James Delingpole

When is it socially acceptable for a white person to tell a black person he looks like a monkey eating a banana? For some of you the answer will be ‘never’; for others: ‘Oh my God. I can’t believe you even asked such a racist question!’ But I must confess that when my white tennis friend Glen made some quip on these lines to my black tennis friend Rodney at our class the other weekend, I found it funny. What made it so was not, of course, the stupid joke itself but the context. Here we were in gag-inducingly PC south London, conspiring in the kind of banter so verboten it could almost get you put in prison. Glen laughed, Rodney laughed, we all laughed. It was the laughter not just of rebellion and transgression but of liberation.

God, I enjoyed my book launch party last week. (Though not as much as some people, eh, Toby?) So much so that I’m not sure I can ever forgive myself. I keep thinking not of the fun I had but of all those friends I wish could have been there but weren’t. My fault, totally, in most cases: I’m horrendously disorganised when it comes to party invitations — and it’s entirely possible that you’re one of the people I love most in the world but forgot to invite because, hey, I’m just a bit useless that way. Anyway, this party.

We all have a pretty good idea of why the Soviet Union collapsed: it’s because its state-run planned economy wasn’t as efficient as its rivals in the free-market West. The lesson we’ve learned from this is that capitalism won the political argument. But it’s a false lesson, because capitalism didn’t. The problems that made the Soviet Union such a failure are now endemic in the West. To give one tiny example, in my Sunday paper last weekend was a story about how the Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, is launching ‘a drive to encourage Britons to holiday in their own country… with discounts worth a fifth on breaks booked during the Olympic year’. Who is paying for this scheme? You are, of course. The government has no money of its own.

We all know that the time before we were born was a golden age when men were manlier, women lovelier, civilisation more civilised, culture more edifying, values more valued and so on. But what if it isn’t actually true? What if, say, it turned out that Winston Churchill was damn near as slippery and unprincipled a politician as David Cameron? What if the Battle of Britain wasn’t actually won by ‘the Few’ — and wasn’t even primarily a fighter battle anyway? What if, damn it, the famously long hot summer of 1940 was in fact mostly overcast with just a hot bit right at the end in September? What if our radar technology really wasn’t that early or special?

One of my new hobbies as I get older is corrupting the young. I did so again the other day with a superbright, very nicely brought-up 11-year-old called Tilly. Her mother was trying to persuade her to read Swallows And Amazons. ‘No, wait, I’ve something much more fun, leedle girl,’ I said. ‘Try this!’ The book I was recommending to her was The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (shortly to be released as this year’s must-see kiddie flick). It’s not exactly literature. In fact it’s not literature at all. But you only realise this when you’ve reached the increasingly feeble second and third books in the trilogy. With the first one you’re too gripped by the storyline to care. And so it was with Tilly.

If the global economy goes seriously tits up — as I believe it is about to do — the important thing is that we understand the actual reasons why it went tits up. Otherwise the drastic remedial action we’ll inevitably take to ensure that it never happens again may well result in the exact opposite. Consider, for example, that disturbingly tentacular collective of self-righteous hippyish busybodies Transition Towns. Here is an ideological movement which senses, as most of us do, that there’s something seriously amiss with western industrial civilisation.

My predictions for 2012 1. After the Arab Spring and the Islamist Winter will come Armageddon Summer. It might happen as early as spring but that season has been bagged already. At Islington dinner parties, on the BBC and in the Guardian — after cursory acknowledgement has been made of all the dead innocents — the conclusion will be reached that Israel is to blame. As if its very existence wasn’t provocation enough, Israel has consistently — and deliberately — mocked its poor, struggling neighbours with its outrageous displays of democracy, accountability and economic growth. 2. Boris will make some spectacular gaffe.

I honestly didn’t realise I’d been to a ‘minor’ public school until my first term at Christ Church. Before that, I thought — as all of us did at my alma mater — that though of course there were lots of other public schools out there, Malvern could hold its head high with the very best of them. So coming up to Oxford was a bit of a shock. As far as the Etonians and Wyckhamists and Wets were concerned, my school was so obscure and worthless I might have attended a shabby comprehensive. Among those who very much gave off this vibe was David Cameron. Dave was never aggressively snobbish but then Etonians are much subtler than that.