R.I.P. Christopher Booker

I was saddened by the death of the great contrarian Christopher Booker, the puppeteer who pulled Dave Spart's strings, the first British journalist who argued for leaving the EU and the most uncompromising of climate change sceptics. 

As an undergraduate at Cambridge, Christopher Booker said his ambitions were to edit a magazine, be on television and marry a duke's daughter. On graduating he became the first editor of Private Eye, a writer and occasional performer on the iconic 1960s satire programme That Was The Week That Was and married the Honourable Emma Tennant, the daughter of Lord Glenconner. None of these things lasted. He wrote a very interesting book called The Neophiliacs.

He thought ‘climate change’ was the biggest scam in the history of the world. James
Delongpole has said of him that 

as an historian, he recognised that across the ages madness has run in cycles, and that every stupid idea – from the Taiping rebellion to Nazism to Maoism – has its day during which the warnings of the sane are ignored. The great global warming scam is just another example of this phenomenon.

In the early 1970s, he campaigned against the building of tower blocks and the destruction of Britain's towns and cities. God bless him for that.

He also pointed out the lack of evidence that passive smoking does any harm.

He was given the cold shoulder by Vote Leave in the Brexit referendum campaign. Like Daniel Hannan he favoured copying Norway's or Switzerland's relationship with the EU but, unlike Mr Hannan, he was sure that this was the only form of Brexit that would not cause vast damage to Great Britain (to say nothing of Northern Ireland). The Sunday Telegraph therefore gave Daniel Hannan his spot in the paper.

Dr. Richard North, who collaborated with Christopher Booker for so many years, wrote in his blog:

...so pointed and effective were our writings on EU Regulation, that when the London Office of the European Commission - with whom Booker had a cordial relationship -launched its "Euro-myth" rebuttal series, largely, although not completely in response to [Boris] Johnson's fabrications, much to Booker's delight it was forced to introduce the new category of "true myths" to describe much of his work.

Having thus established our credentials as leading Eurosceptic campaigners, for Booker and I the opportunity to fight in a referendum campaign was seen as the culmination of our efforts over decades. Sadly, it was not to be. Booker and I were completely marginalised by the official leave campaign, which preferred Johnson's tawdry propagandising to our more measured approach.

In the latter, post-referendum days, Booker and I could both see with horror the unfolding train-wreck of Brexit. Booker thus became the first to write in the legacy media about the perils of a no-deal exit, arguing consistently for the more rational Efta/EEA option.