Christopher Booker: First editor of Private Eye and a professional contrarian

For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy Christopher Booker, who has died aged 81, was a journalist, author and inveterate contrarian who used his regular column in The Sunday Telegraph as a platform for challenging scientific orthodoxies and tackling the phenomenon of what he called “groupthink”. “Such a merciless attack on a politician was unprecedented”, Booker later recalled, while simultaneously paying tribute to the programme’s pivotal role in ushering the BBC “into a less reverential age”. Armoured in their certainty that they have all the answers when they so obviously don’t, neo-Darwinians such as Richard Dawkins rest their beliefs just as much on an unscientific leap of faith as the ‘Creationists’ they so fanatically affect to despise.” His report Global Warming: A Case Study in Groupthink, published last year by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, criticises what he describes as an “intellectual straitjacket” that prevents critical discussion of global warming theory. According to Booker’s polemic, this perceived failure emanates from a herd mentality he describes as “the groupthink that has for 30 years come to dominate virtually all public discussion of global warming in the west”.