James Delingpole

I honestly didn’t realise I’d been to a ‘minor’ public school until my first term at Christ Church. Before that, I thought — as all of us did at my alma mater — that though of course there were lots of other public schools out there, Malvern could hold its head high with the very best of them. So coming up to Oxford was a bit of a shock. As far as the Etonians and Wyckhamists and Wets were concerned, my school was so obscure and worthless I might have attended a shabby comprehensive. Among those who very much gave off this vibe was David Cameron. Dave was never aggressively snobbish but then Etonians are much subtler than that.

Conservatism is dead in Britain — as it is in Europe, as it is in most of the world — and if you want to know what the problem is, a good place to start is the one where I’ve just been: the David Horowitz Restoration Weekend in Palm Beach, Florida. Horowitz is a prominent US activist, author and intellectual whose Freedom Center, if you didn’t know better, you might assume was a conservative think tank. But it’s not. As Horowitz reminded us on the first night of our three-day palm-fringed extravaganza of cocktails, fine cuisine, and sound conservatism courtesy of Mark Steyn, Ann Coulter, Herman Cain, Allen West, Baroness Cox, Bernie Goldberg, Douglas Murray and, ahem, James Delingpole, ‘We’re not a think tank. We’re a battle tank.

‘Great God, Twitter is an awful place!’ I tweeted the other day. Hypocritically. After all, if I really hate it so much, what the hell am I still doing there? It’s quite possible for someone in my game to survive without Twitter. Look at Rod Liddle. The reason Rod doesn’t do Twitter is that he recognises it as a suppurating bubo of intense Satanic vileness in which bullies exult, idiots are hailed as sages and all decency, wisdom, insight, wit or modesty is drowned in a mucus flood of idiot received ideas, poisonous cant, vicious insults and sixth-form common-room glibness. He’s right, of course, as I’m reminded almost daily by missives like this: ‘Gutted to learn that c**t @jamesdelingpole has kids. So that means even more c**ts in the world.

 ‘Oh God, you realise if it gets really bad we might have to end up eating that,’ I said, meaning our fat cat Runty. The Fawn started making upset noises. She’s very fond of Runty. My problem wouldn’t be so much the sentimental aspect as the practical one. Just how do you go about skinning and cooking a cat, when the power’s most likely to be gone and you’re long since out of barbecue charcoal? Which bits are safe to eat? Does it taste like chicken? ‘Don’t be ridiculous. It’s never going to get that bad,’ she said. ‘How do you know?’ I said. ‘Well London would need to be under siege for that to happen.’ ‘Not necessarily. They ate cat in France during the War. Lapin sans tête.

I know lots of second world war veterans who rather enjoyed their war against the Germans. But I’ve never met one who enjoyed his war against the Japanese. As the Eastern Front was to the Western Front, so the Far Eastern front was to the European/North African front: the fighting was more implacably brutal, the conditions more ferociously grim, the chances of coming out in one piece notably slimmer. That’s why, in dark times like these, I find it of such great comfort to read a novel like Harold James’s The Scorpion Trap (Janus). It’s a brilliant fictionalised account by a former Gurkha officer of those hideous and terrifying early stages of the war when implacable Japanese overran our colonies.