Cometh the hour cometh the man. (Or woman).

Except it’s not always true, is it?

In 1940 we had Winston Churchill. In 1979 we had Margaret Thatcher. But I’m not sure even the most generous apologists for our current Prime Minister would bracket David Cameron in quite the same category.

What did Mrs Thatcher have that Cameron doesn’t?

For me the essential distinction is that between being a statesman and being a politician. Maggie was the former, Dave is evidently the latter – as, I think was Tony Blair. One of the key differences between the two lies in their attitude to personal popularity. To the politician it matters greatly, for the primary aim of the politician is to gain and maintain power at regardless of what cost to his principles. To the statesman, however, the political process is little more than…

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You know what? There was a time – perhaps as recently as six or twelve months ago – when I would have been seriously heartened by the news of Cameron’s latest mini reshuffle. I’m a massive fan of the tough, free-market-minded Michael Fallon. Appointing him as the minister at the Department of Energy and Climate Change is a bit like sending in King Herod to shake up the Judaean Child Services Unit. But it’s a symbolic gesture, nothing more. Fallon’s predecessor in the job – John Hayes – was just as old school Tory, just as much a conviction politician, just as opposed to the insanity of wind – and look where it got him: absolutely nowhere.

While DECC’s departmental boss Ed Davey may not be quite as sinister a machiavel as his predecessor Chris Huhne (whatever…

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There is barely a cigarette paper’s difference between my own and Toby Young’s opinion on most – if not all – political and social issues. I like and admire him hugely. But where he and I differ is in our interest in the political process: he finds it fascinating, I don’t. So while he has been following the Eastleigh by election assiduously, I really haven’t. I’m not interested in the politics, I’m not interested in the personalities. This is because like many classical liberals of a certain bent, I happen to think politics is the problem. The petty backbiting, the jockeying for power, the horse-trading, the sordid alliances of convenience, the factions, the malleable principles, the moral cowardice, the favoured interests – not that I’m…

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Blimey, I’m up for a prize – my first ever Bloggie award nomination. I’d be so pleased if I won because, unlike most journalistic awards, the Bloggies aren’t decided by a cabal of pinkos and unimaginative, career-safe lametards from the decaying, dead-tree establishment but by the only people who really matter – you the readers.

See that subtle, sucking-up thing I did there? But I also happen to mean it. Without your vote I don’t win a prize. Without your readership and support I’d just be another of those desperate saddoes like the trolls who haunt this blog in order to try to leech off some traffic for their own pitifully dull, billy-no-mates online musings.

So that’s something else to consider: when you vote for me, you’re not merely voting for the…

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It’s not often one looks to the Guardian’s environment pages for an incisive and thorough critique of green propagandising. But hats off – really – to Leo Hickman for this ruthless deconstruction of an erroneous claim made by David Attenborough on his latest BBC nature documentary that in the last twenty years Africa has warmed by 3.5 degrees C.

3.5 degrees C in two decades? That would indeed be a remarkable temperature rise in anybody’s money. (Remember, since 1850 global mean temperatures have risen by about 0.8 degrees C – and we’re supposed to find that worrying and significant). Which is why, you might have thought, the BBC would have spotted so obvious an error and removed it before the programme went out.

To his credit, thi…

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In this week’s episode of Radio Free Delingpole, James and his old mucker Douglas Murray discuss: the Dalai Lama, Tim Rice, gay marriage, Karl Rove, the Tea Party, what the GOP needs to do if it’s ever to get re-elected, Zero Dark Thirty v Les Miserables.

Includes a heart-breakingly beautiful rendition of There Is A Castle On A Cloud.

Listen here