Christopher Booker
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Christopher John Penrice Booker (born October 7, 1937) is an English journalist and author, educated at Shrewsbury School and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (history scholar). With fellow Salopians Richard Ingrams and Willie Rushton he founded Private Eye in 1961, and was its first editor, ousted by Ingrams in 1963. Returning in 1965, he has remained a member of the magazine’s collaborative joke-writing team ever since (with Ingrams, Barry Fantoni and current editor Ian Hislop).
From 1959 to 1962 he was the first jazz critic for the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs. In 1962 he became the resident political scriptwriter on the BBC satire show That Was The Week That Was, notably contributing sketches on Home Secretary Henry Brooke and prime minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home which have often been cited as examples of the programme’s outspoken style.
From 1964 he became a Spectator columnist, writing on the press and TV, and in 1969 published The Neophiliacs: A Study of the Revolution in English Life In The Fifties and Sixties, a highly critical analysis of the role played by fantasy in the political and social life of those decades.
In the early 70s he campaigned against tower blocks and the wholesale redevelopment of Britain’s cities according to the ideology of the modern movement. In 1973 he published Goodbye London (written with John Betjeman’s daughter Candida Lycett Green), and, with Bennie Gray, was the IPC Campaigning Journalist of the Year. His BBC documentary City of Towers (1979) was widely praised, not least by some of the modern architects whose work it criticised.
In the mid-1970s he contributed a regular quiz to Melvyn Bragg’s BBC books programme Read All About It, and he returned to the Spectator as a weekly contributor (1976-1981), when he also became a lead book-reviewer for the Sunday Telegraph. In 1980 he published The Seventies: Portrait Of A Decade, and covered the Moscow Olympics for the Daily Mail, publishing The Games War: A Moscow Journal (1981). Between 1988 and 1990 he contributed The Way of the World satirical column to the Daily Telegraph (as Peter Simple II), and in 1990 swapped places with Auberon Waugh to become a weekly columnist on the Sunday Telegraph, where he has remained to this day.
From 1992 he focused more on the role played in British life by bureaucratic regulation and the European Union, forming a professional collaboration with Dr Richard North, and they subsequently co-authored a series of books: The Mad Officials: How The Bureaucrats Are Strangling Britain (1994); The Castle of Lies (1996); The Great Deception (2003), a critical history of the European Union; and most recently Scared To Death: From BSE To Global Warming, Why Scares Are Costing Us The Earth (2007), a study of the part played in Western society in recent decades by the ‘scare phenomenon’.
Between 1986 and 1990 he took part in a detailed investigation, chaired by Brigadier Tony Cowgill, of the widely-publicised charges that senior British politicians, including Harold Macmillan, had been guilty of a serious war crime in handing over thousands of Cossack and Yugoslav prisoners to the Communists at the end of the war in 1945. Their report, published in 1990, presented those events in a very different light, and Booker published a lengthy analysis of the controversy in A Looking Glass Tragedy (1997).
In 2005 he published The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories, on which he had been working for over 30 years. Although this long book was dismissed by a number of journalistic reviewers, it won praise from a good many novelists, playwrights and academics, including Fay Weldon, Beryl Bainbridge, Richard Adams, Ronald Harwood and John Bayley.
He was briefly married to the novelist Emma Tennant and to Christine Verity, now married to historian Norman Stone, but in 1979 married Valerie Patrick (two sons) with whom he has lived in Somerset ever since. His parents founded the elite girls school Knighton House.
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