Delingpole: Here’s what I learnt from the extinction of the golden toad — ecologists have sold out to the religion of global warming

When I was a child — in the days before it became illegal under Schedule 5 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act (1981) and Schedule 2 of the Conservation of Habitats and Species Regulations (2010) — I was an unlicensed handler of great crested newts.

I loved them for the same reasons, I imagine, Ken Livingstone does: the gorgeous contrast between their rough, matt black bodies and their flame-orange and black-speckled bellies; the way they float in mid-pond as if in suspended animation; watching them develop from their larval stage into efts and then adults; Beatrix Potter’s Sir Isaac Newton…

But this was back in the near vanished age when the natural world was something to be studied and enjoyed for its own sake, rather than viewed through a prism of guilt and self-hatred. In those days, you didn’t need fancy scientific qualifications or government permission to justify your interactions with the animal kingdom.