The other day George Monbiot of the Guardian had me round for the weekend at his country seat in Machynlleth, Wales. You’ll never guess what we had for dinner after a fine afternoon’s sport shooting the red kite which infest that region like a verminous plague. First, we had leatherback turtle soup; then a delicious tranche of foie gras à la Nigella; then a superb escalope of cruel-reared veal in a wild okapi reduction on a bed of endangered tropical hardwood; then finally, the pièce de résistance, candied polar bear cub paws marinaded in Château d’Yquem. Afterwards, the world’s third most famous Old Stoic (after Perry Worsthorne and his seducer the late George Melly) proposed a toast: ‘To the eco-bollocks that makes me my fortune!’
No, no, really, I jest. Granted, the world of eco-propaganda can be awfully lucrative, what with all the money sloshing around from advocacy groups like Greenpeace and from big oil companies like Shell trying to ‘greenwash’ their image by giving handouts to the Guardian environment pages. But not for a moment do I imagine that George Monbiot writes his paranoid, hair-shirt, anti-capitalist eco-screeds in order to please his paymasters. Nope, I’m quite sure the dear chap genuinely, sincerely believes every word he writes.
The same is true of most journalists, from hardcore leftists such as Polly Toynbee, Rod Liddle and David Aaronovitch right across the political spectrum to Douglas Murray and Paul Johnson. No more could Polly be bribed to write in praise of free-market capitalism for the Daily Mail than Charles Moore could be persuaded to write a meditative ‘on boshing my first E’ piece for the Guardian or Nick Cohen could be coaxed into writing ‘Why I totally heart George Galloway’ for Jihadism Now. Journalists, for all their failings, tend to be romantics: they’re in this game to write what they believe in, rather than to whore themselves to the highest bidder.
This is why I was so gobsmacked a few months ago when Monbiot suddenly took it upon himself publicly to declare his income sources, apparently in a bid to shame his ideological opponents into confessing the extent to which their own jottings were funded by sinister business interests.
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