Right, if incorrect
Marcus Berkmann
HOW TO BE RIGHT by James Delingpole Headline Review, £12.99, pp. 182, ISBN 9780755315901 ✆ £13.59 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 You have to admire boldness in a writer. It’s actually a rare commodity these days — most of us don’t have the talent or the temperament or the energy to write exactly the way we feel, or we’re too sensible or too ambitious. James Delingpole is an exception. Week after week, with enviable fearlessness, he writes a television column in which he admits that he really only likes watching documentaries about the second world war on the History Channel. Then, from time to time, he breaks off from writing about the telly to complain about how little money he makes and how unfair it is that he hasn’t been given a lucrative column on the Mail or the Telegraph. In journalistic terms this is what Sir Humphrey Appleby would call ‘courageous’. Whenever I bump into James, part of me wants to shake him and shout, ‘No! You’re going about it the wrong way! You’ve got to play it cool! If you want your column you’ve got to pretend that it’s the last thing you want, and then you might get it!’ But obviously I don’t, as I’m far too polite. Besides, the other part of me admires that reckless candour.
Another route to the overpaid column, though, is the bestselling book. Delingpole has already published three novels without overwhelming success, and apparently there are more on the way. In the meantime arrives this strange little volume, a Christmas book in all but timing, a humorous polemic on right-wingness. James is, of course, fantastically right wing, and likes nothing better than to stick it up the noses of the lefty liberals he despises. Indeed, the book is subtitled ‘The Essential Guide to Making Lefty Liberals History’, which to me is an irresistible taunt. Although I may have been writing for The Spectator for nearly 20 years, I would certainly describe myself as a ‘lefty liberal’. Good grief, I live in north London, I’m not married to the mother of my children, who go to Steiner schools, and I wouldn’t vote Conservative if you paid me (although, admittedly, no one has yet offered). As far as Delingpole is concerned, I am exactly the sort of person who should be reading his book.
So it’s curious that I find myself agreeing with so much that he says. Or rather, shouts. The book is an A-Z of brief but cogent rants, of a similar format to the bestselling (but I thought witless) Is it Just Me or is Everything Shit? All the usual manifestations of modern silliness are here. Compensation culture. Wind farms. The expurgation of Enid Blyton to remove names like ‘Fanny’ and ‘Dick’. Health & Safety jobsworths. Ambulancechasing lawyers. James is especially rude about the Germans and the French, and has some good one-liners. Of ‘Porritt, Jonathan’, he writes: ‘Posho green activist with major social advantage over George Monbiot (qv): he went to Eton, not Stowe.’ When he doesn’t make you laugh, he can seem a bit silly. For instance, he consistently accuses ‘the left’ of stifling debate, while doing the same thing himself on every page with wild generalisations that brook no argument. Sometimes he misses the point so completely it looks wilful. At other times he is spot on.
The odd thing, though, was that I didn’t particularly feel that he was having a go at me, or any lefty liberals I have ever met. You don’t have to be right-wing, as far as I’m concerned, to be irritated by BBC 2’s old dancing wheelchairs ident, or Bono, or the director-general of the Leonard Cheshire Charity suggesting they take the words ‘Leonard’ and ‘Cheshire’ out of the charity’s name because they don’t mean anything to young people. By the same token, his attitudes towards gays and drugs would not be recognised as right-wing by, say, Norman Tebbit. His seems a very selective definition of right-wingness, or merely a very personal one. It may be that all our notions of rightand left-wingness are far more subjective and fluid than any of us realise.
So will this make his fortune? I hope so. James is a good egg and a one-off and has school fees to pay. He remains, in many ways, a big kid, and I suspect some reviewers will rip into him for some callow opinions and his characteristic near-worship of the British upper classes. But his book has wit and boundless energy and is a thousand times better than the books of the big-faced buffoon and bully Clarkson, whose sales (and columns) James clearly has an eye on. Newspaper editors, a fearless and mouthy columnist has here presented his c.v. in convenient paperback form. The rest is up to you.
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