This dying creed - by Richard... Sunday, September 05, 2010

This dying creed - by Richard... Sunday, September 05, 2010

With Pachauri in "crow mode" in the Times of India, Booker starts the fight-back in today's Sunday Telegraph. Essentially, what he is saying is that the recently published Inter-Academy report into the IPCC "tiptoes around a mighty elephant in the room", even if it has provoked even some of the more committed believers in man-made global warming to demand the resignation of Pachauri.

The "elephant", of course, is that it is not just Pachauri who is corrupt but the whole of the edifice of the IPCC. This is not a proper scientific body we are dealing with here – any more than Pachauri is a proper climate scientist. It is an advocacy group, ready to stop at nothing in hijacking the prestige of science for its cause.

This, though, you would not have guessed from the Inter-Academy report which means that, even if Pachauri is forced to resign at a UN meeting in Korea next month - as seems possible - he will merely have been thrown off the sledge so that the all-important cause can survive.

Nevertheless, it is unlikely that the cause will survive. Like the EU, it has lost any intellectual or moral authority it ever had. It is only a matter of time, therefore, before the stench from its decomposing corpse, washed up on the beach, becomes so overpowering that even its supporters are forced to take note.

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The real scandal? - by Richard... Saturday, September 04, 2010

Not a few readers have been writing to tell me that I should "forget" about Hague and concentrate on the real scandal, the ongoing saga of Andy Coulson, the No 10 "communications chief" and former News of the World editor.

Actually, I would as soon forget about the whole bunch of them but, sadly, ignoring them does not make them go away. But the Coulson scandal will not go away either, as is gleefully recorded byThe Guardian and many others, who are picking up on the so-called mobile phone hacking scandal.

The current development is that Coulson, who has denied any wrongdoing, has been fingered by the New York Times as having freely discussed the use of unlawful news-gathering techniques, with a former News of the World journalist claiming that he had been ordered by the former editor to tap phones.

This is Sean Hoare, who has also told BBC Radio 4's PM: "There is an expression called the culture of dark arts. You were given a remit: just get the story. Phone tapping hadn't just existed on the News of the World. It was endemic within the whole industry. I have gone on the record in the New York Times and said I have stood by Andy and been requested to tap phones, OK, or hack into them. He was well aware the practice existed. To deny it is simply a lie.

For the Tories to have their spinmeister implicated in an illegal activity is bad enough, but to have him also accused of lying through his teeth is more than a little unfortunate. It points once again to the lack of judgement of the Tory hierarchy and to the generally tawdry nature of British politics and politics in general.

The impression is further reinforced that politics is not something that ordinary, decent people have anything to do with – an impression that is not wrong, given the people we see involved in politics and their various deeds.

The Hague affair, therefore, is not separate from the Coulson affair. They are part of a continuum. These are people we can do without.