Christopher Booker

For other people named Chris Booker, see Chris Booker (disambiguation).

Christopher John Penrice Booker (born 7 October 1937) is an English journalist and author. Booker is well-known for holding contrarian views on a number of topical issues, including global warming, the link between passive smoking and cancer, and intelligent design. In 1961, he was one of the founders of the magazine Private Eye, and has contributed to it for over four decades. He has been a columnist for the Sunday Telegraph since 1990.

Biography

Booker was educated at the Dragon School in Oxford, Shrewsbury School, and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he read history. His parents founded the elite girls' school Knighton House.

He was briefly married to the novelist Emma Tennant and to Christine Verity, who later married historian Norman Stone. In 1979, he married Valerie Patrick, with whom he has two sons; they live in Somerset.

Career

With fellow Salopians Richard Ingrams and Willie Rushton he founded Private Eye in 1961, and was its first editor. He was ousted by Ingrams in 1963. Returning in 1965, he has remained a member of the magazine's collaborative joke-writing team ever since (with Ingrams, Barry Fantoni and current editor Ian Hislop).

From 1959 to 1962, he was the first jazz critic for the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs. In 1962 he became the resident political scriptwriter on the BBC satire show That Was The Week That Was, notably contributing sketches on Home Secretary Henry Brooke and prime minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home which have often been cited as examples of the programme's outspoken style.

From 1964 he became a Spectator columnist, writing on the press and TV, and in 1969 published The Neophiliacs: A Study of the Revolution in English Life In The Fifties and Sixties, a highly critical analysis of the role played by fantasy in the political and social life of those decades.

In the early 1970s he campaigned against the building of tower blocks and the wholesale redevelopment of Britain's cities according to the ideology of the modern movement. In 1973, he published both Goodbye London (written with John Betjeman's daughter Candida Lycett Green), and, with Bennie Gray, was the IPC Campaigning Journalist of the Year. His BBC documentary City of Towers (1979) was widely praised, not least by some of the modern architects whose work it criticised.

In the mid-70s he contributed a regular quiz to Melvyn Bragg's BBC literary programme Read All About It, and he returned to the Spectator as a weekly contributor (1976–1981), when he also became a lead book-reviewer for the Sunday Telegraph. In 1980, he published The Seventies: Portrait Of A Decade, and covered the Moscow Olympics for the Daily Mail, publishing The Games War: A Moscow Journal the following year. Between 1988 and 1990 he contributed The Way of the World satirical column to the Daily Telegraph (as Peter Simple II), and in 1990 swapped places with Auberon Waugh to become a weekly columnist on the Sunday Telegraph, where he has remained to this day.

From 1992 he focused more on the role played in British life by bureaucratic regulation and the European Union, forming a professional collaboration with Dr Richard North, and they subsequently co-authored a series of books: The Mad Officials: How The Bureaucrats Are Strangling Britain (1994); The Castle of Lies (1996); The Great Deception (2003), a critical history of the European Union; and most recently Scared To Death: From BSE To Global Warming, Why Scares Are Costing Us The Earth (2007), a study of the part played in Western society in recent decades by the 'scare phenomenon'.

Between 1986 and 1990 he took part in a detailed investigation, chaired by Brigadier Tony Cowgill, of the widely publicised charges that senior British politicians, including Harold Macmillan, had been guilty of a serious war crime in handing over thousands of Cossack and Yugoslav prisoners to the Communists at the end of the war in 1945. Their report, published in 1990, presented those events in a very different light, and Booker published a lengthy analysis of the controversy in A Looking Glass Tragedy (1997).

In 2005, he published The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories, a Jungian-influenced analysis of stories and their psychological meaning, on which he had been working for over 30 years. Although this long book was dismissed by a number of journalistic reviewers, it won praise from a number of novelists, playwrights and academics, including Fay Weldon, Beryl Bainbridge, Richard Adams, Ronald Harwood and John Bayley.

In 2009, he published The Real Global Warming Disaster, which was described in The Guardian as "the definitive climate sceptics' manual".

Views on science

Booker, a prominent global warming sceptic, has claimed in his long-running column in the Sunday Telegraph that 2008 was "the year man-made global warming was disproved", amid "a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming", and that government policy aimed at dealing with this issue will be ruinously expensive.

Booker has also claimed that white asbestos is "chemically identical to talcum powder" and poses a "non-existent" risk to human health, stating that "HSE studies, including a paper by John Hodgson and Andrew Darnton in 2000, concluded that the risk from the substance is "virtually zero".

Booker has also claimed that

• "scientific evidence to support [the] belief that inhaling other people's smoke causes cancer simply does not exist";
• there is "no proof that BSE causes CJD in humans".
• Darwinists "rest their case on nothing more than blind faith and unexamined a priori assumptions".
• BBC Radio 4's Today Programme "crudely distorted" the debate between defenders of the theory of Intelligent Design and Darwinians and "went out of their way to ignore the fact that the proponents of "intelligent design" are scientists".

Criticism

Booker's articles in The Daily Telegraph on asbestos and on global warming have been repeatedly severely challenged by George Monbiot of The Guardian.

Booker's claims, which include the assertion that white asbestos (chrysotile) is "chemically identical to talcum powder" were also critically analysed by Richard Wilson in his book Don't Get Fooled Again (2008). Wilson highlighted Booker's repeated endorsement of the alleged scientific expertise of John Bridle, who in 2005 was convicted under the UK's Trade Descriptions Act of making false claims about his qualifications.

Booker's claims about the Hodgson and Darnton paper have been criticised by George Monbiot, who argues that Booker has misrepresented the authors' findings. In an article in May 2008, Booker again cited the Hodgson and Darnton paper, claiming that 'they concluded that the risk of contracting mesothelioma from white asbestos cement was "insignificant", while that of lung cancer was "zero"'. This article was criticised by the UK's Health and Safety Executive as "substantially misleading".

Booker's claims about asbestos have also been criticised several times by the UK government's Health and Safety Executive. In 2002, the HSE's Director General, Timothy Walker, wrote that Booker's articles on asbestos had been "misinformed and do little to increase public understanding of a very important occupational health issue."

The Health and Safety Executive issued further rebuttals to articles written by Booker in both 2005 and in 2006.

Booker has been described by English comic writer James Delingpole, and fellow climate change sceptic, in The Spectator as doing "the kind of proper, old-school things that journalists hardly ever bother with in this new age of aggregation and flip bloggery: he digs, he makes the calls, he reads the small print, he takes up the cause of the little man and campaigns, he speaks truth to power without fear or favour".

In December 2009, Christopher Booker and Richard North published an article in The Sunday Telegraph in which they questioned whether Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was using his position for personal gain, with a followup Telegraph article in January 2010. On 21 August 2010,The Daily Telegraph issued an apology, and withdrew the December article from their website. Dr Pachauri described the statements against him as "another attempt by the climate sceptics to discredit the IPCC."

Bibliography

• The Neophiliacs: A Study of the Revolution in English Life In The Fifties and Sixties (1969)
• Goodbye London (written with John Betjeman’s daughter Candida Lycett Green) (1979)
• The Seventies: Portrait Of A Decade (1980)
• The Games War: A Moscow Journal (1981)
• The Mad Officials: How The Bureaucrats Are Strangling Britain (with Richard North, 1994)
• The Castle of Lie: Why Britain Must get Out of Europe (with Richard North, 1996)
• A Looking-Glass Tragedy. The Controversy Over The Repatriations From Austria In 1945, London, United Kingdom, Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd, First Edition (1997)
• The Great Deception (with Richard North, 2003), London: Continuum Publishing
• The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories (2005)
• Scared To Death: From BSE To Global Warming, Why Scares Are Costing Us The Earth (with Richard North, 2007), London: Continuum. ISBN 0826486142
• The Real Global Warming Disaster, London, Continuum. (2009) ISBN 9781441110527
• Climategate to Cancun: The Real Global Warming Disaster Continues... (with Richard North, 2010), London: Continuum.

External links

• Christopher Booker on Telegraph.co.uk