You Know It Makes Sense | 31 October 2009

The global warming lobby, and the terrier who won’t let go two lines

If the devil is in the detail then Satan’s foremost emissary on earth must be Christopher Booker. The Booker does 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 my eyes — admittedly biased because he has become a bit of a mate — Booker is way more significant and heroic a journalist than that fellow Old Salopian hack (and tedious leftie) Paul Foot. Indeed I’d rate him among the greatest of the age.

Like all prophets without honour in their own country, Booker doesn’t have many laurels to show for his efforts. Sure his Sunday Telegraph column has an enormous, dedicated following (as the occasional new editor has discovered when he has made the mistake of trying to sack him) but in Fleet Street (or whatever we call it nowadays) he’s still generally considered a bit of a maverick: swivel-eyed, eccentric, obsessive, probably quite good at what he does — and a jolly nice chap, by all accounts — but definitely not a part of polite journalistic society. When a new Booker book is published it isn’t an event. In fact he barely even gets reviewed.

His new book The Real Global Warming Disaster (Continuum) probably won’t either. Yet like his earlier works (mostly co-written with the similarly magnificent Richard North), it’s another of those classics which any even vaguely intelligent person who wants to know what’s really going on needs to read.