James Delingpole

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_10_April_2014_v4.mp3" title="James Delingpole and Peter Robins discuss the Vikings exhibition" startat=1656] Listen [/audioplayer]Have you managed to book tickets to the Viking exhibition at the British Museum yet? If you haven’t, my advice is: don’t bother. I know what the critics have been saying: that it’s an unmissable treat. But it’s only an unmissable treat if you visit under the privileged conditions of a previewing journalist. Go as an ordinary punter on the other hand — as the Delingpole family discovered to their cost last week — and you’ll find it about as much fun as being pillaged, raped and having your ribcage torn open to form a ‘spread eagle’.

Just as every child now thinks he’s going to die of global warming, so those of us who grew up in the Seventies and Eighties all thought we were going to die of nuclear war. We knew this because trusted authorities told us so: not just the government and our teachers but even the author of Fungus the Bogeyman. When the Wind Blows (1982) was the downer of a graphic novel which Raymond Briggs wrote as our punishment for having enjoyed Fungus. It was about a nice, retired couple called Jim and Hilda Bloggs who somehow survive the first Soviet nuclear strike, unwittingly smell the burned corpses of their neighbours, and end the book praying in their miserable fallout shelter as they vomit, lose their hair and their teeth fall out.

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_13_March_2014_v4.mp3" title="James Delingpole and Freddy Gray discuss the ups and downs of CPac" startat=1124] Listen [/audioplayer]About the coolest guy I saw at CPac this year was this wild-eyed, middle--aged crazy wearing ‘statement’ spectacles, faded Levis and a badge on his immaculately cut, grey wool Timothy Everest suit-coat saying ‘2012 WTF?’ I was looking in the bathroom mirror at the time and the drugs were just starting to kick in. Not proper Hunter S. Thompson drugs, unfortunately.

Since I landed my new job as executive editor at Breitbart London, my old Fleet Street friends and colleagues have reacted with a mix of envy and horror. The envy part comes from the fancy title and their ludicrously exaggerated idea of how much I’m being paid; the horror from the fact that I’ve gone and joined what’s known disparagingly in the trade as a ‘vertical’. A vertical — the opposite of a horizontal, obviously — is an online enterprise that caters to a niche audience: dog owners, say; or foot fetishists; or, in the case of Breitbart.com, readers of a mainly American persuasion who like their news curated and served up in an uncompromisingly right-wing way. So, for example, at Breitbart.

When I first read, many months ago, that the notorious US climate scientist Michael Mann was suing the notorious right-wing bastard Mark Steyn for defamation, I admit that I felt a little piqued. Obviously a libel trial is not something any sane person would wish to court; and naturally I’m a massive fan of Steyn’s. Nevertheless, after all the work I’ve dedicated over the years to goading Mann, I found it a bit bloody annoying that Steyn — a relative latecomer to the climate change debate — should have been the one who ended up stealing all my courtroom glory. What made me doubly jealous was that this was a case Steyn was guaranteed to win.

Whenever I’m tempted to pretend to be nicer so that fewer people hate me, I remember my old friend Alain de Botton. Alain is a genuinely delightful fellow — charming, considerate, wise, modest — but this has made no difference to the degree with which, in some quarters, he remains intensely loathed. This saddens me. There are certainly occasions when I find his utopianism naive, twee, mockable. And, yes, I suppose it’s easy to be jealous of a handsome man with a beautiful wife and a comfortable life which seems to involve nothing harder than pondering philosophically, writing bestsellers and being on TV a lot.

My grandmother, Nanny Nancy, is 99 and going strong. But it can’t be denied that while she’s all there mentally, physically she’s not the lithe young thing she was in her 1920s adolescence. I mean no disrespect to my beloved grandmother, but if we’re honest, when Michael Bay is casting his next blockbuster and it’s a choice between her and Megan Fox for the female lead, well… . It’s not just me who has noticed this: the kids have even more so. When they were younger, especially, and I asked them to kiss their great-grandmother they’d react — as so many children do when confronting their older relatives’ decrepitude — as if I’d invited them to snog a bird-eating spider.

Here’s a thought to kindle a lovely warm glow of smugness and schadenfreude as we enter a new year: you didn’t lose your fortune in the great bitcoin bubble of 2013. The reason I know you didn’t is because few Speccie-reading types of my acquaintance even understand what a bitcoin is, let alone how you might go about buying one, or why it might be important for the future of everything. So let me try to explain from the perspective of a fellow Luddite and techno-phobe. You think about bitcoin, if at all, as one of those newfangled things that young people and child pornographers and hackers and other unsavoury types indulge in.

‘Is anyone here even remotely shocked that Nigella Lawson has done cocaine?’ I asked. Everyone shook their heads. Well of course they did: it was the after-show drinks in the green room at a BBC studio. ‘So why is it being reported in the media as if it were some amazingly big deal?’ No one knew the answer to that one. Everyone present had either tried Class As or been to numerous parties where they were about the only ones there who hadn’t taken Class As. Yet here we were, gossiping about the latest revelations from the Nigella court case for all the world as if they mattered. ‘One Direction are infatuated with Nigella Lawson and paid her a million pounds to have a six-some with her, in a giant tub of her How To Eat classic pea risotto.

When I was a child — in the days before it became illegal under Schedule 5 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act (1981) and Schedule 2 of the Conservation of Habitats and Species Regulations (2010) — I was an unlicensed handler of great crested newts. I loved them for the same reasons, I imagine, Ken Livingstone does: the gorgeous contrast between their rough, matt black bodies and their flame-orange and black-speckled bellies; the way they float in mid-pond as if in suspended animation; watching them develop from their larval stage into efts and then adults; Beatrix Potter’s Sir Isaac Newton...