off.

For instance, there’s a top-of-the-line water filter (a snip at $279) to stop the Bilderberg evil geniuses poisoning your body and mind.

Or how about the all-in-one Arc seed kit, a bargain at $239 and all your post-apocalypse agrarian needs sorted in one purchase.

His TV show is also like a survivalist QVC. Viewers are told about all the terror-inducing trans-humanist plots on their lives and then aggressively advertised the solution – at a special discount price, naturally.

So, and this is just an observation, Jones appears to be a man who has a financial interest in people believing his dark Bilderberg conspiracies.

After two hours of listening to these two godfathers of conspiracy level accusation after accusation against the group, I was left with a few niggling questions.

For a start, if Bilderberg was guilty of even a couple of the diabolical crimes it was accused of, it would really need more than a three-day conference every year to tackle the expansive agenda.

Organising a cancer-based genocide of 80 per cent of the world’s population strikes me as something of a logistics nightmare.

I was also left wondering why the organisers of the Bilderberg Fringe, who had come over beforehand as an eloquent bunch with understandable concerns about the Bilderberg Group’s activities, had allowed the protest to be hijacked by credibility-vortexes such as Icke and Jones.

The only fathomable reason was the number of people the pair’s star billing attracted to the demo.

But the result was that any moderate concerns about Bilderberg were buried under a tidal wave of outlandish accusations, speculation and fantasy.

And the leading duo of truth-seekers were left looking more like grasping attention-seekers.