Christopher Booker
Encyclopedia
Christopher John Penrice Booker (born 7 October 1937) is an English journalist
and author. In 1961, he was one of the founders of the magazine Private Eye
, and has contributed to it for over four decades. He has been a columnist for the Sunday Telegraph
since 1990. He often takes a stance which runs counter to mainstream views on a number of issues, including global warming
, the link between passive smoking
and cancer, asbestos
and some proponents of the Darwinian theory of evolution. In 2009, he published The Real Global Warming Disaster
, described by The Observer as "the definitive climate sceptics' manual".
in Oxford
, Shrewsbury School
, and Corpus Christi College
, Cambridge, where he read history
. His parents founded the elite girls' school Knighton House
.
He was briefly married to the novelist Emma Tennant
and to Christine Verity. In 1979, he married Valerie Patrick, with whom he has two sons; they live in Somerset
.
Richard Ingrams
and Willie Rushton
he founded Private Eye
in 1961, and was its first editor. He was ousted by Ingrams in 1963. Returning in 1965, he has remained a member of the magazine's collaborative joke-writing team ever since (with Ingrams, Barry Fantoni and current editor Ian Hislop
).
From 1959 to 1962, he was the first jazz critic for the Daily and Sunday Telegraph
s. In 1962 he became the resident political scriptwriter on the BBC
satire show That Was The Week That Was
, notably contributing sketches on Home Secretary Henry Brooke
and prime minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home which have often been cited as examples of the programme's outspoken style.
From 1964 he became a Spectator
columnist, writing on the press and TV, and in 1969 published The Neophiliacs: A Study of the Revolution in English Life In The Fifties and Sixties, a highly critical analysis of the role played by fantasy in the political and social life of those decades.
), and, with Bennie Gray, was the IPC Campaigning Journalist of the Year. His BBC
documentary City of Towers (1979) was widely praised, not least by some of the modern architects whose work it criticised.
In the mid-70s he contributed a regular quiz to Melvyn Bragg
's BBC literary programme Read All About It, and he returned to the Spectator as a weekly contributor (1976–1981), when he also became a lead book-reviewer for the Sunday Telegraph.
, publishing The Games War: A Moscow Journal the following year. Between 1988 and 1990 he contributed The Way of the World satirical column to the Daily Telegraph (as Peter Simple II), and in 1990 swapped places with Auberon Waugh
to become a weekly columnist on the Sunday Telegraph, where he has remained to this day.
Between 1986 and 1990 he took part in a detailed investigation, chaired by Brigadier Tony Cowgill, of the widely publicised charges that senior British politicians, including Harold Macmillan
, had been guilty of a serious war crime
in handing over thousands of Cossack and Yugoslav prisoners to the Communists at the end of the war in 1945. Their report, published in 1990, presented those events in a very different light, and Booker later published a lengthy analysis of the controversy in A Looking Glass Tragedy (1997).
, forming a professional collaboration with Dr Richard North, and they subsequently co-authored a series of books, including The Mad Officials: How The Bureaucrats Are Strangling Britain (1994); The Castle of Lies (1996); The Great Deception (2003), a critical history of the European Union; and most recently Scared To Death: From BSE To Global Warming, Why Scares Are Costing Us The Earth (2007), a study of the part played in Western society in recent decades by the 'scare phenomenon'.
In 2005, he published The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories, a Jungian-influenced analysis of stories and their psychological meaning, on which he had been working for over 30 years. This long book was dismissed by a number of journalistic reviewers, such as Adam Mars-Jones
, who objected to Booker employing his generalizations about conventional plot structures prescriptively: "He sets up criteria for art, and ends up condemning Rigoletto
, The Cherry Orchard
, Wagner
, Proust
, Joyce
, Kafka
and Lawrence - the list goes on - while praising Crocodile Dundee
, E.T.
and Terminator 2". However, a number of novelists, playwrights, and academics, including Fay Weldon
, Beryl Bainbridge
, Richard Adams
, Ronald Harwood
, and John Bayley, spoke positively of the work.
In 2009, he published The Real Global Warming Disaster
. The book, which became his bestselling work, questions whether there is a scientific consensus for anthropogenic global warming
and postulates that the measures taken by governments to combat climate change "will turn out to be one of the most expensive, destructive, and foolish mistakes the human race has ever made". The book was described by The Observer as being as "the definitive climate sceptics' manual," although the reviewer found that much of the book, "including the central claim, is bunk".
In December 2009, Christopher Booker and Richard North published an article in The Sunday Telegraph in which they questioned whether Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC), was using his position for personal gain, with a followup Telegraph article in January 2010. On 21 August 2010,The Daily Telegraph
issued an apology, and withdrew the December article from their website having reportedly paid legal fees running into six figures. Dr Pachauri described the statements against him as "another attempt by the climate sceptics to discredit the IPCC."
in The Spectator
as doing "the kind of proper, old-school things that journalists hardly ever bother with in this new age of aggregation and flip bloggery: he digs, he makes the calls, he reads the small print, he takes up the cause of the little man and campaigns, he speaks truth to power without fear or favour". On a range of health issues, Booker has put forward a view that the public is being unnecessarily "scared", as detailed in his book Scared to Death. Thus he argues that asbestos
, passive smoking
and BSE
have not been shown to be dangerous. His views on these matters go against scientific consensus, and as a result have attracted much criticism from other journalists as well as public bodies. Thus his articles on asbestos and on global warming have been repeatedly challenged by George Monbiot
of The Guardian
, and the UK Health and Safety Executive has repeatedly refuted his claims about asbestos.
Booker has repeatedly claimed that white asbestos is "chemically identical to talcum powder" and poses a "non-existent" risk to human health, relying primarily on a 2000 paper for the UK's Health and Safety Executive
by John Hodgson and Andrew Darnton. He wrote in January 2002 that "HSE studies, including a paper by John Hodgson and Andrew Darnton in 2000, concluded that the risk from the substance is "virtually zero". In response, the HSE's Director General, Timothy Walker, wrote that Booker's articles on asbestos had been "misinformed and do little to increase public understanding of a very important occupational health issue." The Health and Safety Executive issued further rebuttals to articles written by Booker in both 2005 and in 2006. In an article in May 2008, Booker again cited the Hodgson and Darnton paper, claiming that 'they concluded that the risk of contracting mesothelioma from white asbestos cement was "insignificant", while that of lung cancer was "zero"'. This article was also criticised by the UK's Health and Safety Executive
as "substantially misleading",Geoffrey Podger, HSE's Chief Executive, responds |date=25 May 2008 |publisher=Health and Safety Executive}} as well as by George Monbiot
, who argued that Booker misrepresented the authors' findings. Booker's claims were also critically analysed by Richard Wilson in his book Don't Get Fooled Again (2008). Wilson highlighted Booker's repeated endorsement of the alleged scientific expertise of John Bridle, who in 2004 was convicted under the UK's Trade Descriptions Act
of making false claims about his qualifications
On climate change
Booker is a global warming sceptic, and claimed in his long-running column in the Sunday Telegraph
that 2008 was "the year man-made global warming was disproved", amid "a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming". He later wrote that the Climate Change Act 2008 was "the most expensive piece of legislation ever put through Parliament", and likely to cost hundreds of billions over the next 40 years.
Booker has also argued in support of intelligent design
, claiming that supporters of the theory of evolution "rest their case on nothing more than blind faith and unexamined a priori assumptions".
"In the first article Mr Booker gives the impression that it was 'faint bruising' which prompted the parents to take L to hospital and which gave rise to what he clearly regards as the over-zealous and unjustified actions of social workers working for the same local authority so recently criticised by me in Re X, Y and Z (Children). As he will come to understand when he reads this judgment, it was in fact L's floppy arm which prompted his parents to take him to hospital. That floppy arm was the result of a spiral fracture of his left humerus. X-rays showed that he also had six metaphyseal fractures. In his first article Mr Booker makes no mention of any of those fractures. It was those fractures which led to the safeguarding measures taken – and in my judgment appropriately taken – by this hospital and by this local authority...
In his second article Mr Booker asserts as fact that in this case 'the council has depended, in its campaign to seize this baby, on the same controversial paediatrician about whom the judge was so excoriatory'... I shall refer to that doctor, as I did in Re X, Y and Z (Children), as Dr M. At no time has Dr M had any involvement at all in the case I am now concerned with. Indeed, to the best of my recollection his name has never even been suggested as a possible expert to be used in this case."
Journalist
A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...
and author. In 1961, he was one of the founders of the magazine Private Eye
Private Eye
Private Eye is a fortnightly British satirical and current affairs magazine, edited by Ian Hislop.Since its first publication in 1961, Private Eye has been a prominent critic and lampooner of public figures and entities that it deemed guilty of any of the sins of incompetence, inefficiency,...
, and has contributed to it for over four decades. He has been a columnist for the Sunday Telegraph
Sunday Telegraph
The Sunday Telegraph is a British broadsheet newspaper, founded in February 1961. It is the sister paper of The Daily Telegraph, but is run separately with a different editorial staff, although there is some cross-usage of stories...
since 1990. He often takes a stance which runs counter to mainstream views on a number of issues, including global warming
Global warming
Global warming refers to the rising average temperature of Earth's atmosphere and oceans and its projected continuation. In the last 100 years, Earth's average surface temperature increased by about with about two thirds of the increase occurring over just the last three decades...
, the link between passive smoking
Passive smoking
Passive smoking is the inhalation of smoke, called secondhand smoke or environmental tobacco smoke , from tobacco products used by others. It occurs when tobacco smoke permeates any environment, causing its inhalation by people within that environment. Exposure to secondhand tobacco smoke causes...
and cancer, asbestos
Asbestos
Asbestos is a set of six naturally occurring silicate minerals used commercially for their desirable physical properties. They all have in common their eponymous, asbestiform habit: long, thin fibrous crystals...
and some proponents of the Darwinian theory of evolution. In 2009, he published The Real Global Warming Disaster
The Real Global Warming Disaster
The Real Global Warming Disaster is a 2009 book by English journalist and author Christopher Booker written from a standpoint of environmental scepticism which aims to show how scientists and politicians came to believe in anthropogenic global warming.In the book, Booker...
, described by The Observer as "the definitive climate sceptics' manual".
Biography
Booker was educated at the Dragon SchoolDragon School
The Dragon School is a British coeducational, preparatory school in the city of Oxford, founded in 1877 as the Oxford Preparatory School, or OPS. It is primarily known as a boarding school, although it also takes day pupils...
in Oxford
Oxford
The city of Oxford is the county town of Oxfordshire, England. The city, made prominent by its medieval university, has a population of just under 165,000, with 153,900 living within the district boundary. It lies about 50 miles north-west of London. The rivers Cherwell and Thames run through...
, Shrewsbury School
Shrewsbury School
Shrewsbury School is a co-educational independent school for pupils aged 13 to 18, founded by Royal Charter in 1552. The present campus to which the school moved in 1882 is located on the banks of the River Severn in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England...
, and Corpus Christi College
Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
Corpus Christi College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. It is notable as the only college founded by Cambridge townspeople: it was established in 1352 by the Guilds of Corpus Christi and the Blessed Virgin Mary...
, Cambridge, where he read history
History
History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...
. His parents founded the elite girls' school Knighton House
Knighton House
Knighton House is a fee-paying, girls' day and boarding prep school in Dorset, England.-The school:The school is a small preparatory school for girls near Blandford Forum in Dorset, England. It was founded in 1950 by John and Peggy Booker, parents of the writer Christopher Booker. There are around...
.
He was briefly married to the novelist Emma Tennant
Emma Tennant
Emma Christina Tennant FRSL is a British novelist and editor. She is known for a postmodern approach to her fiction, which is often imbued with fantasy or magic. Several of her novels give a feminist or dreamlike twist to classic stories, such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr....
and to Christine Verity. In 1979, he married Valerie Patrick, with whom he has two sons; they live in Somerset
Somerset
The ceremonial and non-metropolitan county of Somerset in South West England borders Bristol and Gloucestershire to the north, Wiltshire to the east, Dorset to the south-east, and Devon to the south-west. It is partly bounded to the north and west by the Bristol Channel and the estuary of the...
.
1960s
With fellow SalopiansShrewsbury School
Shrewsbury School is a co-educational independent school for pupils aged 13 to 18, founded by Royal Charter in 1552. The present campus to which the school moved in 1882 is located on the banks of the River Severn in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England...
Richard Ingrams
Richard Ingrams
Richard Ingrams is an English journalist, a co-founder and second editor of the British satirical magazine Private Eye, and now editor of The Oldie magazine.-Career:...
and Willie Rushton
Willie Rushton
William George Rushton, commonly known as Willie Rushton was an English cartoonist, satirist, comedian, actor and performer who co-founded the Private Eye satirical magazine.- School and army :William George Rushton was born 18 August 1937 in the family home at Scarsdale Villas,...
he founded Private Eye
Private Eye
Private Eye is a fortnightly British satirical and current affairs magazine, edited by Ian Hislop.Since its first publication in 1961, Private Eye has been a prominent critic and lampooner of public figures and entities that it deemed guilty of any of the sins of incompetence, inefficiency,...
in 1961, and was its first editor. He was ousted by Ingrams in 1963. Returning in 1965, he has remained a member of the magazine's collaborative joke-writing team ever since (with Ingrams, Barry Fantoni and current editor Ian Hislop
Ian Hislop
Ian David Hislop is a British journalist, satirist, comedian, writer, broadcaster and editor of the satirical magazine Private Eye...
).
From 1959 to 1962, he was the first jazz critic for the Daily and Sunday Telegraph
Sunday Telegraph
The Sunday Telegraph is a British broadsheet newspaper, founded in February 1961. It is the sister paper of The Daily Telegraph, but is run separately with a different editorial staff, although there is some cross-usage of stories...
s. In 1962 he became the resident political scriptwriter on the BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
satire show That Was The Week That Was
That Was The Week That Was
That Was The Week That Was, also known as TW3, is a satirical television comedy programme that was shown on BBC Television in 1962 and 1963. It was devised, produced and directed by Ned Sherrin and presented by David Frost...
, notably contributing sketches on Home Secretary Henry Brooke
Henry Brooke, Baron Brooke of Cumnor
Henry Brooke, Baron Brooke of Cumnor CH, PC was a British Conservative Party politician.-Political career:...
and prime minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home which have often been cited as examples of the programme's outspoken style.
From 1964 he became a Spectator
The Spectator
The Spectator is a weekly British magazine first published on 6 July 1828. It is currently owned by David and Frederick Barclay, who also owns The Daily Telegraph. Its principal subject areas are politics and culture...
columnist, writing on the press and TV, and in 1969 published The Neophiliacs: A Study of the Revolution in English Life In The Fifties and Sixties, a highly critical analysis of the role played by fantasy in the political and social life of those decades.
1970s
In the early 1970s he campaigned against the building of tower blocks and the wholesale redevelopment of Britain's cities according to the ideology of the modern movement. In 1973, he published both Goodbye London (written with John Betjeman's daughter Candida Lycett GreenCandida Lycett Green
Candida Lycett Green is the author of sixteen books including English Cottages, Goodbye London, The Perfect English House, Over the Hills and Far Away and The Dangerous Edge of Things. Her television documentaries include “The Englishwoman and the Horse” and “The Front Garden”...
), and, with Bennie Gray, was the IPC Campaigning Journalist of the Year. His BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
documentary City of Towers (1979) was widely praised, not least by some of the modern architects whose work it criticised.
In the mid-70s he contributed a regular quiz to Melvyn Bragg
Melvyn Bragg
Melvyn Bragg, Baron Bragg FRSL FRTS FBA, FRS FRSA is an English broadcaster and author best known for his work with the BBC and for presenting the The South Bank Show...
's BBC literary programme Read All About It, and he returned to the Spectator as a weekly contributor (1976–1981), when he also became a lead book-reviewer for the Sunday Telegraph.
1980s
In 1980, he published The Seventies: Portrait Of A Decade, and covered the Moscow Olympics for the Daily MailDaily Mail
The Daily Mail is a British daily middle-market tabloid newspaper owned by the Daily Mail and General Trust. First published in 1896 by Lord Northcliffe, it is the United Kingdom's second biggest-selling daily newspaper after The Sun. Its sister paper The Mail on Sunday was launched in 1982...
, publishing The Games War: A Moscow Journal the following year. Between 1988 and 1990 he contributed The Way of the World satirical column to the Daily Telegraph (as Peter Simple II), and in 1990 swapped places with Auberon Waugh
Auberon Waugh
Auberon Alexander Waugh was a British author and journalist, son of the novelist Evelyn Waugh. He was known to his family and friends as Bron Waugh.-Life and career:...
to become a weekly columnist on the Sunday Telegraph, where he has remained to this day.
Between 1986 and 1990 he took part in a detailed investigation, chaired by Brigadier Tony Cowgill, of the widely publicised charges that senior British politicians, including Harold Macmillan
Harold Macmillan
Maurice Harold Macmillan, 1st Earl of Stockton, OM, PC was Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 10 January 1957 to 18 October 1963....
, had been guilty of a serious war crime
War crime
War crimes are serious violations of the laws applicable in armed conflict giving rise to individual criminal responsibility...
in handing over thousands of Cossack and Yugoslav prisoners to the Communists at the end of the war in 1945. Their report, published in 1990, presented those events in a very different light, and Booker later published a lengthy analysis of the controversy in A Looking Glass Tragedy (1997).
After 1990
From 1992 he focused more on the role played in British life by bureaucratic regulation and the European UnionEuropean Union
The European Union is an economic and political union of 27 independent member states which are located primarily in Europe. The EU traces its origins from the European Coal and Steel Community and the European Economic Community , formed by six countries in 1958...
, forming a professional collaboration with Dr Richard North, and they subsequently co-authored a series of books, including The Mad Officials: How The Bureaucrats Are Strangling Britain (1994); The Castle of Lies (1996); The Great Deception (2003), a critical history of the European Union; and most recently Scared To Death: From BSE To Global Warming, Why Scares Are Costing Us The Earth (2007), a study of the part played in Western society in recent decades by the 'scare phenomenon'.
In 2005, he published The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories, a Jungian-influenced analysis of stories and their psychological meaning, on which he had been working for over 30 years. This long book was dismissed by a number of journalistic reviewers, such as Adam Mars-Jones
Adam Mars-Jones
Adam Mars-Jones is a British novelist and critic.Mars-Jones was born in London, to parents William Mars-Jones, the Welsh High Court judge and President of the London Welsh Trust, and Sheila . Mars-Jones studied at Westminster School, and read Classics at Trinity Hall, Cambridge...
, who objected to Booker employing his generalizations about conventional plot structures prescriptively: "He sets up criteria for art, and ends up condemning Rigoletto
Rigoletto
Rigoletto is an opera in three acts by Giuseppe Verdi. The Italian libretto was written by Francesco Maria Piave based on the play Le roi s'amuse by Victor Hugo. It was first performed at La Fenice in Venice on March 11, 1851...
, The Cherry Orchard
The Cherry Orchard
The Cherry Orchard is Russian playwright Anton Chekhov's last play. It premiered at the Moscow Art Theatre 17 January 1904 in a production directed by Constantin Stanislavski. Chekhov intended this play as a comedy and it does contain some elements of farce; however, Stanislavski insisted on...
, Wagner
Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, conductor, theatre director, philosopher, music theorist, poet, essayist and writer primarily known for his operas...
, Proust
Marcel Proust
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu...
, Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
, Kafka
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...
and Lawrence - the list goes on - while praising Crocodile Dundee
Crocodile Dundee
"Crocodile" Dundee is a 1986 Australian comedy film set in the Australian Outback and in New York City. It stars Paul Hogan as the weathered Mick Dundee and Linda Kozlowski as Sue Charlton....
, E.T.
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is a 1982 American science fiction film co-produced and directed by Steven Spielberg, written by Melissa Mathison and starring Henry Thomas, Dee Wallace, Robert MacNaughton, Drew Barrymore, and Peter Coyote...
and Terminator 2". However, a number of novelists, playwrights, and academics, including Fay Weldon
Fay Weldon
Fay Weldon CBE is an English author, essayist and playwright, whose work has been associated with feminism. In her fiction, Weldon typically portrays contemporary women who find themselves trapped in oppressive situations caused by the patriarchal structure of British society.-Biography:Weldon was...
, Beryl Bainbridge
Beryl Bainbridge
Dame Beryl Margaret Bainbridge, DBE was an English author from Liverpool. She was primarily known for her psychological novels, often set amongst the English working classes. Bainbridge won the Whitbread Awards prize for best novel in 1977 and 1996; she was nominated five times for the Booker...
, Richard Adams
Richard Adams
Richard Adams was a non-conforming English Presbyterian divine, known as author of sermons and other theological writings.-Life:...
, Ronald Harwood
Ronald Harwood
Sir Ronald Harwood CBE is an author, playwright and screenwriter. He is most noted for his plays for the British stage as well as the screenplays for The Dresser and The Pianist, for which he won the 2003 Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay...
, and John Bayley, spoke positively of the work.
In 2009, he published The Real Global Warming Disaster
The Real Global Warming Disaster
The Real Global Warming Disaster is a 2009 book by English journalist and author Christopher Booker written from a standpoint of environmental scepticism which aims to show how scientists and politicians came to believe in anthropogenic global warming.In the book, Booker...
. The book, which became his bestselling work, questions whether there is a scientific consensus for anthropogenic global warming
Global warming
Global warming refers to the rising average temperature of Earth's atmosphere and oceans and its projected continuation. In the last 100 years, Earth's average surface temperature increased by about with about two thirds of the increase occurring over just the last three decades...
and postulates that the measures taken by governments to combat climate change "will turn out to be one of the most expensive, destructive, and foolish mistakes the human race has ever made". The book was described by The Observer as being as "the definitive climate sceptics' manual," although the reviewer found that much of the book, "including the central claim, is bunk".
In December 2009, Christopher Booker and Richard North published an article in The Sunday Telegraph in which they questioned whether Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a scientific intergovernmental body which provides comprehensive assessments of current scientific, technical and socio-economic information worldwide about the risk of climate change caused by human activity, its potential environmental and...
(IPCC), was using his position for personal gain, with a followup Telegraph article in January 2010. On 21 August 2010,The Daily Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph is a daily morning broadsheet newspaper distributed throughout the United Kingdom and internationally. The newspaper was founded by Arthur B...
issued an apology, and withdrew the December article from their website having reportedly paid legal fees running into six figures. Dr Pachauri described the statements against him as "another attempt by the climate sceptics to discredit the IPCC."
Views on science
Booker's weekly columns in The Sunday Telegraph have covered a wide range of topics of public interest. Booker has been described by English writer James DelingpoleJames Delingpole
James Delingpole is an English columnist and novelist. A self-described libertarian conservative, he writes for The Times, The Daily Telegraph, and The Spectator. He has published several novels and four political books, most recently Watermelons: The Green Movement's True Colors [2011]...
in The Spectator
The Spectator
The Spectator is a weekly British magazine first published on 6 July 1828. It is currently owned by David and Frederick Barclay, who also owns The Daily Telegraph. Its principal subject areas are politics and culture...
as doing "the kind of proper, old-school things that journalists hardly ever bother with in this new age of aggregation and flip bloggery: he digs, he makes the calls, he reads the small print, he takes up the cause of the little man and campaigns, he speaks truth to power without fear or favour". On a range of health issues, Booker has put forward a view that the public is being unnecessarily "scared", as detailed in his book Scared to Death. Thus he argues that asbestos
Asbestos
Asbestos is a set of six naturally occurring silicate minerals used commercially for their desirable physical properties. They all have in common their eponymous, asbestiform habit: long, thin fibrous crystals...
, passive smoking
Passive smoking
Passive smoking is the inhalation of smoke, called secondhand smoke or environmental tobacco smoke , from tobacco products used by others. It occurs when tobacco smoke permeates any environment, causing its inhalation by people within that environment. Exposure to secondhand tobacco smoke causes...
and BSE
Bovine spongiform encephalopathy
Bovine spongiform encephalopathy , commonly known as mad-cow disease, is a fatal neurodegenerative disease in cattle that causes a spongy degeneration in the brain and spinal cord. BSE has a long incubation period, about 30 months to 8 years, usually affecting adult cattle at a peak age onset of...
have not been shown to be dangerous. His views on these matters go against scientific consensus, and as a result have attracted much criticism from other journalists as well as public bodies. Thus his articles on asbestos and on global warming have been repeatedly challenged by George Monbiot
George Monbiot
George Joshua Richard Monbiot is an English writer, known for his environmental and political activism. He lives in Machynlleth, Wales, writes a weekly column for The Guardian, and is the author of a number of books, including Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain and Bring on the...
of The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
, and the UK Health and Safety Executive has repeatedly refuted his claims about asbestos.
Booker has repeatedly claimed that white asbestos is "chemically identical to talcum powder" and poses a "non-existent" risk to human health, relying primarily on a 2000 paper for the UK's Health and Safety Executive
Health and Safety Executive
The Health and Safety Executive is a non-departmental public body in the United Kingdom. It is the body responsible for the encouragement, regulation and enforcement of workplace health, safety and welfare, and for research into occupational risks in England and Wales and Scotland...
by John Hodgson and Andrew Darnton. He wrote in January 2002 that "HSE studies, including a paper by John Hodgson and Andrew Darnton in 2000, concluded that the risk from the substance is "virtually zero". In response, the HSE's Director General, Timothy Walker, wrote that Booker's articles on asbestos had been "misinformed and do little to increase public understanding of a very important occupational health issue." The Health and Safety Executive issued further rebuttals to articles written by Booker in both 2005 and in 2006. In an article in May 2008, Booker again cited the Hodgson and Darnton paper, claiming that 'they concluded that the risk of contracting mesothelioma from white asbestos cement was "insignificant", while that of lung cancer was "zero"'. This article was also criticised by the UK's Health and Safety Executive
Health and Safety Executive
The Health and Safety Executive is a non-departmental public body in the United Kingdom. It is the body responsible for the encouragement, regulation and enforcement of workplace health, safety and welfare, and for research into occupational risks in England and Wales and Scotland...
as "substantially misleading",Geoffrey Podger, HSE's Chief Executive, responds |date=25 May 2008 |publisher=Health and Safety Executive}} as well as by George Monbiot
George Monbiot
George Joshua Richard Monbiot is an English writer, known for his environmental and political activism. He lives in Machynlleth, Wales, writes a weekly column for The Guardian, and is the author of a number of books, including Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain and Bring on the...
, who argued that Booker misrepresented the authors' findings. Booker's claims were also critically analysed by Richard Wilson in his book Don't Get Fooled Again (2008). Wilson highlighted Booker's repeated endorsement of the alleged scientific expertise of John Bridle, who in 2004 was convicted under the UK's Trade Descriptions Act
Trade Descriptions Act 1968
The Trade Descriptions 1968 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom which prevents manufacturers, retailers or service industry providers from misleading consumers as to what they are spending their money on....
of making false claims about his qualifications
On climate change
Climate change
Climate change is a significant and lasting change in the statistical distribution of weather patterns over periods ranging from decades to millions of years. It may be a change in average weather conditions or the distribution of events around that average...
Booker is a global warming sceptic, and claimed in his long-running column in the Sunday Telegraph
Sunday Telegraph
The Sunday Telegraph is a British broadsheet newspaper, founded in February 1961. It is the sister paper of The Daily Telegraph, but is run separately with a different editorial staff, although there is some cross-usage of stories...
that 2008 was "the year man-made global warming was disproved", amid "a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming". He later wrote that the Climate Change Act 2008 was "the most expensive piece of legislation ever put through Parliament", and likely to cost hundreds of billions over the next 40 years.
Booker has also argued in support of intelligent design
Intelligent design
Intelligent design is the proposition that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection." It is a form of creationism and a contemporary adaptation of the traditional teleological argument for...
, claiming that supporters of the theory of evolution "rest their case on nothing more than blind faith and unexamined a priori assumptions".
Family courts controversy
Christopher Booker has written a number of articles raising concerns about the Family Court system in England and Wales. But his writings on this issue have also drawn criticism from the judiciary for alleged inaccuracyhttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/7896592/Its-time-to-bring-family-law-to-book.htmlhttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/8470199/The-judge-has-forbidden-anyone-to-tell-me-what-he-wanted-me-to-hear.html. In a High Court judgement in April 2011, Judge Bellamy stated that: "Mr Booker's articles contain significant factual errors and omissions", and took issue with Booker on two cases he had covered:"In the first article Mr Booker gives the impression that it was 'faint bruising' which prompted the parents to take L to hospital and which gave rise to what he clearly regards as the over-zealous and unjustified actions of social workers working for the same local authority so recently criticised by me in Re X, Y and Z (Children). As he will come to understand when he reads this judgment, it was in fact L's floppy arm which prompted his parents to take him to hospital. That floppy arm was the result of a spiral fracture of his left humerus. X-rays showed that he also had six metaphyseal fractures. In his first article Mr Booker makes no mention of any of those fractures. It was those fractures which led to the safeguarding measures taken – and in my judgment appropriately taken – by this hospital and by this local authority...
In his second article Mr Booker asserts as fact that in this case 'the council has depended, in its campaign to seize this baby, on the same controversial paediatrician about whom the judge was so excoriatory'... I shall refer to that doctor, as I did in Re X, Y and Z (Children), as Dr M. At no time has Dr M had any involvement at all in the case I am now concerned with. Indeed, to the best of my recollection his name has never even been suggested as a possible expert to be used in this case."