My name is James Delingpole and if you’ve seen or heard my podcasts you might mistake me for an English country gentleman with a large estate, stables for his hunters and a vast private income.
But appearances can be deceptive. Though it’s possible that I may be descended from the Welsh prince Owain de la Pole, my more recent ancestry is Midlands industrial - father’s side came from Birmingham, mother’s from the Black Country. And any money we may have had is unfortunately all gone. I do like riding horses, though, so that bit is true.
When I was at Oxford, trying to relive Brideshead Revisited, my Midlands background kept getting in the way. I now realise that this was a blessing. Because I was always an outsider looking in, I never became part of the system. Whenever I had a choice between playing the game or taking the piss (that is, refusing to take all the pomposity too seriously) I could rarely resist acting the Court Jester. I was like that at school too: always looking for the comedy angle, even though I was one of the clever kids who didn’t need to be the class clown.
My life has been one of two halves.
In the first, I was an aspirant member of the Establishment: educated at private school (Malvern) and Oxford; friend to future prime ministers; a pretty successful journalist, broadcaster and author; I helped break an important story called ‘Climategate’…
And in the second I threw the first half away when I woke up, found Jesus and realised that almost everything I thought I knew about the world was a lie. That’s when life starting getting interesting.
Not that part one didn’t have its moments. I dived with great white sharks; hung out with Jimmy Page and Robert Plant in LA; got altitude sickness on Mt Kilimanjaro; interviewed movie stars and rock stars too numerous to mention, but they included Tom Hanks, John Travolta, Harrison Ford, Samuel L Jackson and, Jon Bon Jovi, who told me the secret to being faithful to his wife was regular masturbation; rode round the Brands Hatch racetrack as the passenger of the world sidecar racing champion; took a Honda Fireblade round the Isle of Man TT course; travelled to the remotest safari destination in Africa; smoked lots of weed; went to countless gigs because for 20 years I was a music critic; reviewed restaurants, books, movies, cars, bikes, hotels; wrote novels including the Dick Coward series, set in World War II; made lots of lovely friends; married, had children, and was all set to live happily ever after.
Then came my Awakening. I didn’t choose it. No one does. Suddenly the world started looking very different, as I began to question all the things I had previously taken for granted as established fact: dinosaurs, the moon landings, the notion that 9/11 was planned by a man in a cave. If you’ve been there you’ll understand; if you haven’t then I wish you good luck on your future heroic journey, should you ever decide to undertake it. [Warning: there be dragons!]
Anyway, I lost friends, work, ‘mainstream’ credibility. But I gained something much more valuable: a sense of purpose. No work I’ve done in the past gives me nearly as much satisfaction as I get from doing my podcast and the articles I write now at places like Substack. That’s because I sense I’m on some kind of mission, for which I was chosen long ago.
My mission is to spread the word. And the Word. But don’t worry, I’m not about to ram Christianity down your throat. If you’re not interested, I’ll just shake off the dust of my feet and move on. Lots of my supporters and followers aren’t Christians and I love and value them all.
What everyone likes about what I do, I think, is that I’m really good at it: I write like a dream; my arguments are cogent; my style is fluent and entertainingly digressive; and - most important this - I’m funny. Similar rules apply to my podcasts. They are not interviews but conversations. I don’t like to over-prepare - or even prepare at all if I can help it - because it spoils the flow and spontaneity. You listen much harder if you don’t know what the other person is going to say. You have to think harder too and this is what gives my conversations their edge. People tell me that I always ask the question they would have wanted to ask, if only they had dared. It’s true, I’m not afraid of asking embarrassing questions, but I try to do so in a tactful way. I want my guests to feel at their ease. It’s not my aim to catch them out or put them on the spot. Well, not unless they show me they deserve it…
One more thing: even though I think you’d probably like me if you met me I can’t guarantee it and I’m not sure it’s relevant. Like all of us, I’m made of frail flesh and for all my excellent qualities I definitely have loads of faults too. Here’s what my friend Abi says about me:
Delingpole is an interesting creature. He is all at once cantankerous, sweet, vitriolic, witty, mean, snobbish, naughty, naive, fun, cocky, and petulant. All this contradictory complexity is housed in a puckish, jockeylike frame, backped with a big, toothy smile, and dolorous, equine eyes. We get on very well, when he’s not testing me on my knowledge of Russian literature and classical music like an irascible, pompous school master. I want to both cuddle him, and punch him repeatedly.
Yup. Sounds about right.
Yes
Anna Karenina; English breakfast tea; craniosacral therapy; the Book of Psalms; Withnail & I; horses; fried lamb’s liver and onions; wild swimming; Baudelaire’s L’Albatros; Goethe’s Erlkönig; Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard; British shorthair cats; pocket check brushed cotton shirts; Gawain And The Green Knight; the Gospels; raw milk; pugs; Pass the Pigs; Cocker spaniels; Margaritas; cold showers; rolling tobacco; grouse shooting; Flat White coffee; Moroccan hash; fox hunting; Brahms’s symphonies; Led Zep IV; Buteyko breathing; DMSO; the family; the Shakespearean authorship question; E type Jaguar; Bridge; Settlers of Catan; fly fishing on the Itchen; War & Peace; trance music; Endtroducing by DJ Shadow; bodyboarding on Bantham beach; Madhur Jaffrey’s Indian Cooking; home schooling; Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress; Purcell’s Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary; Margaret Howell; Brora sweaters; Bach’s St John Passion; everything else by Bach; the build up to Handel’s Zadok the Priest; ‘Goodbye to you, Charlotte Pringle’s due. I’ve had enough for one day’; colloidal silver; John Martin’s The Fallen Angels Entering Pandemonium; Dead Souls; Vaughan Williams’s English Folk Song Suite; creme brulee; anything else made with cream; pan fried foie gras; roast shoulder of lamb; roast rib of beef; roast chicken; the Book of Isaiah; Bitcoin; butter; Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Marriage Portrait; the Wilton diptych; English churches; Burnt Norton; Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon; Trollope (especially the hunting scenes); Emma; Das Boot (the original not the crap remakes); Matterhorn; Tess of the D’Urbervilles; halibut; MDMA; Glastonbury; the Carpaccio cycle in the Scuola Dalmata dei Santi Giogio e Trifone in Venice; London thirty years ago; Kardamyli; the Bolt Head and Prawle Point walks in Salcombe and East Portlemouth; birds of East Africa; doing the Isle of Man TT circuit on a Honda Fireblade; tweed; bespoke suits; R M Williams boots; sauna chats; VW Golf V6 4Motion hatchback; green herb; conversations; cash; parkland designed by Capability Brown; Georgian rectories…
No
Wind turbines [aka Bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes], ‘going forward’, politicians, central bankers, the Illuminati, Middlemarch, celebrities, solar panels, fluoride in the water, mercury in dental fillings, environmentalists, the Satanic bloodline families, sanctimoniousness, animal rights, smoke alarms, plastic framed windows, vaccines, most Dickens, solar arrays, speed cameras, red kites; 5G, ‘drive carefully’, kidneys, sustainability; feminism; BBC Radio One; everything else on the BBC including the things that were previously almost bearable; Jerusalem artichokes; false flags; war; Central Bank Digital Currencies; lying; cocaine; Oscar Wilde; Henry James; To The Lighthouse; diversity casting; Hollywood; skimmed milk; low fat anything; the New Age; I’m A Celebrity; the news; Taylor Swift; Billie Eilish; pollock and other ‘sustainable’ fish; our NHS; taxes; Glastonbury; London now, mosquitos; bull sharks, the electrics on a Moto Guzzi; ‘smart’ motorways; the ‘smart’ grid; anything else with the adjective ‘smart’; lobby groups; ‘best practice’; rainbow flags; unicorns; veganism; having to eat pudding to be polite; Waterstones; Apple; dinosaurs; interviews; ‘stay safe’; geoengineering; Directed Energy Weapons; Steely Dan; people phoning me up on my mobile; that ‘Santa Baby’ song; Rooibos ‘tea’ that isn’t actually tea; holier than thou Christians; the war on farmers; rewilding; salt Nazis…
