I cannot work out what it is with that shirt – but it is beautiful. Its top button is unfastened and its pristine cotton is firm and yet soft. It is behaving in all the right ways – in all of its angles, in the soaring confidence of its collar’s upright points, in the inviting shadows that it is painting on its owner’s skin. How does a simple white shirt come to look so elegant? What, exactly, is it that makes it so different from any of mine? Probably, I think, it is expensive. The young man who is wearing it certainly looks expensive. He sounds it, too. The whole carriage can hear him. Whereas everybody else has spent this journey looking softly out of windows or quietly reading, he has spent it on his phone, cufflinks flashing, talking volubly about his many and important activities at university at Oxford, which is where this train terminates. ‘I really don’t know what his problem is with me,’ he says, at one point, and I think, ‘I bet I could tell you. I bet I could give you a fucking list.’
I watch him, through the heads of the passengers in front of me. He is one of those men who are almost handsome. He is an impersonator, executing a flawed performance of beauty – mimicking perfection and failing just enough so that your attention is drawn to his essential flaw. It is his mouth. It is too wide and juts upwards at the sides. Thin lips and billboard teeth give his face a note of imperiousness and cruelty. I wonder about the years he has ahead of him. The gilded, almost-perfect life. I realise that I am staring at him again. He looks at me directly, this lucky prince, this student, and I glance shamefully away.
I am an hour early for my meeting with the famous climate-change sceptic Lord Monckton, so I button up my coat and wander the city. I am in a pedestrian precinct, ten minutes from the station, when I am startled to recognise the scene in front of me – a Tudor-looking building that now houses a chemist. My father has a framed etching of it at home, hanging in the corridor that leads from the bathroom. Ten minutes later I see a magisterial, columned edifice with a distinctive circular frontage. I grew up looking at that one too. Scenes from this city surrounded me when I was young. Oxford University. It is part of my father’s story. I try to picture him – young and thriving, perhaps still with his Yorkshire accent – walking these streets in the 1960s. I wonder what he was like, back then. Which college did he go to? I begin to squint up at the black and gold painted walkers’ signs as I pass them. Christ Church? Was that it?
I am about to enter Christ Church when a man in a booth blankly meets my eyes. There is a smartly painted sign in front of me, declaring this to be a private entrance. Two students move through unimpeded. Flush-cheeked, with big hair and scarves and confident, in their gait and in their echoing chatter, which concerns an audition for a part in a play. They turn off into some secret corridor. I stand in the wind and watch them go.
University is a part of my story too. My parents wanted me to go to a respected one such as this, but I never doubted that their ambition was hopeless. Even towards the end, they seemed convinced that I had a chance. The last time I was in Oxford was for a university open day. My father had sent me there praying, I suspect, that by witnessing the glories that were ultimately possible, I would be inspired, finally, finally, after all these years of trouble, to actually do some work. My only memory of that trip is of sitting in the room of an English professor, who said, ‘Tell me about your favourite Tennessee Williams.’ I don’t recall how I answered. But I do remember the emotion of the moment; the shame that I had no idea at all what a Tennessee Williams was.
When I was at school, I would always argue with my disappointed parents and harried teachers that I wanted to write and that writers don’t need qualifications. I made no attempt to pass my A-levels and when I failed them all, I happily took a job in a record shop and the editorship of a local music fanzine. While my ex-school friends were lounging around student bars, I was working eight-hour days, with four weeks off a year, keeping my spare time for interviewing bands, hustling advertisers and folding thousands of photocopied pages. I spurned university. I never went. I always said I wouldn’t need it to succeed, and I didn’t.
That is my university story. It is the one I tell everyone, and it is untrue. I didn’t fail all my A-levels, I scraped an E in geography, on account of a project I did on the pH levels of some soil on a Scottish hill that I really quite enjoyed doing. I did attend university – in Luton. My leaving (which took place a matter of weeks into my course) was motivated less by the opportunity of an editorship and more by the fact that I missed my girlfriend, Jenny, so much that I felt as if I was being crushed underwater. I moved in with a drug dealer in Tunbridge Wells, discovered amphetamines and got sacked from the shop when they caught me stealing. I ended up back in my childhood bedroom, for a while, claiming the dole.
In the narrative that I tell everyone, I am the hero, defiantly fighting the authorities at school and at home, bravely choosing the harder path and winning. In the true version, I am an academic failure and a petty criminal. Cognitive psychologist Professor Martin Conway believes that when we recall the events of our lives, we become the accidental victims of a fight between the different ways in which the brain rebuilds memories. It takes sensory information – how we felt in that moment – and combines it with dry facts – dates and so on. But these two processes are in conflict. The rational side wants the truth while the emotional side wants a story that works in service of the ego. And mostly – unsurprisingly – it wants to rebuild you into a hero. I am not sure if I can blame my university myth on these unconscious processes. But the strange thing is that a part of me – most of me, in fact – has somehow come to believe it.
The public entrance of Christ Church takes you past a sign that tells of Lewis Carroll and Albert Einstein and the thirteen prime ministers who have studied there. The college building is fatly magnificent, with its arched windows, carved stone balconies and towering roofs. I wander up and down for a while, just looking, imagining. It costs seven pounds for a non-student such as me to enter. I buy my ticket and follow the strictly laid-out tourist route, prevented by bowler-hatted guards from wandering the parts from which the public are prohibited. Grand portraits of centuries-past alumni look down at me – pale faces emerge from dark oils as if looming out of death itself. Long fingers, long noses, raised chins, impressive and imperious and gloating. I walk through the dining hall, with its leather seats, its golden lamps and its lit log fires, to see grown men and women shuffling about anxiously in silver-service uniforms, waxing the floor and polishing knives and forks and special little spoons in preparation for the arrival of these miraculous and perfect teenagers, in their miraculous and perfect shirts, who will soon be ruling the world.
Suddenly unaccountably irritable, I decide to leave. On the way out, I hear the sound of an organ coming from the chapel. I pad in quietly, unsure whether or not I am allowed to enter. I find the source of the music – a stunning array of pipes that float high in the medieval shadows – and stand before it. This is the sound of my childhood. My father was – is – obsessed with playing the organ. When he retired, he had one built in a small upstairs room of his house. It was his version of buying a Ferrari, I think – a dream come true. He had to have the floor reinforced.
When I was growing up, I was obsessed with music too. But my father couldn’t bear the pop that I listened to before my adolescence or the heavy metal that I stomped towards when I became a teenager. The records that I would buy, the posters that I would pin to my walls, were the cause of terrible fights. It was all symbolic to him, I think, of my failure at school, my thieving at home, my drinking, my lack of respect for civilisation. My parents hated my music, and they loved God. They worked in education and believed passionately in its principles. I rejected education and God and believed passionately in Zodiac Mindwarp and Faith No More. It made for an uneasy childhood.
Our beliefs and tastes are much more than they are. They signal to distances that lie far beyond their own limits. They are markers, signs that display the culture and moral structure that we have adopted for ourselves to live within. They are chapter titles in our story about the world. My father read the signs that were hidden in those posters, T-shirts and record sleeves, and he did not like what they told him.
Yesterday, I met Dr James Garvey, a secretary of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, at a cafe in the British Museum. He has written a book on the ethics of global warming, and been called a religiously minded eco-fascist by climate-change sceptics because of his refusal to explore the notion that it is all a hoax, or to read obscure papers by non-scientists. He told me that this kind of thinking represents ‘a way of seeing the world. In order to be a conservative person in America you have to be anti-abortion, pro-guns, pro-death-penalty, small government, no regulation – and climate is in there too. If you look at that set of beliefs, that’s an identity. And you can’t change an identity with facts.’
I have begun to realise that I used to blame my parents for their beliefs. I took it personally that their identities did not resemble mine. What I didn’t understand was that we cannot choose the worlds we live within. Dr Garvey told me, ‘David Hume says, “nature hasn’t left it up to us what we believe”. You can’t pick your beliefs. You can, to some extent, have an influence on them, if you are especially open. But evidence cannot shift almost all the things you believe.’
My father’s anger at my music, mine at his spiritual convictions. If these were just confabulations – stories spun atop mute emotional responses – then which emotion was it? Fear, perhaps. My father’s fear of my failure, mine of his rejection. Inevitably, naturally, as I have grown older I have found myself becoming more like he was back then. And so the distance lessens, the understanding gathers itself up from the edges and with it comes empathy and love. It strikes me, as I stand here, that there was a time when the sound of an organ playing would make me fearful. Right now, I find it beautiful.
It is nearly time. I leave the hushed chapel and walk to the Oxford Union, where I have an engagement with the Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley. It is Dr Garvey’s ‘identity’ problem that has brought me here, to meet one of the world’s most controversial climate-change sceptics. What fascinates me about Lord Monckton is not his explosively heretical defiance of the scientific establishment’s now inarguable case for the dangers and reality of man-made climate change. It is that so many of his views seem to coalesce on the political right. Why do constellations of belief tend to fall so reliably on the left or right wing? Why, for example, would a person who votes for the privatisation of public services also often be a supporter of the foreign policy of Israel? Why would their opponent tend to agitate on behalf of women seeking abortions and also for cheaper fares on local buses?
In Lord Monckton’s case, he is head of policy at the right wing UK Independence Party, an anti-European, anti-regulation Christian, one-time adviser on scientific and domestic policy to Margaret Thatcher and a popular speaker with America’s Tea Party movement. He has labelled climate science the ‘largest fraud of all time,’ believes that ‘the Hitler Youth were left wing and also a green organisation’ and has compared 2009’s Copenhagen Climate Conference to the Nuremberg Rallies.
Monckton’s position on climate differs from that of the mainstream in that he believes that ‘very little’ warming of the earth will take place given the anticipated increase in carbon-dioxide concentration. When the presentation that he gives in service of this opinion was heard by Professor John Abraham – who has published more than eighty papers on heat transfer and fluid mechanics – he spent eight months tracking down ‘the articles and authors that Monckton cited. What I discovered was incredible, even to a scientist who follows the politics of climate change. I found that he had misrepresented the science.’ Monckton responded by accusing Abraham of issuing ‘venomously ad hominem … artful puerilities,’ said he had a face like an ‘overcooked prawn’ and promptly declared legal action.
Our modern notion of ‘left’ and ‘right’ beliefs has its genesis in the 1789 revolution in France, when defenders of the aristocracy, Church and crown placed themselves on the right side of the chamber at the French Assembly, while supporters of the revolutionaries sat opposite. It is remarkable to think that conservatives and progressives still tend to align in this way, as if magnetised. If emotions – unconscious hunches – drive the great mass of our beliefs, then what is the emotional cause of these disparate sets of positions collecting at opposite poles? And why, in the words of clinical psychologist and political strategist Professor Drew Westen, is ‘the biggest single predictor of party affiliation – and of the broader value systems associated with it – the party affiliations of our parents’?
In preparation for my encounter with Lord Monckton, I spoke with Professor Jonathan Haidt about the source of our moral and political beliefs. ‘The place to begin is with these amazing twin studies in the 1980s,’ he told me. ‘They said that every aspect of your personality is partly heritable – what kind of music you like, what food you enjoy, everything. So if your identical twin is separated from you at birth, they will probably have the same politics as you forty years later, and how it works is to do with your genes. You have a particular genome which sets your initial direction – the first draft of your moral and political mind. Your genome does not specify the final form of your brain, it really just specifies the starting conditions. Then, by this mysterious process by which brains are created in utero and run throughout life, you emerge with a certain kind of brain. Brains are what you call “experience expectant”. Evolution, in a sense, knows that we’re going to get lots and lots of experience about what kinds of animals are dangerous, whether society is stable or unstable, hierarchical or egalitarian. So we get all kinds of information from the environment; our brains are expecting that information. As they continue growing, they incorporate that information. So you have to take a genetic view, a developmental view and a cultural view. You have to take all three views at the same time to understand why people end up where they end up and if you leave any of these three pieces out you won’t have the whole story.’
In The Righteous Mind, Haidt writes that genes account for ‘between a third and a half of the variability among people on their political attitudes.’ An analysis of thirteen thousand Australians has indicated that a key commonality among many of the genes that separated conservative from liberal was involved in their responses to threat and fear. ‘Individual genes have tiny effects,’ he writes. However, ‘genes collectively give people brains that are more or less reactive to threat and more or less open to new experience.’ Very broadly speaking, the open ones are more likely to wander leftwards. The fearful, meanwhile, run to the right.
We can be born, then, with a kind of pre-set ‘mood’ – open or fearful. Depending on what happens to us during childhood, aspects of this mood can be counteracted or encouraged. Our behaviour influences the behaviour of those around us which, in turn, re-influences us. Growing up, our personality draws those of a similar nature closer into our circles. Professor Chris Frith has already told me how we are barely aware of our automatic tendency to imitate the people around us, and absorb their goals, knowledge and beliefs. (‘This is why strange narratives work best when they are shared by a group,’ he added, significantly.) As an adult, these crucial choices – where we live, how we socialise, the newspapers we read – create yet more feedback loops.
In this way, our moods create our worlds. Although our destinies are not written in the codes of our genome, we are aimed in a certain direction before we are sluiced from the womb. Our emotions weave a breadcrumb trail of advance or withdraw responses, which we can hardly help but follow. They influence our experiences, which influence the way we understand the world. Unless dramatic life events intercede, we have a tendency to become what we are.
The stories that we tell ourselves are another essential component to all this. The model of the world that we build for ourselves to live within is made of observations of cause and effect that are soaked in emotion. These micro-stories, whose purpose is to explain and predict the world, can grow into staggering tales of magnificent drama and complexity. In The Political Brain, Professor Westen writes ‘research suggests that our minds naturally search for stories with a particular kind of structure, readily recognisable to elementary school children and similar across cultures.’ In this structure, a crisis strikes a settled world, heroic efforts are begun to solve it, terrible obstacles are surmounted and dreadful enemies are battled, until a new and blissful state is achieved. According to Professor Westen, the political left and the right each has a ‘master narrative’ that reflects this structure – a grand, over-arching plot that comes loaded with a set of core assumptions, that defines the identity of heroes and villains and promises a paradisiacal denouement.
A person who fears novelty might have an instinctive, emotional hunch that immigration is a bad thing. A charismatic politician who tells of the urgent necessity of halting the hordes, promises heroic attempts at controlling the borders, and predicts wonders to come if their opponents are conquered is confabulating on behalf of the listener. He is weaving a story in which the right wing individual is on the side of heroes. He does so with passion and wit and drama and all these amazing true facts. How can that not be seductive?
In this way, each side tells a conflicting tale about how the world works. The two poles experience a different reality, recognise a different story with different heroes and villains, and join a different side. They become members of opposing cultures, aliens from warring worlds. Needless to say, when all this is happening, nobody is behaving especially rationally. As Professor Westen writes, ‘The data from political science are crystal clear: people vote for the candidate who elicits the right feelings, not the candidate who presents the best arguments.’
This is why I want to meet Lord Monckton. His identity has a remarkable coherence; the stars of his beliefs seem to align in a perfect constellation of right-leaning thinking.
*
The Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley has powerful hands and he lets you know all about them when he takes one of yours to shake it. He wears pinstripes and a large digital watch that looks like the kind of device a runner might wear to check his heart rate. His tie shows the elements of the periodic table and a wide golden ring clutches to his left little finger. The cartilage and bones in his nose push out from his skin in the shape of an anchor. His eyes peer from either side of the anchor’s stock, and are not as bad as you might imagine from the newspapers: their startling fishlike bulbousness – his ocular proptosis, caused by Grave’s disease – has lessened dramatically thanks, he says, to the top secret cure he devised using his own ‘completely bonkers’ theory before concocting it ‘on the library table, test tubes, and stuff bubbling away.’ He believes his claimed breakthrough ‘shows much promise in curing everything from HIV to malaria to multiple sclerosis.’
He leads me briskly through a corridor of the Oxford Union building, where he is to appear later in a debate. We head up the beautiful polished-wood staircase, looking for a quiet place to talk. He opens this door and that, each time bowing and apologising to the people inside whom we have startled. He races up another flight, suit-vent flapping like the wings of a skate, and finds an unoccupied room that is hung with rows of pen-and-ink portraits of high-collared gentlemen and lined with extravagant red, green and gold William Morris wallpaper.
We each pull out a leather-cushioned seat. He sits, bolt-straight before me, this liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Broderers, this Officer of the Order of St John of Jerusalem, this Knight of Honour and Devotion of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, this former policy adviser to Margaret Thatcher, and I tell him that I am interested in heretics – those brave Davids who take the fight to the establishment Goliaths – and that I am really only here to listen to his story, about his battles and his heroes and his villains. ‘Yes,’ he says, smiling. ‘Certainly.’ He folds his hands in front of him on the table. ‘I was born,’ he begins, ‘at the age of nought …’
Christopher Walter Monckton became the first son of Major General Gilbert Monckton, Second Viscount Monckton of Brenchley and Marianna, Dame of Malta on Valentine’s Day, 1952.
‘I came of exceptional parents,’ he says. ‘My father was the army’s youngest general, my mother was the first woman high sheriff of Kent since the fourteenth century and my father’s father, the first Lord Monckton, had been the adviser to Edward VIII on his abdication, and had then served in Churchill’s last cabinet and Eden’s first. If we go back to my great-great-grandfather on my mother’s side, he was the model on whom Sanders of the River was based – a wonderful pro-imperialist film about a district commissioner. They were the people who really had the power in the empire, as you know.’
Young Christopher’s early years were a time of great happiness.
‘My mother would use the whip,’ he says. ‘The horse whip. I was disciplined severely. Far more severely than was normal, even for that time. She nearly broke my finger once.’
‘But you say you were happy?’ I ask.
‘It was indeed a very happy childhood. My parents gave me just the right amount of attention, which is not too much and not too little.’
From the whip of his mother he learned discipline, but from his father he learned a lesson of even greater value.
‘I remember, at the age of two, sitting on his knee, and he had a book with the alphabet set out on little bows on the tails of kites. When I went to nursery school, at the age of three, I already knew the alphabet and could read. It was my father, not my mother, who had taught me that. It gave me an edge which I never lost. I realised there were advantages in being ahead. And I stayed ahead.’
Through discipline and toil he achieved success at prep school and at Harrow and then Cambridge University. But the post-war years were dark ones for Great Britain, for she was losing her empire.
‘I felt infinite sadness. And nostalgia, of course. When I was at Harrow we had a wonderful school song which said, “From Harrow school to rise and rule.” The education was very much that you are going to be the rulers of the world and the masters of the universe and, therefore, you need to know how to do it. But in order to do it, you had to understand the people who were going to be in your care. That’s how it was – they weren’t your servants. I mean, if you go back to the philosopher George Santayana, he said, “The world never had sweeter masters,” and that’s probably true, because we weren’t really conscious of being masters. We weren’t there to grind folk under our heel.’
Sadly, for the millions of recipients of Britain’s gentle colonial care, not everyone had the discernments that were bred into the schoolboy rulers of Harrow. ‘We were taught this sensitivity which, unfortunately, turned out to be more or less wholly lacking in most of the political class. I could see, even from a very early age, that the empire – great though it had been – was over.’
The dismantling of our magnificent empire was, perhaps, the first victory for those who were soon to become Lord Monckton’s lifetime enemies. It was an act of grand vandalism, wrought by the selfish and irresponsible left.
‘Of course, it was all the consequence of the welfare state,’ he explains. ‘Britain was pretty bust after the Second World War. Then Labour got in on a “jam today, jam tomorrow, jam forever” manifesto. Very typical Labour manifesto – very appealing to those who are not used to making their own way in the world. Somebody else will provide. So they got into office on this idea of a National Health Service, universal pensions, universal benefits, full employment.’
‘Free stuff?’ I say.
‘Sweeties!’ he nods. ‘Bread and circuses! The problem was, we couldn’t afford it and so we had to go to the United States to say, “Please can we have the money to pay for the welfare state and the health service?” They said to us, “If you want help, then you’re going to have to bring the empire to an end.” Which, of course, the Labour Party wanted to do anyway.’
It was in 1973, when he was reading classics at Cambridge University, that the richly educated young lord decided that he would no longer indulge the kinds of people who were not used to making their own way in the world. The left were attempting to reform the exclusive Cambridge Union by changing it into an ‘open’ one that anyone could enter. ‘It was going to be like any other students’ union anywhere else,’ he says. ‘Beer and sandwiches and the occasional pop concert, as I believe it is called. The traditions of what was still a civilised gentleman’s club would’ve been swept away. All that history, nearly two hundred years of it, would’ve been gone. Debating would’ve been brought to an end. I thought, Our ancestors went to some trouble to establish this place and foster the techniques of debating, which I have learnt, in the chamber, against the most difficult audience you could hope to face. I didn’t want it to be lost and I decided that, if nobody else would fight it, I would. I would disregard any consequences from my own Cambridge political career. I knew that one would never become president of the union because, at the time, unless you subscribed to the’ – he spits the word – ‘so-called consensus, you couldn’t.’
Lord Monckton went to work. He discovered that the union was protected by the Literary and Scientific Institutions Act 1854, which said that any major change had to be the subject of a vote. He began a public campaign which saw life members returning from all over the world. ‘On polling day there was a queue, almost as far as the railway station, which is a long way outside Cambridge.’ The leftist insurgents lost the vote. The young Monckton was victorious.
On another occasion, the fellows of his college – ‘all Marxists and atheists’ – attempted to depose the chaplain. Lord Monckton launched another campaign. ‘And they caved in.’ That fight gave him a sudden and startling x-ray flash of the culture war that would define the politics of the latter half of the twentieth century. The left, he realised, were beginning to ally themselves with militant, atheistic scientists. ‘They were increasingly using the language of science,’ he says, describing a new, ‘unholy departure from anything spiritual. I fought that, very successfully, just as I fought the union thing. And what I learnt from those two episodes was that the lone wolf – provided he does not seek the approbation of his fellows and does not seek advancement or promotion to high office – can effect far more change for good than anyone who does hold high office, because he has not made the compromises necessary to get it.’
The history of this corrosive alliance between the left and atheist scientists had begun eleven years before Lord Monckton’s union campaign, when an American academic named Rachel Carson published her book Silent Spring, which warned of the potential dangers of the pesticide DDT. It was to became totemic, a foundational text for the modern environmental movement that ultimately influenced policymakers who banned the use of the chemical around the world, even where it was being used to kill malarial mosquitoes.
‘It was a stupid book,’ says Lord Monckton. ‘Carson was well intentioned, bless her little cotton socks, but stupid scientifically. A stupid book! The left had already decided that they were going to exploit science in a political cause, and they were totally unconcerned about whether the science was true or not. Even when they were putting this ban in place they realised that it would cause millions of children to die. In America they used to do massive sprays of DDT and the kids would run after the planes and play in the clouds. It didn’t do them any harm. You can eat the stuff by the tablespoon.’
‘So if they knew it was safe, and that banning it would kill millions of children, what was their motivation?’ I ask.
He leans forward.
‘Power. It showed who was boss. They would say, “We’re here to save the planet,” but they weren’t at all. It was pure naked left wing political power. They also wanted to whip up a cause which would bring in money from well-meaning rich people like Bill Gates, who knows absolutely fuck all about anything.’
Why, I wondered, do environmental groups today still want all this power and money?
‘To shut down the economies of the West.’
Even in those days, when the two powers of the cold war were frighteningly evenly matched, the Soviet Union knew that they could not compete with capitalists. So they formulated a plan. To destroy the West and their systems of wealth, they realised that they had to attack our energy-making infrastructure. The KGB began secretly transporting influential British individuals to Moscow and Leningrad for training. Marxists infiltrated the new green groups, who were fomenting their own version of trouble. ‘I’ve been told that the left, the KGB, realised that energy was the soft underbelly of the West,’ says Lord Monckton. ‘They used twin attacks via the working classes and the environment movement. They thought, “That’s how we destroy the economies of the West.” Not compete with – destroy. It’s about nihilism, it’s about destruction, tearing down what we’re building because they can’t compete with it and they’re jealous of it. Jealousy is at the root of all socialism. Jealousy is at the root of all evil. Socialism is evil.’
And so, the Communist crosshairs fell upon Britain. We had links not only with the United States, but also with the Commonwealth and the European Union. If you brought down the United Kingdom, our ties with the rest of the world would stretch and pull as we tumbled into the void, wrenching damaging chunks from everyone else. We might even pull some of them in behind us. That was the grim plot that lay behind the miners’ strike of the mid-1980s. It was a new front in the cold war, triggered by prominent Britons who had been covertly trained in Muscovite terrorist universities. The Communists hoped that the strikes would fatally damage our energy infrastructure and thereby threaten the ‘most popular government in modern times’ – that of the woman who, by then, was Lord Monckton’s boss, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
Lord Monckton’s record in government, as recounted by Lord Monckton, speaks of a man of prescient counsel whose advice, if heeded, would have prevented the flowering of evil in many spheres. If the world had followed his advice during the AIDS crisis, to offer one example, millions of lives would have been saved. He described his views at length in an article for the American Spectator, published in January 1987:
There is only one way to stop AIDS. That is to screen the entire population regularly and to quarantine all carriers of the disease for life … There are occasions when it is imperative to think the unthinkable and then to do the undoable. The AIDS epidemic is one such occasion … AIDS is more threatening than any plague which has previously afflicted mankind … Strict controls would be needed at all borders. Visitors would be required to take blood-tests at the port of entry and would be quarantined in the immigration building until the tests had proved negative … Although the idea of universal testing and isolation now sounds extravagant and preposterous, it will eventually happen.
Today, he insists that his article was ‘very reasonable’ and he has been unfairly quoted by people who fail to mention the paragraph where he says, ‘of course the isolation does not need to be prison camps, or shoving them on an island somewhere. The simplest thing is, you just test everybody, tell them if they’ve got it, then they can isolate themselves. I’m a great believer in trusting people.’ Which is all very mysterious because I read the entire piece only yesterday and, as I explain to Lord Monckton now, I don’t remember reading anything like that. He mentions, rather vaguely, things that he ‘went on to say in subsequent articles.’ So, you know, I’m sure it’s all fine, and the main point is if they had listened to Lord Monckton in the first place, then AIDS would have been ‘practically stopped it in its tracks.’
Likewise, the global financial crisis. Lord Monckton saw it coming. Ultimately, he tells me, the economic terrors from which we are currently suffering are the result of the left’s attempts at destroying capitalism, ‘by making it terribly rich. They have learned that if you concentrate wealth in the hands of a few, they become resented then …’
‘It is overthrown!’ I gasp, barely believing what I am hearing. ‘Of course!’
‘Oh, yes,’ he agrees. ‘It’s all part of the same picture.’
But, as everybody has been compelled to acknowledge, flaws in the level of banking regulation are also to blame for the crash. Indeed, Lord Monckton spent four years at No. 10, objecting to what one day would become the Financial Services Act, the legislation that would come to seed our economic downfall. ‘But literally a month after I left Downing Street, the civil service pushed it through.’
‘So that was deregulation?’ I clarify.
He looks amazed.
‘No, no, no. It was imposing, for the first time, the most staggering over-regulation in the city of London.’
I sit up.
‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘I thought the banks began to behave badly because of a loosening of the rules – deregulation.’
‘No, completely the opposite.’
‘Really?’
‘Oh, completely. I was there, you see. I said to Margaret, “For God’s sake, don’t go anywhere near this catastrophe.” What happened was, people began to believe that because it was so heavily regulated, they could put their money into whatever financial instrument they chose and it would be safe.’
‘So all that regulation gave everyone false confidence?’
‘Absolutely. Entirely false sense of security. The result was that the banks then began messing around doing all these complicated credit-default swaps and you see what happened.’
Another crucial event that was taking place during Lord Monckton’s time in government was the miners’ strike. One of his recollections of those tense days begins with him sitting in his office in Downing Street as future cabinet minister Oliver Letwin came running in.
‘Oh, it’s terrible, it’s terrible, where do we hide?’ wailed Letwin. ‘The miners are rioting in Parliament Square. It’s so un-English!’
But Lord Monckton knew better. ‘Don’t be so silly!’ he admonished the young Letwin. ‘This is just what they do every Friday evening when the pubs tip out.’
‘They’re coming this way!’ he cried.
Lord Monckton glanced out of the window. Hmm, yes. There were thirty or forty of them by now, pressing against the rickety barriers. More still were arriving. But Lord M was not in the least perturbed.
‘Oh, well,’ he sighed while slipping on his overcoat. ‘I’ll just go and deal with that.’
And then he reached for his bowler hat. Letwin was agog. A bowler hat?
‘They’ll lynch you!’
‘Of course they won’t,’ said Lord Monckton.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Look, why do I wear a hat in situations like this? It’s the only way to make a polite gesture at a distance. This has been known to my ancestors since time immemorial. It ran the empire. If you wanted to indicate politeness to people who were charging you, you took your hat off to them and they stopped. It works every time. Just watch!’
Lord Monckton descended the steps of No. 10 and approached the angry miners, passing a pair of policemen who were nervously radioing for reinforcements. The revolting pitmen saw him. They began jeering. When Lord Monckton was halfway along Downing Street he suddenly stopped. He surveyed the horde. He took a breath. And he doffed.
Immediately, the jeering turned to cheering. Lord Monckton approached the men, promised to put their complaints in a note to Margaret Thatcher, and then offered them a pint. ‘And you could have heard a pin drop,’ he remembers, smiling. ‘They were all docile and followed me across the road to the pub in double file. It was like a schoolmaster and his crocodile.’
Since the years of his heroic calming of Downing Street, the cold war might have ended, but the power-mad left, he tells me, remain a perilous threat.
‘Once they had been motivated in these directions by the Communists, then these organisations took on a life of their own,’ he says. ‘They are essentially still following the KGB playbook without being aware that they’re doing so. It’s absolutely the same pattern. The main thing is power. That is the fundamental principle of leftism. It’s about this absolute control over every detail, which is why the correct word for left is “totalitarianism”.’
And today, the enemy – in the modern form of the European Union and the United Nations – appear to be winning.
‘You don’t know who they are. You can’t really see them. But everybody in this classe politique is now beginning to argue for global governance.’ He tells me that the UN held a meeting last May ‘with all of its top people, to discuss ways of bringing the “nation state” to an end. It’s code for bringing democracy to an end. That’s actually at the top of the UN’s agenda.’ An early draft of the 2009 Copenhagen Treaty, he adds menacingly, ‘describes that they’re going to establish a global government.’
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the environmental groups and many politicians sympathetic to the IPCC’s views are part of this plan to institute what Lord Monckton has previously called ‘a worldwide coup d’état by bureaucrats’ who seek to ‘impose a Communist world government on the world.’
And the people know it. Well, they don’t know it, just know it. Not the details, the facts. They just have this hunch, you see. This intuition. This generalised emotion. Who knows where it comes from? When they hear Lord Monckton speak, they realise this feeling they have always had was true all along and, when they do, they react with such rapture, such jubilation.
‘I began giving talks all over the place,’ he tells me. ‘Australia, America, Europe. Huge crowds would turn up and they would jump around – standing ovations practically every time. It was clear that there was a large feeling among ordinary people that something was going on in this climate story that they didn’t like the smell of. They knew there was. They just couldn’t quite work out what it was …’
*
When I spoke with Professor Jonathan Haidt, I was surprised to find him offering some advice that Lord Monckton might have approved of. ‘Follow the sacredness,’ he told me. ‘Find out what people believe to be sacred, and when you look around there you will find rampant irrationality. The left have sacralised global warming. I am very certain, as a moral psychologist, that their discourse about it is not rational. They cannot be trusted to think straight about it. It’s a classic moral crusade. And when a scientific community is all on one side, morally and politically, then its ability to be objective goes out the window. Unfortunately, this is the case with global warming. I believe that the scientists are correct, but we can’t be as confident, because there are tribal dynamics going on.’
Professor Haidt believes that, as well as global warming, the left have ‘sacralised victims and demonised capitalism’ while the right have sacralised markets. ‘They can’t think straight about the ability of the markets to solve problems.’ Perhaps comfortingly, he argues that the endless war between the political poles represents a relatively efficient model of governance. ‘The most basic question that faces any society is change versus stick,’ he asserts. ‘Stay with what you have and know, or change and strike out into the future. And there is no correct answer – you have to have a balance of both.’
It was remarkable to observe how many of the battles of Lord Monckton were in the service of ‘stick’. His emotional instincts were to conserve the world, to defend hierarchy and order and tradition. He is an archetypal conservative.
But perhaps the most surprising thing that I discovered, as I was conducting my research into our political brains, is that allegiances are not defined by simple, calculating self-interest.
The studies that Professor Haidt has been involved with, and the data that he has been exposed to, have convinced him into a darker vision than the traditional one. We do not use free will in order to select beliefs and behaviours that will make the world a better place. In The Righteous Brain, he writes that moral reasoning ‘evolved not to help us find truth but to help us engage in arguments, persuasion and manipulation in the context of discussions with other people.’
In this alternative vision, the brain wants to make us into heroes in the eyes of those around us and also in our own. The stories we believe, and the demons that we imagine surround us, all tend to serve a crucial narrative – that we are exceptional, that we are morally holy, that we are on a meaningful journey, and that we are right.
And my encounter with Lord Monckton has also given me something extra – an unexpected method by which I believe we can spot faulty beliefs. Yesterday, the philosopher Dr James Garvey told me, ‘Most people would say that something’s true if it corresponds to the way the world is. This view goes back to Aristotle. But there are other people who prefer the coherence theory of truth, which says that if you have a completely coherent set of beliefs, that tends to be a true set of beliefs.’
Over the last few days, I have become convinced that the coherence theory could not be more wrong. If a person’s set of beliefs all cohere, it means that they are telling themselves a highly successful story. It means that their confabulation is so rich and deep and all-enveloping that almost every living particle of nuance and doubt has been suffocated. Which says to me, their brains are working brilliantly, and their confabulated tale is not to be trusted.
*
I am walking through the courtyard of the Oxford Union, back towards the station, when I see a pair of young students laughing as they stride into the entrance. I get that thud, again. That feeling. Avoid, dislike, unclean. My left-brain interpreter seeks to explain, to justify. And I want to say, spoiled. I want to say, privileged. I want to say, glad I never went to university. But none of that would be true. What my emotions are really a response to is something that is utterly heretical to the story that I have always told of my life.
It is envy.