Columns

Every columnist, broadcaster or writer should, as each year closes, review his or her net contribution to the sum total of national good. It isn’t vain — or, if vain, it’s the vanity demanded by self-respect — that we should ask what we’ve done to change the world for the better. One hundred and ten years ago this New Year’s eve, Emile Zola will have reflected with pride on the total exoneration of Alfred Dreyfus, whose cruel traduction by the French authorities the brave writer did so much to expose. Charles Dickens deserved to spend his Christmases proudly contemplating how his stories, serialised in the daily newspapers, had awakened the Victorian conscience to the sufferings of the poor.

It has been a weird, weird thing having a ringside seat at the messy unravelling of the greatest scientific scandal in the history of the world. The only experience in my life even vaguely similar was queuing outside the Wag club in the spring of 1988 watching all the straight people staring at us freaks, and thinking to myself: ‘God, just imagine how totally awesome it would be if this Acid House craze ever caught on.’ From a tiny germ of a story on a few specialist blogs, Climategate has gone über-viral in a way few of us sceptics could ever have dared hope.

It hardly struck me, as I set out for a couple of days in Somerset, that they would lead me to Bridport in Dorset, thence to Dame Margaret Drabble, to the history of the jigsaw puzzle, and finally to some melancholy reflections on the meaning of life. But of such apparently random pieces are jigsaws made, and sometimes they do make a picture. We’d seen a day of hurricane-force gales along the south coast last Saturday, when our Somerset hosts remarked that they’d bought tickets for a talk by Margaret Drabble at the Bridport Literary Festival early that evening, and were planning to drive over to the town before supper — and would anyone care to come? Gales notwithstanding, Margaret Drabble was there on time, in a scarlet silk tunic and red shoes.

I don’t know quite how to put this without sounding nauseatingly smug or dangerously hubristic, but I think I might finally have become almost-famous. The revelation occurred while I was doing Vanessa Feltz’s show on BBC Radio London. I was burbling away in my usual self-hating way about how needy I am and unappreciated, and Vanessa said: ‘You know a lot of listeners are going to be quite puzzled by that, because you’re a successful columnist with a huge audience and you’re broadcasting to thousands of people right now.’ And I thought, ‘Bloody hell, Vanessa. You’re right.’ Sure I’m not famous enough to be mobbed in the street, or get tables in restaurants, or have gorgeous random females forever hurling their bodies at me.

I have an independent financial adviser. I can recommend him. He gives me expert advice. But I decide, and sometimes I disagree. Nobody would question either the propriety or the commonplace nature of this arrangement. Recently we were discussing what to do with my maturing pension fund. His suggestions looked shrewd but were predicated on a measure of resumed economic growth and the persistence for some years of low interest rates. His assessment was well-informed and would be widely shared.

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.

If you’re me, one of the ways you know that broadcasters are getting desperate for a ‘balancing’ voice to counter a popular point of view is that large numbers of them start telephoning you. You realise they must be scraping the barrel. Never more so, of course, than when what’s sought is that elusive beast, an articulate right-winger who isn’t totally Neanderthal. I generally tell them (always good advice in a tight corner) to try Peter Hitchens or Janet Daley.