Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley

This article is about the journalist and politician. For the musician, see Christopher J. Monckton. For Baron Lang of Monkton, see Ian Lang.

Christopher Walter Monckton Viscount Monckton of Brenchley
In Washington, D.C., January 2010
Born	(1952-02-14) 14 February 1952
Education	MA in classics, 1974; diploma in journalism studies
Alma mater	Churchill College, Cambridge University College, Cardiff
Occupation(s)	Politician, journalist
Political party	UK Independence Party
Spouse	Juliet Mary Anne Malherbe Jensen
Parent(s)	Major-General Gilbert Monckton and Marianna Letitia Bower
Relatives	Rosa Monckton (sister), Timothy Monckton (brother)

Christopher Walter Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley (born 14 February 1952) is a British politician, journalist, and hereditary peer. Formerly a member of the Conservative Party, Monckton has been the deputy leader of the UK Independence Party since June 2010. During the 1980s he served in Conservative Central Office and worked for Margaret Thatcher's Downing Street Policy Unit. He also worked for The Universe, The Sunday Telegraph, Today and the Evening Standard.

Monckton became known for his invention of the Eternity puzzle at the end of the 1990s, and the Eternity II puzzle in 2007. He has attracted attention in recent years for his outspoken skepticism about anthropogenic global warming.

Personal life

Monckton was born the eldest son of the late Major-General Gilbert Monckton, 2nd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley and Marianna Letitia (nee Bower), former High Sheriff of Kent and a Dame of Malta. He has a brother, Timothy, and a sister, Rosa, wife of journalist Dominic Lawson. His father raised the family as Roman Catholics after converting at Cambridge.

Monckton was educated at Harrow School and Churchill College, Cambridge, where he received an MA in classics in 1974, and at University College, Cardiff, where he obtained a diploma in journalism studies. In 1990, he married Juliet Mary Anne Malherbe Jensen. In 2006, on the death of his father, he acceded to the title of viscount.

He is a liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Broderers, an Officer of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, a Knight of Honour and Devotion of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, and a member of the Roman Catholic Mass Media Commission. He is also a qualified Day Skipper with the Royal Yachting Association, and has been a Trustee of the Hales Trophy for the Blue Riband of the Atlantic since 1986.

Career

Journalism

Monckton joined the Yorkshire Post in 1974 at the age of 22, where he worked as a reporter and leader-writer. From 1977 to 1978, he worked at Conservative Central Office as a press officer, becoming the editor of the Roman Catholic newspaper The Universe in 1979, then managing editor of The Sunday Telegraph magazine in 1981. He joined the London Evening Standard newspaper as a leader-writer in 1982.

In 1979, Monckton met Alfred Sherman, who co-founded the pro-Conservative think tank the Centre for Policy Studies with Margaret Thatcher and Keith Joseph in 1974. Sherman asked Monckton to take the minutes at the CPS's study group meetings. Monckton subsequently became the secretary for the centre's economic, forward strategy, health and employment study groups. He wrote a paper on the privatisation of council housing by means of a rent-to-mortgages scheme that brought him to the attention of Downing Street. Ferdinand Mount, the head of the Number 10 Policy Unit and a former CPS director, brought Monckton into the Policy Unit in 1982. He was recruited as a domestic specialist with responsibilities for housing and parliamentary affairs, working alongside Mount and Peter Shipley on projects such as the phasing out of council housing. He left the unit in 1986 to become assistant editor of the newly established, and now defunct, tabloid newspaper Today. He was a consulting editor for the Evening Standard from 1987 to 1992 and was its chief leader-writer from 1990 to 1992.

Inventions

In 1999, Monckton created and published the Eternity puzzle, a geometric puzzle that involved tiling a dodecagon with 209 irregularly shaped polygons called Polydrafters. A £1 million prize was won after 18 months by two Cambridge mathematicians. By that time, 500,000 puzzles had been sold. Monckton said he had to sell his home, Crimonmogate, to pay the prize; he later said the story was a publicity stunt. A second puzzle, Eternity II, was launched on 28 July 2007, with a prize of $2 million.

Political career

Although Monckton is a hereditary peer, his father's membership of the House of Lords was ended by the House of Lords Act 1999. Monckton has referred to himself as "a member of the Upper House but without the right to sit or vote," but the House of Lords has said he is not a member, and that there is no such thing as a non-voting or honorary member.

He stood unsuccessfully in four by-elections for vacant seats created by deaths among the 92 hereditary peers remaining in the Lords after the reforms. He stood for a Conservative seat in a March 2007 by-election; of the 43 candidates, 31 received no votes, Monckton included. He subsequently stood in the crossbench by-elections of May 2008, July 2009, and June 2010, again receiving no votes. He was highly critical of the way the Lords was reformed, describing the procedure in the March 2007 by-election, with 43 candidates and 47 electors, as "a bizarre constitutional abortion."

He has also considered standing for election to the House of Commons (which hereditary peers are entitled to do if they are not members of the House of Lords). At the 2010 general election he was nominated as the UK Independence Party (UKIP) candidate for the Scottish constituency of Perth and North Perthshire, but withdrew in accordance with UKIP's policy of not opposing other Eurosceptic parliamentary candidates. In June 2010, UKIP announced he had been appointed its deputy leader, to serve alongside David Campbell Bannerman.

Political views

Climate change

"You won't see them flashing past, as they scuttle down to their noisome lairs—there to snivel in the darkness".

— Monckton on what he claims will be the fate of climate scientists who have allegedly distorted temperature data. Interview with Bob Parks (2010)

Monckton is critical of the theory of anthropogenic causes for climate change and the stated scope of it, which he regards as a controversy catalysed by "the need of the international left for a new flag to rally round following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989". He has expressed doubt about the reality of global warming in a number of newspaper articles and papers. However, his credentials as a commentator on climate change have been questioned. James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore note in their book Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming that Monckton has "no training whatsoever in science" and criticise his asserted credentials as "unfounded self-promotion."

In the first of two Sunday Telegraph editorials published in November 2006, Monckton disputed whether global warming is man-made, suggested that it is unlikely to prove catastrophic, and criticised the science presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In particular, he has criticised the IPCC's interpretation of the Medieval Warm Period, cited the "hockey stick" controversy as evidence of faulty science, argued that the science in the IPCC reports has misapplied the Stefan–Boltzmann law, and supported the solar variation theory as a possible explanation of global warming. In an apparent reference to claims made by Gavin Menzies, he further stated "There was little ice at the North Pole: a Chinese naval squadron sailed right round the Arctic in 1421 and found none."

Editorial writer for The Guardian George Monbiot has criticised Monckton's arguments, labelling them "cherry-picking, downright misrepresentation and pseudo-scientific gibberish". In response, Monckton argued that he "got the science right", claiming that Monbiot got "too many facts wrong" and had shown "ignorance of the elementary physics".

In the second Sunday Telegraph opinion piece Monckton looked at economic aspects of the U.K. government's Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, arguing that the review's recommendation to invest 1% of global GDP per annum in climate change mitigation would be ineffective, as would the introduction of carbon taxes and emissions trading, as a means of curbing carbon emissions. He has proposed instead that the best solution should be to "go nuclear and reverse 20th-century deforestation."

In February 2007, he published a critique of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report on climate change. Monckton's CV as Chief Policy Adviser at the Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI) claims that "the correction of a table inserted by IPCC bureaucrats... earned him the status of Nobel Peace Laureate." In January 2010, Monckton voiced this claim on an Australian radio broadcast. When later questioned about this by reporters , Monckton conceded that his claim to have won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 was "a joke". As of 6 June 2010, the claim that Monckton is a Nobel Peace Laureate has not been removed from the SPPI web site

Monckton played a role in a legal challenge heard in the High Court of Justice in October 2007 in a bid to prevent An Inconvenient Truth from being shown in English schools. In an interview with the conservative American talk radio host Glenn Beck, Monckton stated that he had prompted an unnamed friend to fund the case "to fight back against this tide of unscientific freedom-destroying nonsense" and had played a direct role in the litigation against the British government. He was also reported to have funded the distribution to schools of the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle as a riposte to Gore's film.

In March 2007, Monckton ran a series of advertisements in The New York Times and Washington Post challenging Al Gore to an internationally televised debate on climate change. The former U.S. Vice President responded in writing but refused to debate. The Science and Public Policy Institute provided funding for Monckton to produce a response to An Inconvenient Truth, titled Apocalypse?, No!, described as "showing Monckton presenting a slide show in a vitriolic attack on climate change science." The film includes footage of Monckton giving a Gore-style presentation on 8 October 2007 at the Cambridge Union in which he asserted that Gore and the IPCC had systematically falsified and exaggerated the evidence for global warming.

In July 2008 Monckton wrote an article about climate sensitivity for the American Physical Society's Forum on Physics and Society, concluding: "it is very likely that in response to a doubling of pre-industrial carbon dioxide concentration [surface temperature] will rise not by the 3.26 °K [sic] suggested by the IPCC, but by <1 °K."

Some right-wing media commentators interpreted the publication of his paper as a sign that the American Physical Society had abandoned its earlier support for the scientific consensus on climate change. In response, the APS reaffirmed its unchanged position on climate change and pointed out that the newsletter of the APS Forum on Physics and Society "carries the statement that 'Opinions expressed are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the APS or of the Forum.' This newsletter is not a journal of the APS and it is not peer reviewed." The APS further added a disclaimer to the top of Monckton's article stating: "...Its conclusions are in disagreement with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community. The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article's conclusions." The American Physical Society, however, was later compelled to remove the portions of its disclaimer about the opinions of the world scientific community and of its own Council, which had not in fact taken a position on Monckton's paper. In a response, Monckton called the APS "red flag" "discourteous" and claimed his paper had been "scientifically reviewed in meticulous detail".

During the autumn of 2009, Monckton toured North America to campaign against the United Nations Climate Change Conference in December 2009. He warned that a treaty was planned for the conference that would "impose a communist world government on the world", which no country would then be able to repeal. Monckton's comments were picked up by numerous commentators on the American right, including Glenn Beck. The St. Petersburg Times's PolitiFact.com described his assertions as "not only unsupported but preposterous" and stated "...Lord Monckton earns a special ruling — Britches on Fire!". After attending one of Monckton's talks, Ethan Baron of the Canadian newspaper The Province criticised Monckton's assertions as the product of a "whacked-out, far-right ideology, combined with an ego the size of the Antarctic ice sheet." The scientific assertions made by Monckton have been criticised as "pure fantasy" by Professor Barry R. Bickmore of Brigham Young University, who comments: "when you see a complete amateur raising objections about a highly technical subject, claiming that he or she has blown the lid off several decades of research in the discipline, you should be highly suspicious."

Vaclav Klaus, the president of the Czech Republic, defended Monckton's views, commenting: "I agree with Lord Monckton that the cap-and-trade bill 'is the largest tax increase ever to be inflicted on a population in the history of the world'", and nationally syndicated US right-wing conservative radio commentator Michael Savage praised Monckton's tour, saying: "it is very rare we get someone as succinct, and as literate, and as passionate ... as Lord Christopher Monckton."

In October 2009, during his tour of North America, Monckton gave a talk on climate science at an event held at Minnesota's Bethel University, sponsored by the Minnesota Free Market Institute. In response, University of St. Thomas professor of thermal engineering John Abraham published an online rebuttal of the claims made by Monckton in his talk. Abraham's presentation, in which he asserted that Monckton had misrepresented and misunderstood scientific findings, received praise as a "long-needed factual voice on climate change." Monckton's response accused Abraham of misrepresentation and libel, criticised the university and its head, and demanded a retraction, apology, disciplinary action against Abraham and a compensatory payment. The University of St Thomas supported Abraham, threatening legal action if Monckton continued making "disparaging or defamatory comments".

Social policy

Eddy Shah: Today and the Newspaper Revolution describes him as "a fervent, forthright and opinionated Roman Catholic Tory" who has been closely associated with the "New Right" faction of the Conservative Party. As one of Margaret Thatcher's policy advisors, he has been credited with being "the brains behind the Thatcherite policy of giving council tenants (public housing) the right to buy their homes." He has been associated with the Referendum Party, advising its founder Sir James Goldsmith, and in 2003 he helped a Scottish Tory breakaway group, the Scottish Peoples Alliance. In 2009 he joined the UK Independence Party; he is now deputy leader.

Views on AIDS

Monckton's views on how the AIDS epidemic should be tackled have been the subject of some controversy. In an article for The American Spectator entitled "AIDS: A British View", written for the magazine's January 1987 issue, he argued that "there is only one way to stop AIDS. That is to screen the entire population regularly and to quarantine all carriers of the disease for life. Every member of the population should be blood-tested every month ... all those found to be infected with the virus, even if only as carriers, should be isolated compulsorily, immediately, and permanently." This would involve isolating between 1.5 and 3 million people in the United States ("not altogether impossible") and another 30,000 people in the UK ("not insuperably difficult"). The article was highly controversial, with The American Spectator's then assistant managing editor, Andrew Ferguson, denouncing it in the letters column of the same issue. Monckton appeared on the BBC's Panorama programme in February 1987 to discuss his views and present the results of an opinion poll that found public support for his position.

Monckton has since stated "the article was written at the very outset of the AIDS epidemic, and with 33 million people around the world now infected, the possibility of [quarantine] is laughable. It couldn't work."

European integration

Monckton has been an advocate of Euroscepticism for many years; as he put it in a 2007 interview, he would "leave the European Union, close down 90 per cent of government services and shift power away from the atheistic, humanistic government and into the hands of families and individuals." In 1994, he sued the Conservative government of John Major for agreeing to contribute to the costs of the Protocol on Social Policy agreed in the 1993 Maastricht Treaty, although the UK had an opt-out from the protocol. The case was heard in the Scottish Court of Session in May 1994. His petition for judicial review was dismissed by the court for want of relevancy.

Published works

• The Laker Story (with Ivan Fallon). Christensen, 1982. ISBN 0950800708
• Anglican Orders: null and void?. Family History Books, 1986.
• The AIDS Report. 1987
• European Monetary Union: opportunities and dangers. University of St. Andrews, Department of Economics. 1997
• Sudoku X. Headline Publishing Group, 2005. ISBN 0755315014
• Sudoku X-mas. Headline Publishing Group, 2005. ISBN 0755315022
• Sudoku Xpert. Headline Publishing Group, 2006. ISBN 0755315294
• Junior Sudoku X. Headline Publishing Group, 2006. ISBN 0755315286
• Sudoku Xtreme. Headline Publishing Group, 2006. ISBN 0755315308
• "Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered". Forum on Physics and Society, American Physical Society. 2008. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

The Science and Public Policy Institute, of which Monckton is policy director, has published nine non peer-reviewed articles by Monckton on climate-change science.

See also

• Gilbert Monckton, 2nd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley
• Rosa Monckton

External links

• Apocalypse Cancelled
• Greenhouse warming? What greenhouse warming? by Christopher Monckton
• Gore Gored Monckton's response to Gore
• Monckton saves the day!, The Observer, 6 May 2007