‘The courage to do nothing’
Guess who did, after all, manage to speak in Bali?
Ladies, gentlemen, I give you Lord Monckton. Or, to be more precise, the Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley. A Scottish member of the House of Lords, Monckton was born Christopher Walter. He is a descendant of a member of Churchill’s cabinet who founded the law firm Monckton Chambers, a licenced day-skipper with the Royal Yacht Association, a puzzle-setter of considerable renown, a member of the Worshipful Company of Broderers (one of London’s great Livery Companies), and a Knight of the Order of Malta. As a Catholic Tory, he has startlingly mediaeval views on handling deadly epidemics, which suggests that when he does see a crisis, he’s all for acting in dramatic fashion. On the upside, he is opposed to European political union and thinks it’s a good idea that people own their own homes. Oh, and he’s a gadfly around Al Gore.
He describes the former US vice president’s jeremiad An Inconvenient Truth as “a foofaraw of pseudo-science, exaggerations, and errors”, and for the use of that word alone, he deserves our respect.
