Guest post by The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley
Dear Anthony, – I’ve enjoyed your series on disinvitation of those who doubt “global warming” by true-believers in the New Religion.
Your readers may enjoy the following well-documented account. – Christopher
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Yet another “global warming” disinvitation to add to the season’s merriment. Some months ago Roger Helmer, a Conservative Member of the European Duma who has dared to question whether “global warming” is a global crisis, was invited to lunch with the Vice-Chancellor of the University of East Anglia, together with leading members of the university’s Environmental Sciences faculty.
The Vice-Chancellor invited Mr. Helmer to bring anyone else who might be interested, and replied that he would be accompanied by James Delingpole, a distinguished columnist with Britain’s national conservative newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, and Lord Monckton, deputy leader and climate-change spokesman for Britain’s second-largest party in European elections, the United Kingdom Independence Party.
A couple of months went by. Then, two days before the lunch was due to take place, the Vice-Chancellor’s office got in touch with Mr. Helmer by email, announcing that Mr. Delingpole and Lord Monckton had been disinvited:
“I am writing in response to recent correspondence/your call about Mr Helmer’s visit to UEA next Friday 29th. The Vice-Chancellor is looking forward to meeting Mr Helmer as planned. However, I am afraid that there has been a misunderstanding in terms of the proposed accompanying guests. It is not normal practice for the Vice-Chancellor to meet MPs and MEPs accompanied by journalists or party political activists, and to avoid setting a new precedent I am afraid that the invitation to meet with the VC cannot be extended to Lord Monckton and Mr Delingpole on this occasion. I am conscious that your office gave our office the names of Mr Helmer’s proposed companions last month but unfortunately they only came to light yesterday.
“If Lord Monckton or Mr Delingpole have particular journalistic enquiries, the University’s Press Office would of course be very happy to receive them.”
Mr. Helmer was not pleased either with the cheesy pretext for the disinvitation or the very late date. The day before the planned visit, he wrote:
“Thank you for your e-mail regarding my visit to UEA tomorrow, but I have to say that I am rather taken aback at this abrupt change of tack. I supplied the names of my colleagues whom I proposed to bring with me some weeks ago (as you rightly point out), and it is rather an embarrassment to have to turn them off at this very late stage. You will be aware that we are dealing here with people who are prominent in their respective fields, and will certainly have dense diary commitments.
“I am disappointed also because while I have a good level of general familiarity with the various issues which we hope to discuss, these colleagues certainly have much more detailed knowledge than I, particularly on the science (Lord Monckton) and on the history and content of the leaked e-mails (James Delingpole). I feel that our meeting will therefore be less useful than it might have been.
“However, we must make the best of it. I propose instead to invite a parliamentary colleague to accompany me (I await his confirmation). This is Stuart Agnew MEP, who represents the Eastern Region and is therefore one of the MEPs covering Norwich and Norfolk. I trust that Mr. Agnew will be acceptable to the Vice Chancellor: if not, please let me know as soon as possible.”
Lord Monckton recommended that Mr. Helmer might take a rather tougher line. Mr. Helmer agreed, and wrote to the Vice-Chancellor’s office again:
“Following my e-mail earlier this morning, I have now been in communication with Lord Monckton, and I feel I have to ask you and the Vice-Chancellor to reconsider your decision.
“You describe Lord Monckton as a “political activist”. Not only is he Deputy Leader of a party which came second (ahead of Labour) in the 2009 Euro-Elections. He is also a former science adviser to former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and acknowledged around the world as an authority on the science of climate change and an expert on climate sensitivity. It is rather depressing that the University is not prepared to talk to him.
“I now learn that Lord Monckton has — at very great inconvenience — arranged to return to the UK early from a banking conference in China, and to delay a forthcoming business trip to New York, at a cost of many thousands of pounds, precisely so that he can attend. I find it particularly embarrassing, therefore, to uninvite him at this late stage — you have placed me in a very difficult position. Moreover there is every possibility that this snub by the University to a public figure would become public.
“In these circumstances I should like to appeal to you, and to the Vice Chancellor, to reconsider your decision. At the same time, I am assured that James Delingpole would be happy to follow Chatam House rules if you wish, and would have an important contribution to make to our discussions.
“Please reconsider this issue in the light of these comments, and let me have your advice as soon as possible.”
Faced with Mr. Helmer’s determination, the Vice-Chancellor caved in:
“Again may I offer our apologies for altering arrangements at this late stage and thank you for our willingness to suggest another accompanying colleague. The Vice-Chancellor would be very happy to meet you with your fellow MEP Stuart Agnew as you suggest. This would be a meeting over lunch with the Vice-Chancellor, Pro-Vice-Chancellor Research Prof Trevor Davies and colleagues from Environmental Sciences, Profs Julian Andrews and Peter Liss, between 12:30-1.30pm in the Vice-Chancellor’s office.
“I am sorry to learn in your second email of the inconvenience caused to Lord Monckton’s travel schedule. In view of the late alteration to his plans, the Vice-Chancellor has agreed to see Lord Monckton along with some of the same UEA colleagues in a separate meeting, immediately after you and Mr Agnew leave us at 1.30pm. We will make sure lunch is still available.
“I trust that these arrangements will be acceptable to you and colleagues and once again apologise for the inconvenience caused.”
The moral of the tale: don’t accept disinvitation. It’s rude and unnecessary. Stand your ground and put the academic bullies in their place.
Layne Blanchard said
” Well, let’s face it, no warmist wants to face Monckton over lunch. They might as well sign up for a whipping. ” Yes, waiter, I will take the “thorough drubbing” with a side of “humiliation”….. and the “mea culpa” tea….. and perhaps a cup of acid to pour over my face. Thank you. 🙂 ”
Brilliant. For a Grande Finale, might I suggest the ” Just Desserts”?
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So will this luncheon exchange be recorded (for upload to the ‘Net) or will it be conducted entirely “off the record” so that only edited and otherwise redacted second-hand accounts of the discussions will be made public?
I always enjoy seeing Mr. Monckton speak, and while I’m certain that Mr. Delingpole will provide his readers with zest-filled accounts of what he hears, it would be very nice – very, VERY nice, indeed! – to have the full proceedings up for detailed examination on the CFACT Web site.
With highlights on YouTube, of course.
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“The Man Who Couldn’t Come to Dinner”?
As others have pointed out, UEA is a little university without any particular merit. I would think that Roger Helmer is quite capable of dealing with the VC and director of research. Since he is a prominent AGW sceptic, they probably want to stop him talking about climate change in one their most important sources of funding (the EU).
If you have eaten what passes for good food in British educational establishments, I wonder if it will be up to Brussels standard?
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At 1:46 PM on 28 October, Paul Birch had written of the University of East Anglia:
…
Over on this side of the Atlantic, the “Polytechnics” don’t have anything remotely resembling a negative image. When Americans consider MIT, CalTech, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, or even Stevens Institute of Technology in humble Hoboken, there tends to be an expectation of faculty and student body competence – and integrity – far superior to what is commonly found in even the much-vaunted Ivy League schools.
Might it be possible to have someone in Blighty explain to us colonials just what the heck justifies the scorn in which “the Polytechnics” seem to be held over there?
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Starwatcher,
Of course, it is obvious that to the ‘settled/consensus science supporters they look bad, that is a tautology. Duh! Every person who doesn’t agree with them looks bad to the ‘settled/consensus science’ supporters . . . .
To the public that is now overwhelmingly rejecting the ‘settled/consensus science’ supporters, well, Monckton and Delingpole don’t look so bad.
People can see integrity. The public do not see integrity in the ‘settled/consensus science’ supporters. It was the ad nauseum claims of we-are-all-going-to-die-right-now from the ‘settled/consensus science supporters’ that caused the public to lose trust.
Don’t blame Monckton and Delingpole for the ‘settled/consensus science’ supporters’ fatal strategic error. : )
John
@Starwatcher: I don’t think either Lord Monckton or James Delingpole needs any defense. The former can rhetorically fillet his foes without raising his voice; the latter is smart, eloquent and funny. As for them “mak[ing] skeptics look bad,” they would have to muck things up pretty horribly before they could hope to equal the damage done to the cause of AGW, and the reputation of UAE, by the Hockey Stick Team and Climategaters. IMHO.
Starwatcher says: October 28, 2010 at 3:38 pm
Monckton is a standing offence to warmists because despite no degree in maths or science of any sort, he is an outstanding mathematician who wins against Gavin Schmidt hands down every time. Warmists say he’s rubbish. I’m proud to side with him. As you can see from my quote, he knows his science. Which is more than your post shows.
Starwatcher says: October 28, 2010 at 3:38 pm
Do you guys really want to defend Monckton and Delingpole? You know they make skeptics look really bad, right?
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Starwatcher. Wrong. Sceptics look neither good nor bad nor even indifferent. They are simply sceptical of things – especially things that don’t add up. What they look like is of no moment – so what is your point if any?
As for Lord Monckton and Mr. Delingpole they seem to me to be quite capable of defending themselves without anyone’s help.
Doug
It is not normal practice for the Vice-Chancellor to meet MPs and MEPs accompanied by journalists or party political activists…
What, precisely, is an MP or MEP if not a party political activist? Innocent virgins swanning around the lake of integrity?
Starwatcher says:
October 28, 2010 at 3:38 pm
Do you guys really want to defend Monckton and Delingpole? You know they make skeptics look really bad, right?
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On the contrary.
And if YOU are a skeptic, with asinine statements like that, then I can say with overwhelming confidence, that the finger of making us “look bad”, is pointed squarely back at you.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
[trimmed, incomplete thought. Robt]
Does this Vice Chancellor have a name? So far all we know of him is the office, or title; a name by which authority can be wielded. My guess is that the VC was persuaded by others, likely lower in rank, to perform the disinvite. Normally a decision by such a high-ranking official is not questioned, let alone resisted; his capitulation is a welcome development.
Hey mod (Robt) there must have been an unknown attachment to my post because you presented it exactly as I wrote it and I meant it.
So….whatever you trimmed…..was not mine.
Cheers
Chris
{The last phrase? OK. ‘Tis gone, t’will ne’er be seen again…..8<) Robt]
I wish we (the U.S.) had a Lord Monckton. We get an Al Gore… sigh. Maybe we can make a trade?
How, exactly, does he make skeptics look bad? The guy is sharp as a tack, and quite fun to listen to besides.
Th e Vice Chancellor of UEA is
The Hon Edward David Joseph Lyon-Dalberg-Acton FRHistS,
He has recently been in the news in UK for being involved in the saga of the Oxburgh report. A slimy and unctuous individual IMHO, you can watch him and his cronies getting a light grilling from Parliament earlier this week here:
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2010/10/27/stc-recording.html
Watch also for his faithful sidekick Davies. Who plays Smithers to his Burns. An even more unpleasant and shifty cove.
If I were invited to lunch with him, I think I’d choose to be washing my hair or sorting out my sock drawer rather than have to spend a couple of hours in his company. But Monckers and Dellers are probably made of sterner stuff.
On reflection, I would accept Ed Acton’s invite, and then fervently hope that I was bad enough to be disinvited once he found out who I was.
A disinvitation to lunch at UEA must rank among the highest accolades a sceptic can achieve. An honour to wear with pride.
I wonder if you’d get a nice disinvitation card to put on your mantelpiece to impress your friends and colleagues?
with a h/t to wikipedia this about sums up why they cannot face their opponents in argument, they don’t have one that a rational and thinking person can accept :
“The Emperor’s New Clothes” (Danish: Kejserens nye Klæder) is a short tale by Hans Christian Andersen about two weavers who promise an Emperor a new suit of clothes that are invisible to those unfit for their positions or incompetent. When the Emperor parades before his subjects in his new clothes, a child cries out, “But he isn’t wearing anything at all!”
I normally side with fellow sceptics, but I can’t get excited about this. If I am invited to a party, and the person who invited me says I can bring a couple of friends, surely it is up to me to respect my host and not bring along their ex or their worst enemy. By inviting Delingpole and Monckton, Helmer was being provocative, and is therefore himself guilty of bad manners, by putting his host in an embarrassing position.
Annabelle: false analogy. The party in your hypothetical is (to me, anyway) a social event among friends, or at least not a “working event” to which people bring their agendas. The UAE lunch was not a party, it was rubber chicken and grip-and-grin between members of one institution in their official capacity, and an elected official whose favorable informed opinion toward the institution was going to be useful. Your example would work only if Helmer were just a bloke on the street, without pull or power, with whom the VC and the faculty were friends. Many official gatherings like this bring together people who, in their private lives, would be at daggers drawn. They put it aside to get the job done. Which just points up, once again, how unfit the VC and his faculty are for their positions.
Reference the comments from Doug, son of mudder, Dave, Rocky H and George E Smith, nothing I said in my post negates the fact that Viscount Monckton is an effective communicator of flaws in the arguments of the climate science community. But, similar points to the ones I made are put even more forcibly in blogs of those who wish to minimise his arguments and who imply that a man who distorts his CV is not to be trusted.
Commenting on some of Jones remarks in the CRU emails Gavin Schmidt said “Gravity isn’t a useful theory because Newton was a nice man.” A corollary of this is that Monckton’s scientific case is not strengthened by embellishments his CV.
Tucci78:
“Might it be possible to have someone in Blighty explain to us colonials just what the heck justifies the scorn in which “the Polytechnics” seem to be held over there?”
I’m a Blightyite in my late forties and for as long as I can recall it has been traditional to scorn polytechnics (and especially former ones that are now universities).
example: “That’s not a proper university, it’s just a Poly that has rebranded”.
A similar tradition used to exist between Grammar and Secondary Modern schools, and likewise between Public and Grammar schools. We have a long and hallowed tradition of snobbery over here, likewise we tend to look up to people “of breeding” regardless of their intelligence, although these things are much less the case than they were perhaps 100 years ago.
I’d have lunch with Monckton, although I’d like him to buy more of the beers as he has more money than me by several orders of magnitude. However, seeing as he accepts (and has posted here sometime back) that increased manmade CO2 in our atmosphere will cause warming, we can move past that very basic bit and get on to more advanced details. Climate sensitivity over Guinness sounds like fun, even if we agreed to differ at the end 🙂
Cheers – John
Academics aren’t all bad you know. At least one I am aware of was knighted through certain parties bugging my PC, on which I had written a spoof letter in the style of Lady Thatcher, which mentioned a prominent football manager’s power relations with his wife.
It so happened that that manager was already knighted and the scientist who rose to that title had the same first name…….
Rum places, academia……
Tony says:
October 28, 2010 at 11:11 am
[…]
“I am glad it has gone public; so everyone knows just what kind of person that Vice Chancellor really is.”
Hmmm … “Vice Chancellor” = Acton, if memory serves correctly.
For a good number of months, to my mind, Acton’s more appropriate title would be “Chancellor of aVarICE” … an historian who’s in the same league as James Cameron, the director of aVaTAR … [where V=voluble and/or vociferous and/or venal)
Acton’s performance at the Oct 27 U.K. House of Commons Science & Technology Committee invitational encore strongly suggests that his “Vice” is characterized by all 3 V’s: voluble, vociferous and venal.
@george E. Smith:
What you say regarding titles is correct, however, the United States has a long-standing tradition of not honoring titles and hereditary peerages, to the extent that the US constitution actually forbids Americans from receiving them. Therefore it might be proper to address Christopher Monckton as Lord in the United Kingdom, but Americans are under no constraint to do so, and I think Christopher Monckton understands and respects the American position on this.
An education in the Classics means the Greek and Latin classics, usually. Greek is wonderful for sharpening rational thought and rhetoric.
If memory serves, Christopher Monckton was deeply involved in stopping the coal workers’ strike in Thatcher’s Britain. MI5/6 had decided it was a Soviet provocation.
Christopher Monckton is also a member of the Sovereign Order of the Knights of Malta, one of the few “states” recognized fairly widely but without a national territory. There are competing claims among different organizations all claiming to be the authentic SoM. I might be wrong but I believe Christopher Mockton belongs to the SoM recognized by the Vatican.
All that aside, what he says makes sense, and I would accept his arguments even were he a homeless man with bloodshot eyes raving at passers-by.
RC Saumarez says:
October 28, 2010 at 4:00 pm
“Might it be possible to have someone in Blighty explain to us colonials just what the heck justifies the scorn in which “the Polytechnics” seem to be held over there?”
In the UK, the Polytechnics were mainly set up in the sixties as part of the (politically motivated) enlargement of “higher education”. They were primarily vocational training establishments for students who couldn’t get a place at any of the universities, even the second rank “red-bricks”, or who simply wanted a more practical and less academic course. The polytechnics were never true universities; their breadth of study was limited, they did little or no academic research, and their focus was always on churning out the maximum number of graduates in those fields the politicians considered most valuable. Since the country was somewhat pro-engineering at that time, they produced a lot of good engineers. The better places (like Manchester Polytechnic) were quite highly regarded – as polytechnics. But when it became politically unacceptable to admit that some places can be better than others at some things, and the polytechnics were rebranded as universities and revamped to hide the fact that they were originally different by design, they lost the respect they might have honestly earned as polytechnics, and gained the contempt due to their dishonest posing as real universities.