Christopher Booker - Misplaced Pages

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Christopher John Penrice Booker (born October 7, 1937) is an English journalist and author.

Biography

Booker was educated at the Dragon School 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, who later married historian Norman Stone. In 1979, he married Valerie Patrick, with whom he has two sons; they live in Somerset.

Career

With fellow Salopians 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 Telegraphs. 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.

In the early 70s 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 Green), 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-1970s 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. In 1980 he published The Seventies: Portrait Of A Decade, and covered the Moscow Olympics for the Daily Mail, 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.

From 1992 he focused more on the role played in British life by bureaucratic regulation and the European Union, forming a professional collaboration with Dr Richard North, and they subsequently co-authored a series of books: 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’.

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 published a lengthy analysis of the controversy in A Looking Glass Tragedy (1997).

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. Although this long book was dismissed by a number of journalistic reviewers, it won praise from a good many novelists, playwrights and academics, including Fay Weldon, Beryl Bainbridge, Richard Adams, Ronald Harwood and John Bayley.

Bibliography

The Neophiliacs: A Study of the Revolution in English Life In The Fifties and Sixties (1969)
Goodbye London (written with John Betjeman’s daughter Candida Lycett Green) (1979)
The Seventies: Portrait Of A Decade (1980)
The Games War: A Moscow Journal (1981)
The Mad Officials: How The Bureaucrats Are Strangling Britain (1994)
The Castle of Lies (1996)
A Looking Glass Tragedy (1997)
The Great Deception (2003)
The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories (2005)
Scared To Death: From BSE To Global Warming, Why Scares Are Costing Us The Earth (2007) ISBN 0826486142

Criticism

Booker's articles in The Daily Telegraph on asbestos and also on global warming have been challenged by George Monbiot in an article in The Guardian newspaper .

Booker's scientific claims, which include the false assertion that white asbestos (chrysotile) is "chemically identical to talcum powder" were also analysed in detail by Richard Wilson in his book Don't Get Fooled Again (2008). (The chemical formula for talc is H2Mg3(SiO3)4 or Mg3Si4O10(OH)2, while the formula for chrysotile, the primary ingredient of white asbestos, is Mg3(Si2O5)(OH)4).

Wilson highlighted Christopher Booker's repeated endorsement of the alleged scientific expertise of John Bridle, who has claimed to be "the world's foremost authority on asbestos science", but who in 2005 was convicted under the UK's Trade Descriptions Act of making false claims about his qualifications, and who the BBC has accused of basing his reputation on "lies about his credentials, unaccredited tests, and self aggrandisement"..

Christopher Booker's scientific claims about asbestos have been criticized several times by the UK government's Health and Safety Executive. In 2002, 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.".

In 2005, the Health and Safety Executive issued a rebuttal after Christopher Booker wrote an article suggesting, incorrectly, that the HSE had agreed with him that white asbestos posed "no medical risk".

In 2006, the HSE published a further rebuttal after Christopher Booker had claimed, again incorrectly, that the Health and Safety Laboratory had concluded that the white asbestos contained within "artex" textured coatings posed "no health risk". .

In May 2008, the Health and Safety Executive accused Booker of writing an article that was "substantially misleading". In the article, published by the Sunday Telegraph earlier that month, Booker had claimed, falsely, that a paper produced in 2000 by two HSE statisticians, Hodgson and Darnton, had 'concluded that the risk of contracting mesothelioma from white asbestos cement was "insignificant", while that of lung cancer was "zero"'.

Sources

Media offices
Preceded byNew Publication	Editor of Private Eye 1961–1963	Succeeded byRichard Ingrams

v t e Private Eye
People	Christopher Booker Peter Cook Richard Ingrams Willie Rushton Craig Brown Barry Fantoni Paul Foot Ian Hislop Francis Wheen
Franchise	Private Eye TV Books Audio recordings
Features	Barry McKenzie Battle for Britain The Cloggies Colemanballs Dear Bill E. J. Thribb Glenda Slagg Prime Minister Parodies St Albion Parish News Teacher's Diary The New Coalition Academy
Miscellanea	Regular mini-sections Recurring in-jokes Not Private Eye "Tired and emotional"
Related	Anyone for Denis? (1982, TV version) Coach and Horses, Soho List of winners of the Sir Hugh Casson Award Paul Foot Award
ISSN 0032-888X

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