Christopher Booker – the greatest scare of all?
Crusading columnist Christopher Booker has written a gripping eulogy to his 21-year career at the Sunday Telegraph fighting “scares” as the newspaper marks its first half century – and refers to global warming as “the greatest scare of them all”.
The Sunday Telegraph celebrated its birthday with a long editorial about its history and gave its core values as “a commitment to telling the truth clearly and honestly to our readers”. It’s a shame there wasn’t more space to tell its readers clearly and honestly about Booker’s journalistic highlights.
Among the highs of this 21-year career would be being forced to apologise to Dr Rajendra Pachauri for falsely claiming the chairman of the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change was “making a fortune from his links with ‘carbon trading’ companies”.
Booker – as the Carbon Brief profile outlines – has also claimed that passive smoking has “little or no effect on health at all”, that there is “not a scrap of firm scientific evidence” to justify statements that BSE can be transmitted to humans from cows” and that white asbestos “poses no measurable risk to health”.
Timothy Walker, when director general of the Health and Safety Executive, wrote in a letter published by the Sunday Telegraph that Booker’s articles on asbestos were ” misinformed” and “do little to increase public understanding of a very important occupational health issue”.
Read Christopher Booker’s profile.