James Delingpole

‘Should I just have done with it and tell them they’re a bunch of tossers?’ I was on my way to speak at the Durham Union. The motion was ‘This House believes the NHS is out of date’. And, as usual, I was on the ‘wrong’ side of the debate — so why should I even bother? You know beforehand which way the vote is going to go at any university debate these days: the one which enables the snowflakes most easily to signal their virtue. But, on the spur of the moment, I decided to give Durham the benefit of the doubt. ‘I was going to be incredibly rude to you,’ I began. ‘Which you totally deserve for being a bunch of snowflakes who are going to vote against the motion because hashtag “I heart the NHS”.

Down the Mighty River with Steve Backshall (BBC2) was perfect Sunday-night TV — one of the most enjoyable adventure travelogues I’ve watched in ages. So I was quite surprised to see it reviewed lukewarmly by another critic. One of the critic’s objections was that the scene where Backshall spots a bird of paradise through his binoculars by the Baliem river in Papua New Guinea was a bit crap. Why couldn’t we have seen it in loving close-up detail, as you would on a David Attenborough? But this is precisely what I loved about the documentary. It had a roughness, an unpredictability, a spontaneity that you rarely find on TV any more.

Toffs are like jackals: always quick to sniff out new carrion. I remember a few years back one florid aristo boasting what obscene amounts of money he was saving on his heating bills thanks to a brilliant new government scheme to incentivise wood-burning. ‘Probably no use to you —your house isn’t big enough,’ he said, pityingly. Then he went on to tell me about the solar array on his estate. ‘Makes perfect sense if you’ve got a few acres spare.’ But I haven’t told you the worst of it. The worst was that my friend felt really virtuous. Some might say that here was another well-heeled scrounger with a massive sense of entitlement raking in tens of thousands in subsidies for sitting on his fat arse.

Here’s the bad news. One day you or someone like you will be shopping in a mall or enjoying a concert or about to catch a train when the first sudden, sharp crack will rend the air and your world will change forever. Around you, people will start to crumple and as the panic and horror finally dawn the screams will begin while the automatic rifle fire escalates and those still standing will begin to flee — but where to? If you run away from the gunfire you’re being herded into a trap. If you run towards it you’ll be shot, either killed immediately, or casually, later, as you lie wounded, probably by knife to save ammo.

Who do you think was responsible for Europe’s biggest environmental disaster of the past three decades; one that caused more widespread damage and killed more people than even the nuclear accident at Chernobyl? Was it a) greedy and selfish capitalists, probably linked to Big Oil, riding roughshod over the stringent health and safety regulations our wise, caring politicians have designed to protect us and our natural environment? Or b) an alliance of fluffy green activists, campaigning journalists and virtue-signalling politicians, united on a noble mission to save the planet from the greatest environmental threat it has ever known? If you guessed b) then you may appreciate why we climate sceptics are experiencing such schadenfreude right now.

Boy is planning his gap year. Every few hours he rings from school to give me a progress report. ‘I’m allowing three days for Denver. Is that long enough?’ ‘We-e-ll, it’s pretty key in On the Road. Maybe five?’ ‘And I’m definitely stopping for a day in Farmington.’ ‘Where?’ ‘It’s where the Horace Walpole library is.’ ‘Oh, of course. Silly me.’ Actually, I don’t much mind where he goes so long as it’s nowhere near where I went for my gap year: Africa. I love Africa.

Because we’re all so obsessed with what it was that made the Nazis tick, we tend to overlook the bigger mystery of how hundreds of millions of people, for a period considerably longer than the lifespan of Hitler’s Germany, remained under the spell of communism. This is a question that Czeslaw Milosz set out to answer in his 1953 classic The Captive Mind. Milosz was a Polish poet, prominent in the underground during the Nazi occupation, who served as a cultural attaché with Poland’s post-war communist regime before quitting in disgust and fleeing to the US, where he taught at Berkeley and achieved eminence as a Nobel-prize-winning dissident exile.

Merry Christmas everyone. Here are some things I learned — or relearned — in 2016. 1. That which does not kill you makes you still alive. It’s weird to think that less than 12 months ago I was in hospital, dosed up with morphine, battered and bruised with a broken clavicle, numerous cracked ribs and a pulmonary embolism which can actually kill you, don’t you know. And now it’s as if the whole thing never happened. Well, apart from the hideous titanium plate, like a giant centipede, which I can still feel all stiff across my collar bone. And the bastard hunting ban my family has imposed on me… 2. Hunting is the only thing.

Merry Christmas everyone. Here are some things I learned — or relearned — in 2016.   1. That which does not kill you makes you still alive. It’s weird to think that less than 12 months ago I was in hospital, dosed up with morphine, battered and bruised with a broken clavicle, numerous cracked ribs and a pulmonary embolism which can actually kill you, don’t you know. And now it’s as if the whole thing never happened. Well, apart from the hideous titanium plate, like a giant centipede, which I can still feel all stiff across my collar bone. And the bastard hunting ban my family has imposed on me…   2. Hunting is the only thing.

I do hope it’s a terrible winter this year: a total bastard where everyone’s snowed into their drives and those few who do manage to escape end up being slewed across the road or filmed in tragic tailbacks by drones for BBC news bulletins or stuck in ditches and having to tramp miles across icy fields trying to find a friendly farmer to pull them out. Nothing personal. It’s just that I’ve finally got hold of the car I always wanted — a Land Rover — and I’d hate people to think I only bought it for class-identity or small-penis or show-off reasons. I want to feel vindicated as a practical, responsible, sensible family man. I want the four-wheel drive to do its proper thing, rather than just be an expensive, fuel-consumption-boosting waste of space.