Delingpole Fact Check Fail

These are not the happiest times for James “saviour of Western civilisation” Delingpole, as he sees his heroes in the climate change sceptic camp fail to pick apart the latest IPCC report – other than by hurling abuse at it – and despairs at today’s politicians not matching his undimmed and undiluted ideological purity. But there is still his adoring readership at the bear pit that is Telegraph blogs.

Not even a teensy bit fair and balanced

Here, Del Boy can still drone on incessantly about how climate change is so not happening, carping at director James Cameron for making a series on the subject: “He is going to make the dumbest, lamest, most tendentious, hysterical, credibility-free and monumentally pointless series in the history of television”. Well, that’s up to him and his backers, no? And there I was thinking Del favoured free markets.

So what’s the deal? It “will be based on the cataclysmic event that no one is talking about right now because it hasn't happened in 17 years and may not even happen again in our lifetime, more's the pity: global warming”. Ah, the old David Rose ploy again. This is, as I’ve shown, crap: if you use the same logic, you can get a 32 year cooling phase (1944 to 1976). That line proves nothing.

Perhaps Del Boy can find another subject to riff on, however lame? Indeed he can – the hated BBC, an organisation which has failed to adhere to his standards of honesty and integrity (the inconvenient fact that he gets a significant part of his income from it, for some reason, fails to get a mention). “How the BBC persuades itself it's not biased. And why this is a nonsense” he proclaims.

The Beeb has, he asserts, become overrun by those rotten lefties because they are far more likely to indulge in activism, whereas his side aren’t, “because conservatives are by nature conservative: they're much less easily roused, more disinclined to rock the boat”. That, no doubt, would explain the tsunami of right-wing pundits and bloggers assaulting the Corporation on a daily basis.

But hold on a minute – can Delingpole maybe cite a reliable source for his argument? Perhaps he could then at least be given the benefit of the doubt. Sadly not: his best shot is Christopher Booker, who thinks white asbestos is harmless, and that the Europol headquarters in den Haag was once inhabited by the Gestapo (difficult – it was only opened two years ago).

Still, there is his Telegraph podcast to look forward to, also featuring “the BBC’s Rosie Millard”. Er, hang on a minute ... Ms Millard stopped being a Beeb staffer nine years ago. If she were “the BBC’s”, then she wouldn’t need an agent, or be appearing on Sky or the Travel Channel. Del Boy can’t even get the most basic detail right. Yet it’s all the others who are out of step.

And then he wonders why so few people take him seriously. No change there, then.