My apology has mainly to do with tone. It made an abrupt and jarring ending to an otherwise quite measured and thoughtful piece. Here’s how it happened: when I was about three-quarters of the way through writing what was intended to be an article of unalloyed praise for Powell, someone drew my attention to the allegations about boys having been procured for him for sexual favours. This put me in an awkward position. If I didn’t mention the allegations and just ran a straight paean then I’d run the risk of looking like a gullible idiot - and the comments would no doubt have been deluged by people saying “You do realise that this guy you are presenting as a hero…”
In my haste, I went too far the other way by declaring with certainty something about Powell which I cannot prove to be true. It left a nasty taste at the end, which spoiled the effect and distracted from the argument. I should have expressed my point more subtly. Or saved it, as I have now, for a separate piece.
But that doesn’t mean, I’m afraid, that I’m discounting the allegations. On the contrary, I think it’s more likely than not that they are true. And this isn’t a case of wishful thinking. Like many of you, I’d much, much rather it were the case that ‘our Enoch’ had been as principled in his private life as he was, mostly, in his public one. Unfortunately, one of the lessons I’ve learned since journeying down the rabbit hole is that true White Hats - if they exist at all, which I doubt, especially not in an arena like politics - are as rare as hen’s teeth.
By white hats I mean, of course, characters like Henry Fonda used to play in his early cowboy movies before he was famously cast against type and put on his evil black hat (and, you might argue, reveal his true colours) in Once Upon The Time In The West. White Hats are the honest, decent, pure of heart good guys who have come to save us - and to help us eventually triumph over the baddies.
While there are plenty of such archetypes in fairy stories and fantasy - see also: the epic hero, the knight in white shining armour, the Prince Charming - you rarely encounter them in serious fiction. This is because most of us instinctively recognise that while moral paragons are a literary ideal, an exemplar which we should strive to emulate in order to become better people, they’re not what many of us would call ‘realistic.’
In fact, I can only think of only one true White Hat who ever existed in real life - Jesus Christ. All the others were imposters. Especially Winston Churchill.
Please don’t let me get started again on Winston Churchill, one of the wickedest men who ever lived. I only mention him because he is a perfect example of the way our yearning for heroic role models, encouraged from our earliest reading, can so easily be exploited and used against us.
Churchill well knew this when he wrote: “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”
We’re all suckers for a proper, old-fashioned story, with evil, snarling, hysterical, monstrously cruel baddies and dauntless, cheerful, determined, inspirational goodies. That’s why so many of us - me included for most of my life - fell for Churchill’s fantasy version of what happened during the Second World War, why ‘we’ fought it and how ‘we’ won.
I think quite a few of us are in danger of falling for a similarly mendacious narrative about Donald Trump. Certainly, I noticed in the aftermath of the alleged assassination quite a few professed sceptics who should really have known better doing the equivalent of sticking their fingers in the ears and going ‘Nyah Nyah. Not listening. Trump’s my hero, now sanctioned by divine miracle, and if you’re telling me he’s not here to save the world then I don’t want to know.’
But this isn’t a piece about Trump any more than it is a piece about Churchill. What it really is, I suppose, is a plea for understanding - and a greater degree of critical thinking - from the kind of people who have been reading my stuff since back in the day and who have wondered how such a once-insightful, soundly right-wing and brilliantly entertaining writer could have turned into the kind of batshit crazy fruitloop who thinks that Enoch Powell was probably a paedo, Churchill worse than Hitler, and Trump frankly no more ‘our guy’ than Hillary or Biden.
Whatever happened to the once-reliable chap who used to be James Delingpole?
Well I hate to say this but if you are sincerely asking this question, I’m not sure that I’m the one here whose Weltanschauung most needs subjecting to closer scrutiny.
Let’s take the Enoch Powell example as an exercise in thinking from first principles and see what we can establish.
First, do we have any evidence that Enoch Powell, the happily married father and grandfather, may yet have had homosexual leanings?
Why yes we do. We have the testimony of his friend Canon Eric James, cited in this investigative piece I quoted by Joseph de Burca.
After he died in 1998, his friend Canon Eric James, a former chaplain at Trinity College, Cambridge, and Extra Preacher to the Queen, revealed that Powell had confided in him ten years earlier that he had engaged in a homosexual relationship as a young man. Powell gave him a copy of a collection of his poems called ‘First Poems’ (1937). He highlighted some verses where he had “tried to put into words what a homosexual relationship had meant to him” […]
One of the lines read as follows: “I love the fire/ In youthful limbs that wakes desire…”. Another of his poems leaves little to the imagination: It described how he, as an “unknowing boy” was “led to sin”. ‘I did not speak, but when I saw you turn And cross your right leg on your left, and fold Your hands around your knee, I felt a flow Of white-hot lava seething up the old Volcano shaft. That self-same attitude, Though not of yours, it was which long ago Fired me, an innocent, unknowing boy, And led me on to sin and on to learn and onwards to the very font of woe’
Now this does not, of course, prove Burca’s subsequent allegations about Powell having enjoyed on more than one occasion the sexual services of a 12- or 13-year old boy from a care home. But it does demonstrate that Burca has done some homework to contextualise his claims. And that he has thereby shown, at the very least, that a) Powell was clearly not some arid stick, devoid of intense sexual desire but a man capable of volcanic passion and b) despite his heterosexual public front, he preferred men to women.
So I think, already, at this stage, we are in a position not to take too seriously the outrage levelled at the original article by commenters such as “Tychon’s Palatinate”, who declared it ‘disgusting’ to label ‘a man like Powell a nonce based on a gossip article from peak mid-2010s nonce hysteria times.’
Apart from engaging in the logical fallacy of ‘Argument from Indignation’, and in the wishful thinking that says “A man who said and did things I agree with would never have been capable of doing anything morally culpable in his private life”, it misrepresents an obviously well-researched and seriously intended article as mere ‘gossip’. It also betrays a degree of innocence about the true nature of our world, both in the realm of politics and beyond.
I can remember that sense of innocence. So, I imagine, can everyone else who has made the heroic journey and ventured down the rabbit hole. We were all Normies once. We too used to believe, as most people around us still do, that senior politicians in the main are more or less decent folk, that child sexual abuse is extremely uncommon, that our doughty media is there honestly and fearlessly to expose the rare exceptions to these rules, and so on.
But tragically it just ain’t so. For example, most venturers into the realm of so-called ‘conspiracy theory’ will have encountered something called the RAINS list. You won’t find much about it via Google search (and with good reason, for Big Tech is part of the problem and has a vested interest in covering up this sort of thing). But it exists, nonetheless.
Joan Coleman's RAINS LIST (Ritual Abuse Information Network & Support)
RAINS stands for Ritual Abuse Information Network & Support. The list was compiled by Dr Joan Coleman, a psychiatrist who spent many years working with victims of Satanic Ritual Abuse. She died - quite coincidentally, I’m sure - not long after she last updated the list in 2018. On it, she named those who had been identified as abusers - or at best, ritual participants - by victims. In order to make it onto the list your name had to be independently mentioned by more than one victim, none of them known to one another.
The list, if you trust it, makes shocking reading. Included are the names of some very prominent people - senior judges, newspaper editors, peers, TV personalities and, of course, leading politicians. Many are what would certainly be called ‘pillars of the Establishment’ and it almost defies belief that such ‘respectable’ people might have engaged in something as rebarbative as the Satanic Ritual Abuse, perhaps even the torture and murder, of children.
Once you’ve read it you have a choice. Either you discount the list by persuading yourself that it’s just hearsay and that Dr Coleman has no credibility. Or you do further research and reluctantly come to accept that the RAINS list is but the tip of the iceberg, that child sexual abuse - including of the Satanic ritual variety - is rife among ‘elites’ all around the world, that child trafficking is one of the biggest black market industries, that adrenochrome (harvested from terrified children at the moment of their death) is the Predator Class’s drug of choice, and that sexual blackmail (kompromat) is one of the main tools by which politicians, celebrities and so on are kept in line by their shadowy puppetmasters.
If you are in the latter camp - and after Epstein Island what exactly is your excuse not to be? - then you’re unlikely to find yourself going into paroxysms of indignant outrage on hearing that even the great Enoch Powell might yet have had feet of clay. Rather you’ll shrug you shoulders and ruefully mutter, as I did to myself, “Oh dear. There goes another one.”
I don’t think it has ever been suggested that Powell was into the seriously nasty stuff. My guess - and it’s only a guess because these secrets are well guarded by threats up to and including murder - is that he wasn’t so much a ‘raging paedo’ as I rather extravagantly described him in my original piece but a lifelong closet pederast who eventually succumbed to temptation. Once he had succumbed, they had him by the balls. Poor Enoch. Poor boys. But that’s just the way the world is, unfortunately.
Article by James Delingpole
James Delingpole is a writer, broadcaster and truth seeker. He hosts the Delingpod - the world’s most entertainingly shambolic ‘conspiracy’ podcast.
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