James Delingpole's Blog, page 52

I've never met a girl who hero-worships Martin Amis as I do — except maybe his wife

M. 'I've spotted him!'

Me. 'Where?'

M. 'Down there. Having a coffee. On his own.'

Me. 'Hey. Do you think he'd like it if we joined him?'

M. 'I doubt it. He's reading a book.'

D. 'God, is he reading his own book? Unbelievable. He's reading Yellow Dog.'

M. 'No it's not. I think it's Hitch 22.'

Me. 'Yeah well, whatever it is, look, he's almost at the end. You know how it is when you're nearly at the end of the book. You want to prolong the moment. So we'd be doing him a favour.'

M. 'You can if you want ...

The disgusting toffs who are destroying Britain

Whenever I am defending toffs one of the main points I like to make is what great conservators they are. Because they have owned vast swathes of Britain, often for many generations, they understand the importance of their role as trustees of the landscape. Certainly, this coincides with their hobbies – hedges and stone walls rather than barbed wire because you don't want your mount's belly ripped open while you're hunting; copses for covert while shooting, and so on – but nonetheless I do...

Climategate: the parliamentary cover-up

Climategate exposed the greatest scandal in the history of modern science but you're never going to hear this from any of the official investigations. Andrew Orlowski at The Register has uncovered why.

Turns out, that there's this well-funded SPECTRE-like advocacy group called GLOBE (Global Legislators for a Balanced Environment) International which has co-opted leading parliamentarians from the main parties in both the Commons and the Lords into advancing the AGW agenda.

One of those is Lord O...

The Economist: not a serious journal

Can anyone tell me how The Economist got its title? I'm guessing it was probably founded in the early 18th century by some crazed charlatan called, perhaps, Zachariah Economist, who, because of the unfortunate coincidence of his surname managed to persuade thousands of gullible fools to part with their shirts on one of the South Sea Bubble companies. The one whose prospectus read "A company for carrying out an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is."

One thing I know...

I need YOUR pledge NOW for the most important campaign in the history of the planet!

I refer, of course to LIGHTS ON – the vital protest being co-ordinated by my colleague Damian Thompson in response to the hideous annual exercise of eco-fascist triumphalism sometimes known as Earth Hour.

All Damian is asking us to do is that we screw up our courage, bump up our electricity bills and make damn sure we keep every single one of the lights in our home blazing between 8.30 and 9.30pm on Saturday March 27.

It will be a tough challenge, not least because the forces arrayed against...

Climategate: the whitewash continues

The Royal Society (Motto: Nullius in Verba Unless It's About Global Warming In Which Case We're Happy To Believe Whatever Unsubstantiated Drivel We're Fed By Michael Mann, Phil Jones, et al) has announced who'll be chairing its "independent" inquiry into the science behind the Climategate scandal.

And guess what? The man could scarcely be more parti pris if they'd given the job to Al Gore.

His name is Lord Oxburgh and, as Bishop Hill reports, he is:

* President of the Carbon Capture and Storage ...

There is nothing cuddly about the WWF

Today in the Sunday Telegraph my colleague Christopher Booker breaks possibly the most important environmental story since Climategate: a devious plan, truly Blofeldian in its scope and menace, by a hard-left-leaning activist body to gain massive global political leverage and earn stupendous sums of money by exploiting and manipulating the world carbon trading market.

My cynical prediction is that this vitally important story will gain little traction in the wider media, especially not with...

In praise of Lord Tebbit

Norman Tebbit, Telegraph blogger (Photo: Andrew Crowley)

My goodness how I admire Lord Tebbit! (So too, to judge by the number of comments on his brilliant blogs do many of you). I must admit I didn't always feel this way but that's only because in my younger more foolish days I was more easily swayed by the Gramsci-endorsed left-liberal dialectic which dominates our culture. The semi-house-trained polecat? The leather-clad boot-boy on Spitting Image? These were tags that stuck regardless of a...

Is Policy Exchange the most loathsome think tank in Britain?

Another day, another reason to hate Cameron's progressive Conservatives. This one comes courtesy of their favourite soft-left think tank Policy Exchange, which has hit on the brilliant idea of punishing smokers even more than they are already by raising the cost of cigarettes still higher.

Just have a skim, if you can bear it, through the witterings of Policy Exchange's creepy-sounding policy wonk Henry Featherstone on the Conservative Home website:

Smoking remains a controversial issue in our ...

Does even Ian McEwan know what Ian McEwan really thinks about 'Climate Change'?

"There was an Old Testament ring to the forewarnings, an air of plague of boils and deluge of frogs that suggested a deep and constant inclination enacted over the centuries to believe that one was always living at the End of Days, that one's own demise was urgently bound up with the end of the world and therefore made more sense or was just a little less irrelevant."

Yes! Great! Tick in the margin! Here is a great novelist at the height of his powers summing up perfectly the atavistic...