Monckton’s Ripping Yarns

Christopher Monckton gets profiled in the Observer:

From those momentous words on, in his own head, Christopher Monckton appears always to have been starring in a Boy’s Own adventure entitled ‘Monckton Saves the Day!’ …

For a start, in this adventure, in which he routinely wore a bowler hat, Monckton won the Falklands conflict from his armchair after suggesting, he claims, to the Prime Minister that the best way to undermine the Argies was to have the SAS introduce a mild bacillus into the water supply in Port Stanley. ‘I can tell you from experience there is nothing more demoralising than having the trots in a trench!’ He believes, laughing a little wildly, she took him up on this idea and the rest is history.

On other occasions, try as he might, even Monckton could not get heard. He would have averted the Aids epidemic (having produced ‘probably the first working model for the transmission of this particular kind of retrovirus in the UK’, he insisted to the cabinet on compulsory testing of adults, legally enforced ‘restricted association’ for people who were HIV positive, but nothing was done). ‘Lobby groups howled. The homosexual lobby said we know you, you’re a Catholic, you don’t like queers.’

He would have saved us from poll tax by scrapping local taxation and adding to VAT, but he got sick and in his absence the foppish Oliver Letwin had decided that a universal tax was too ‘intellectually satisfying’ to ignore. He would have prevented us joining the ERM. ‘Not because I hate the European Union, but because I worked out the economics on the back of an envelope. [Monckton's pockets, I can't help thinking, must be stuffed with such calculations.] But John Major would not be told. I wrote to him privately; I sent people to see him. But he was deaf to the idea.’ In the end, like all good Tories, he instead placed a sizeable bet on sterling collapsing and ‘made a packet’ when it did.

Does he think he has ever been wrong about anything at all?

He ponders for a long moment. ‘Not on the big ones, no!’

So what will happen, does he imagine, to the current ‘big one’?

‘Well,’ he says, breezily, ‘for a few years, the temperature will continue to rise, but nowhere near as fast as the alarmists would wish it to rise. Then solar physicists suggest that in the next solar cycle but one, and a solar cycle is about 10.6 years, there will be a considerable cooling of the Sun. And the panic will disappear.’ Hey presto.

Via Hot Topic.

Comments

#1 guthrie
May 8, 2007

Hey, I’m sure I mentioned that here. I definitely mentioned it at Eli’s place.
#2 Gareth
May 8, 2007

You mentioned it at Stoat, too
#3 guthrie
May 8, 2007

No your right, I mentioned it at Stoat, not here. Ahh well, these blogs all look the same these days…
#4 Thom
May 8, 2007

“He sent the man from the City the conclusions he had drawn from ‘the back of an envelope’ and more extensive calculations he had done (outsmarting at a stroke thousands of the world’s scientists).”

For shame that this envelope was not published in Science or Nature. It could save us all a great deal of worry.
#5 Eli Rabett
May 8, 2007

Hmm sort of Fermat like is our little laird.

Also may I point out that it is the Blorgs that look alike, elements, such as designer mouse holes.
#6 stu
May 9, 2007

Not quite Eli, Fermat was proved correct in the end! That is to say, his theorem was true (though it also was true that the proof wouldn’t fit in the margin).
Actually, it’s funny you should mention him because my first experience of the crank mindset was via the cranks of sci.math who often either claimed to have an elementary proof of FLT, or claimed that it was false and that Andrew Wiles was a fraud. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these people have moved on to dabble in climate science these days.
#7 Alex
May 9, 2007

I was going to blog about this, but I started to get the red hate, and people were hiding the knives.

Frankly, fuck classicists, Tories, and aristocrats.

Maybe I’ll have another go once I’ve taken my meds. Meanwhile, the Independent has repented of its Dominic Lawson/TGGWS arsery, reporting at some length on the head of the Danish National Space Centre’s complaints that TGGWS fabricated data to gussy up some of their graphs.
#8 Brian
May 9, 2007

From the article: “He gave some credibility to this nickname with his invention of the 209-piece Eternity jigsaw puzzle, which offered a reward of £1m for the first winning solution. Two Cambridge scientists got there in 18 months; reports at the time suggested Monckton had lost a fortune, but he now claims 500,000 copies of the puzzle were sold worldwide.”

The story at the time was that he had to sell his ancestral home to cover the losses- rather bizarrely he later claimed he’d made the story up as a publicity stunt.
#9 Hank Roberts
May 10, 2007

Monkton affirms the British government engaged in biological warfare?
And that he’s responsible for this?

http://www.state.gov/t/ac/trt/4718.htm
#10 MikeB
May 11, 2007

After reading this article, you are reminded of Python’s ‘Upper Class Twit of the Year’. Total Prat.
#11 Gareth
May 11, 2007

Yes, but a total prat with contacts.
#12 MikeB
May 11, 2007

Contacts indeed. If he wasn’t a Lord or related to various media types, he’d probably be written off as just another green-inker. Still, come the revolution…
#13 leather jackets
May 12, 2007

not so much but its ok