James Delingpole

I have just killed a good friend of mine. It was immensely satisfying. I got him after a long and very irritating conversation we’d had about man-made global warming (my friend, James Heneage, is a believer, whereas I, as you know, am not) but that wasn’t my main motive. Rather, I did it because those were my orders. I had to kill James, in a red Land Rover, with a bar of soap. If it sounds a bit like a game of Cluedo, that’s more or less what it was. Human Cluedo. Perhaps you’ve played it too, sometime over the summer. You need a fairly large house party of people who are going to be in the same place for several days, and at the beginning of their stay everyone has to write down their name, a murder weapon and a murder location.

If the NHS is ‘fair’, give me unfairness any day Did I ever tell you about the time the National Health Service relieved me of my piles? It’s a painful story — and for many of you, no doubt, already far, far more information than you want. But I do think it goes a long way towards explaining our ongoing Eloi-like subservience to the great, slobbering, brutish NHS Morlock which we so rose-tintedly delude ourselves is still the ‘Envy of the World’. Look, if you don’t want to read about piles (‘’roids’ if you’re American), I should skip on a few pars. The key thing to recognise is that from tiny beginnings, they mutate into an all-consuming misery. Enjoying a night in front of the TV? Yeah, but the piles!

‘Father of three drowns in Welsh holiday tragedy’. This was the news-in-brief headline you nearly read last week. The father in question would have been me. Like all such incidents it came completely out of the blue. This is a thing I’ve noticed: you never wake up that morning with a spooky feeling of impending doom. One minute you’re carrying on as most of us do: as if we’re immortal or, at the very least, guaranteed to live to a very ripe old age. And the next: ‘Whooah! If it isn’t the Grim Reaper, hovering above me with his sickle!

Have you ever played fireball hockey? God, what a fantastic game! You wrap a bog roll in chicken wire, douse it in paraffin, set fire to it and then play hockey with it — preferably while drunk and wearing black tie, as I was lucky enough to do myself three years ago in front of the officers’ mess at the Norfolk HQ of the Light Dragoons. I’d been invited by their then CO, Lt Col Robin Matthews, who’d liked my book How To Be Right and wanted me to give his officers a pep talk. He explained: ‘A lot of these chaps are painfully aware how much money all their non-army friends are making [Gosh! That dates this story, doesn’t it?] and knowing you’re such a fan of the military I thought you could help remind them why they’re there.

Quite possibly the greatest moment of my life so far — better perhaps even than pills in the late 1980s or riding to hounds on Exmoor or getting into Oxford or finding that the huge purple mite I’d discovered clinging to my left testicle during a cold bucket shower in the Western Sudan appeared not to have done any lasting damage — was watching Boy play cricket in a school house match the other week. Like me, I’m half-proud to say, Boy is a total spaz at cricket. But I’m only half-proud to say it because obviously there’s another part of me that would love him to be captaining the first XI, like I dearly wish I’d done when I was at school.

James Delingpole talks to Professor Ian Plimer, the Australian geologist, whose new book shows that ‘anthropogenic global warming’ is a dangerous, ruinously expensive fiction, a ‘first-world luxury’ with no basis in scientific fact. Shame on the publishers who rejected the book Imagine how wonderful the world would be if man-made global warming were just a figment of Al Gore’s imagination. No more ugly wind farms to darken our sunlit uplands. No more whopping electricity bills, artificially inflated by EU-imposed carbon taxes. No longer any need to treat each warm, sunny day as though it were some terrible harbinger of ecological doom. And definitely no need for the $7.

A friend who teaches at an old-fashioned Sussex boarding school has a zero-tolerance approach to racism. The moment he hears one of the foreign boys claiming to be a victim of it, that’s them chucked out of the class for the rest of the lesson. ‘Well I’m sorry,’ says my friend Duncan, quite unapologetically. ‘But they’re bright kids and they’re enjoying the best education money can buy in a multi-ethnic school where racism just isn’t an issue. I think it’s an absolute bloody outrage that they should try that line…’ Had he been working in the state sector, of course, he would be out of his job by now. Which is an awful pity because people of Duncan’s courage and robust convictions are what the world sorely needs.

‘Bugger,’ says my delightful eight-year-old daughter, dancing round my desk. ‘Bugger, Daddy. Bugger, bugger, bugger!’ ‘Don’t say that word darling, it’s really unattractive,’ I say. ‘You use it, Daddy. I learned it from Coward on the Beach,’ says daughter, gleefully looking up the offending word, which isn’t difficult, because it’s the second one in the book. All right, so I swear. Probably more than is good for me.

I don’t bait greens only for fun. I do it because they’re public enemy number one If only you could have seen the gratitude in my guinea pigs’ eyes just now. At least I think it was gratitude. It’s hard to be totally sure with those blank, dead, black staring eyes which, let’s be honest, aren’t noticeably more intelligent or expressive than a (very small) great white shark’s. Even so, if Pickles Deathclaw and Lily Scampers could speak, I like to think that what they would have said is this: ‘Thank you, human. You are so kind and generous and nurturing.

There’s a new application you can get for your iPhone called Baby Shaker, where a baby cries and cries until eventually you get so sick of it you shake your mobile so that large red Xs appear over the baby’s eyes and the crying stops for good. Or rather there isn’t, because someone took offence and complained to Apple and now, annoyingly, it has been withdrawn. Would I have acquired a copy myself? Well the graphics looked pretty rubbish but I still think it was probably worth the 99 cents, just on the off chance one might have found someone to offend. Sicko, child-related jokes are very useful in this respect, I find. One of my favourites when I was about 14 was: Q. What’s the difference between a truckload of babies and a truckload of marbles? A.

The coppers round my part of south London are really pretty good. They chase the occasional burglar; they’re courteous when they come to your door; and if you can get hold of their direct lines or mobiles they’re even better. Last year, my friendly local rozzers did an excellent job of removing a large, noisy gang of criminally inclined hoodies who had taken to congregating on some steps by the estate at the bottom of my garden. This made all the homeowners in my neck of the woods feel much happier and more secure. ‘Hurrah! The police doing their ruddy job for once!’ we all thought. But stories like that are the exception rather than the rule, aren’t they?