Hotmao

“I felt like a gay man coming out of the closet,” James Delingpole tells me  after his recent experiences doing the rounds on right wing talk shows in the USA. “For the first time in my life I actually felt like I was free to be right wing.” 

Coming from a man who has written a book called How to be Right (A guide to making lefty-liberals history), who has a weekly column in the Spectator, and who has just launched his new book decrying the ascent of President Obama complete with chapters titled Barbecue the Polar Bears and Give War a Chance, this isn’t quite the bombshell it first seems. However Delingpole is right (sorry)(double sorry these bracketed asides are a literary tick which just has to stop – more later). Well at least he has a point.

To illustrate this point have a go at canvassing various opinions covering Fox News. If the general answer is along the lines of; it’s run by neo-con, murdering, Murdoch scum, then bear in mind that Fox News is one of the most popular news channels in the US with an audience of millions (incidentally for added fun try asking your questionee if they’ve ever watched it) (sorry)(again). Now ask them their opinion of the UK’s Channel 4 News complete with its poppy-refusenik anchor John Snow. Should the answer be along the lines of; laudable, incisive, campaigning, brave, it would be fair to say QED.

And this seems to be precisely Delingpole’s point. “When you go to America you realise how subtly intolerant of right wing views we are in the UK,” he laments. “Freedom of expression has really been curtailed here.”

Note the “has been”. As Delingpole sees it this curtailment came around the same time an unpopular government was replaced by a new chap with a flashing grin and a promise to be whiter than white, that pretty straight kind of guy named Tony Blair. And now he’s terrified it’s going to happen to that last bastion of conservative free speech which is America.

The result is Delingpole’s latest book; Welcome to Obamaland – I have seen your future and it doesn’t work. The premise of which is to prepare American conservatives for the bleak future they face under Obama by showing the damage caused by a left-wing government no-one has bothered to look into too closely because they are so charming and the people before them were so vile.

Obamaland is heavily set towards the American market, those conservatives he is trying to warn, as is made obvious from the first paragraph, a wonderful exercise in anticlimax, “For I am afraid I have a terrible message to impart. I have just seen the future. Your future. And I’m sorry to say it sucks.” Incidentally a less wonderful and more odious tactic to embrace American conservatives seems to be using the aforementioned literary brackets as a reminder of Obama’s race; “It’s coming to you in spades (sorry).” Apparently these nudge, nudge, wink, wink, hey your president’s a nigger brackets were inserted by an editor after the text was submitted but boy does it jar the tone and undermine Delingpole’s argument.

Anyway this purely American focus is a shame because the tactic Delingpole uses in this horror story for American conservatives is to systematically dismantle all the gimmicks New Labour imposed on the United Kingdom; the various bans and the squandering of public money, and the result is a damning critique of the present government which goes much further and is much more entertaining then the hackneyed recycling of the war on Iraq and the credit crunch.

Hence Delingpole devotes a chapter to how the unwieldy NHS, used as a parallel for Obama’s plans for universal healthcare, has ended up becoming a socialist nightmare of MRSA and supercomputers which do not work.

Initially the various calculations of public money are rolled out (in US dollars which is slightly confusing but in the spirit of the book), however the crux of Delingpole’s argument comes down to something much more tangible. In response to an imaginary patient describing the NHS and its hardworking staff as “the envy of the world,” Delingpole explains how when he did manage to give himself first degree burns lighting his Aga and subsequently ended up needing liquid morphine, he spent the hours after the accident phoning around friends asking for help, anything rather than face an eternity in a miserable sick ward in A and E.

This tactic of tangibility is one of the enjoyable things about reading Welcome to Obamaland. Delingpole draws his arguments about the liberal (American style) nightmare about to be visited on the United States from personal anecdotes. So Antonio Gramsci’s methods for winning the ideological war against the right are explained in terms of the writer not getting much sex in the 80’s, while the unquestioning socialist love-in where America now finds itself is explained via the medium of tedious hippies at Glastonbury festival, oh, and Woodstock was shit by the way, everyone was tripping on bad acid.  

Likewise his paen to the joys of fox hunting, “It has the sexiest, most glamorous uniform this side of Baywatch,” couched in Delingpole’s trademark social climbing conservatism, captures the joie de vivre of the sport and contrasts so well with the grim-faced, chippy reality of socialism. “(Fox-hunting) is frequently associated with fornication, wife swapping, stable-girl-rogering, fast car driving, and all manner of Rabelaisian excess, ribaldry and licentiousness….Which is why of course one of the British Labour government’s first priorities on coming to power was to ban it.”      

Delingpole’s marriage of conservatism with the cause of liberty is what makes his earlier concerns about the right’s marginalisation from political discourse so important (and why those racist brackets in the first chapter are so aggravating). As far as he is concerned socialism/the left, is rooted in a distrust for the individual and this explains why liberties have been so heavily curtailed in the UK by a Labour government. As Delingpole told me, “Even if Obama is well-intentioned   I am genuinely concerned that the people coming in underneath him are going to seriously regress the cause of American liberty.”

In fact the striking thing about Welcome to Obamaland is that the eponymous protagonist barely features at all. Instead Delingpole reminds the reader about the dangers of hordes of drones chanting “Yes We Can”. Freedom is curtailed, hunting gets banned and no-one gets any sex.