James Delingpole
Politics • Culture • Writing
Erudite but accessible; warm and witty; definitely not woke
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Fish Story

“And there’s this tradition where you have to have a pet fish,” grumbled Girl when she became head of house at her boarding school. Girl was grumbling because she’s not especially a fish fan. But I am and I was delighted. My father was a world champion guppy breeder. Both Dick and I used to maintain our own tropical fish tanks. So getting daughter kitted out with an aquarium felt like a happy nostalgia trip.

That was five years ago, since when all bar one of the fish we bought for daughter’s aquarium have died. I did feel a bit sorry for the solitary molly left behind in the tank, which I’ve been feeding while Girl is away travelling. But the Fawn - as wives generally are, more ruthless and practical in these matters - told me I’d be an idiot to buy any more because we’d be stuck in a permanent cycle of unwanted fish ownership.

It was easy for Fawn to say that, though. She wasn’t the one who had to look at the lonely fish staring at her with its lonely fish eyes every time you fed it. That was my job, just as cleaning the tank has always been my job. She has always done the laundry (obvs). I have always taken charge of the children’s pets. This goes at least as far back as the days when I used to have to clear out the cage of the kid’s guinea pigs, Lily Scampers and Pickles Deathclaw.

Even though guinea pigs are, to all intents and purposes, just stupid, useless, edible rodents, you do become oddly attached to them when you’re in charge of looking after them. In fact, when the devil dog belonging to some kid from the nearby housing estate - this was when we were living in Sarf London - vaulted our garden wall and killed the guineas in front of me, it was about the only occasion in my adult life when I’ve almost cried. The only occasion when I actually cried was when a similar dog performed the same manoeuvre and killed our cat.

Anyway, it’s the same with fish. Sure a fish is just a fish is just a fish. But when you’re in sole charge of their environment - as opposed to say fishing for them or frying them - you become quite fond of them. Not only that but you become acutely aware of your moral responsibility towards their wellbeing.

So what to do about this lone molly? I ran through the options. 1. Squash it and put it quickly out of its misery. 2. Pop down to Pets At Home and get it some tank mates. 3. Find a new home for the fish. 4. Take the last fish back to the shop. 5. Ignore the problem and pretend it wasn’t happening.

I only included 3 and 4 because some of you will be naive enough to think of them as valid options. But they’re really not. 3. No one, anywhere, wants your second hand solitary fish. As for 4. I tried this once with a rabid biting hamster. “Your problem, now, mate” was the pet shop’s response. Not that I’m suggesting the molly was dangerous. But a pet shop is not going to be able, in any conscience, to resell a fish of indeterminate age or one that might be diseased.

If I’m perfectly honest, the most sensible and probably least cruel solution would have been 1. But somehow it felt wrong. As for 2, that was clearly a non-starter, a) because I don’t particularly like Pets At Home. Not only is it shockingly expensive but I loathe the way they insist on logging all your personal details before they sell you a fish, like they’re the Piscine Gestapo and they reserve the right to burst into your home any time of day and night to check whether your aquarium is clean, uncrowded and the right temperature. But also, clearly, it would get me a bollocking from the Fawn for being such a sentimental fool.

That left the ‘do nothing’ option 5, which is generally, in my experience, the most satisfying solution to most situations. At least it would be just so long as I could manage to persuade myself that the fish was perfectly happy on its own, or if not happy at least that it was going to cope well enough, and that anyway it was just a cold blooded pond creature so did it really matter that much either way?

When you’ve only one fish to feed you don’t really need to do many feedings. One feed every three days is more than enough, I’d say. But this only added to my guilt. “This fish is on his own for two days out of three with absolutely nothing to do but swim around his tank, maybe occasionally catching sight of the solitary shrimp. And the only excitement or even interest of his life happens on the third day when, for all of thirty seconds, I come to Girl’s empty bedroom to give him his feed. That’s it. That’s all. Those thirty seconds are the only things giving any meaning or variety to the fish’s life sentence in solitary confinement.”

Luckily, I had a holiday in Colombia booked, so that meant two whole weeks of not having to think about the fish. I just had to take care not to look too closely into any of the rivers I swam in, because Colombia is one of the places mollies live in the wild and had I seen a bunch of them en masse, hanging out in their big fishy gang and looking all healthy and content it might have been given me guilt flashbacks.

In my absence, Boy took charge of fish duties. Though he hates to admit it he has quite a lot in common with me because one of the first things he said when I got back was: “Do you ever worry about that fish?” I agreed, eagerly, that I did. We got talking, one guilt victim to another. “I think he might be depressed,” said Boy. “Me too. They do get depressed. Grandpa told me this when he had his fish house. Fish get moods, just like humans,” I said. “What’s really upsetting is the way when you come into the room he comes to see you. Like he’s THAT desperate for entertainment…”, said Boy.

So we hatched a plan. In the guise of getting more ludicrously expensive specialist pet food for our cat (whose breed’s special shaped mouth requires special shaped biscuits: or so the manufacturers ludicrously claim) we would go into Pets At Home and…

“Good news!”, we told Mum/Fawn when we got back from our shopping expedition. “We got more food for the cat.” “Oh, well done” said Fawn. “And also, by accident, we ended up getting some more fish. And some snails. The snails are really useful because they clean the tank, apparently, so that’s good isn’t it?”

The Fawn was much less cross than I thought she’d be. In fact, she actually seemed quite pleased. Boy and I hurried upstairs to introduce the new fish - at least one of which was female because it was evidently gravid - to their new home and their new friend. You’re supposed to do it gradually - put a bit of tank water in their bag, then leave the bag floating in the tank so the temperature reaches approximate equilibrium - but we couldn’t wait.

This is the point in the story where the bathos usually occurs. Either the two new fish gang up on the original and peck his fins off. Or the original gangsta fish, territorial, attacks the other two. Or they swim into different parts of the tank and ignore each other. Or the shock of the new arrivals proves too much for the old lag and the next we know he’s floating belly up at the top of his tank while the arrivistes nip at his corpse.

Amazingly, though, none of these disappointments transpired. On the contrary, the results exceded our wildest fantasies. Within moments, the three fish were cuddling up to one another like long lost friends. The old fish, insofar as it is possible to interpret fish behaviour, seemed genuinely delighted to have gained some company. His (or possibly her - I can’t be sure what sex he or she is, because it’s not like, if she’s a girl, she has had any opportunities to get pregnant) movements have become more animated; he’s much less mopey and more interested when we pay him his visits. The fish tank that we associated with misery and guilt has become a source of joy.

No really. I’m not exaggerating when I say that buying those two stupid extra fish completely transformed the mood of the house. Seeing those three fish being happy made me happy. And the Boy happy. And Fawn happy.

Who’d have thought it, eh?

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James and Dick’s CHRISTMAS Special 2025

Featuring Dick. And James. And Unregistered Chicken. And possibly some other special guests.

Not included in ticket price but available so you don’t starve/die of thirst: nice pizzas out of wood-fired ovens; street food.

VIP Tickets - £120 including bell-ringing lesson, walk with James, front row seats, church tour

Location is: My neck of the woods. Northants. Nearest stations, Banbury/Long Buckby. Junction 11 of M40.

Friday, 28th November 2025. Starts at 5pm

https://www.jamesdelingpole.co.uk/Shop/?section=events#events

00:02:47
Big Birthday Bash

James Delingpole’s Big Birthday Bash August 1st. Starring Bob Moran, Dick Delingpole and Friends. Tickets £40. VIP Tickets (limited to 20) £120

Venue: tbc Central England/East Midlands - off M40 and M1 in middle of beautiful countryside with lots of b n bs etc.

Buy Tickets / More Info:
https://jamesdelingpole.co.uk/Live/bob-moran.html

If you have any questions regarding the event - please contact us via our website:
https://jamesdelingpole.co.uk/#Contact

00:04:15
Nick Kraljevic

If you had to escape to another country which would it be? James runs through some of the options with Aussie cybersecurity guy and entrepreneur Nick Kraljevic. Nick - a Delingpod addict since Australia’s crazy lockdowns - talks about how to claim dual citizenship (handy if your family originates from somewhere like Croatia, as Nick’s does) and which countries are currently the most welcoming. His two top choices may come as a surprise. Nick is the founder of Societates Civis - www.soc-civ.com - which can help you make the move.

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How environmentalists are killing the planet, destroying the economy and stealing your children's future.

In Watermelons, an updated edition of his ground-breaking 2011 book, JD tells the shocking true story of how a handful of political activists, green campaigners, voodoo scientists and psychopathic billionaires teamed up to invent a fake crisis called ‘global warming’.

This updated edition includes two new chapters which, like a geo-engineered flood, pour ...

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Posted by Tom Woods this morning. I concur! Breakfast is for farmers.

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James's Big Birthday Bash - August 1st. Be There!

Because I love you all and want you to be happy, I’d like few things more than if you were ALL able to join me at my James Delingpole Birthday Bash on August 1st.

Unfortunately, numbers are strictly limited. So please don’t be one of those people - I’m the procrastinating type myself, so I know whereof I speak - who sends me a pleading message a few days before the event saying: “Can you squeeze me in?” Because tragically I might not be able to help.

Here’s why I think you’ll enjoy it. The main event is me doing a live Delingpod with Bob Moran and the conversation is going to be great. You know it is. Apart from my brother Dick - who’ll also be appearing, obvs. - there’s probably no one with whom I have a greater rapport than Bob. And, gosh, do we have a lot to talk about: chemtrails, death jabs, dinosaurs, Satanists, the New World Order etc. All the stuff, basically, that you can’t discuss with your Normie friends, but which here we’ll cover freely and frankly because, hey, you’ll be ...

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Christianity 1 New Age 0

If you haven’t already - I’m a bit behind the curve here - I urge you to watch this car crash encounter between Christian apologist and scholar Wes Huff and ‘ancient civilisation’ researcher Billy Carson.

It’s an excruciating experience - probably best to watch it on double speed - for a couple of reasons. First, the hapless podcast host/debate moderator Mark Minard is somewhat out of his depth and is also clearly embarrassed at having one of his guests (Carson, sitting right next to him) eviscerated in front of him by his other guest. This causes him to interrupt the debate at intervals and expound well-meaningly but not very interestingly on his own half-baked views on the mysteries of the universe. You feel a bit sorry for him but you do rather wish he’d shut up.

Second, and mainly, it’s painful to watch Carson being outclassed and outgunned by someone who knows and understands his purported field of expertise so much better than he does. Carson was reportedly so upset by the encounter that he ...

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I Wish I Weren't a Christian

No, not really, obviously. I’m just venting my frustration on how incredibly hard it is sometimes.

For example, if you read your scripture regularly you will notice that time and again Jesus enjoins us to forgive our enemies. This is emphasised in Matthew where He tells us that there’s only one prayer we really need and that’s the Lord’s Prayer.

In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus leaves us in no doubt that for followers of the way forgiveness is not an optional extra.

Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us.

There’s an implicit contract here. If you want to be worthy of God’s forgiveness then you must do likewise.

I say the Lord’s Prayer every day, from the moment I wake till the moment I’m about to go to sleep - and lots of times in between.

The first parts are easy. What’s not to like about hallowing the Lord’s name and celebrating his eternal kingdom and being assured of all that daily bread He provides?

But the forgiving trespasses part can be a bit of a stumbling block because it seems so onerous - and unfair.

Surely if someone wrongs you, especially when unprovoked, the proper and proportionate response ought to be to smite them sevenfold? At the very least.

How can it not be right to retaliate when you’ve got right on your side?

How can it especially not be right when you happen to have been blessed by God with a mind that can produce the kind of next-level invective, weapons-grade cattiness and implacable, Daisy-cutter bomb logic that utterly obliterates anyone foolish enough to cross you?

Not only would the revenge be just - but fun too!

I’ve tried these arguments, over the years, on my morning walk with the dog, which is one of the occasions where I go through the Psalms and commune with God. But I can never quite get my point past the goalkeeper.

I’ll say stuff like: “C’mon, God. Give me a break. I’m not St Francis of Assisi. Can’t you just give me a bit of leeway, just this once, to satisfy my baser urges? I’ll be good afterwards, promise.”

Or: “But taking out wrong ‘uns in an amusing way is my brand. It’s how I make my living. You surely don’t want me to starve, do you?”

Resisting the temptation to deploy my powers is tough. It’s like being blessed with a huge penis only to discover “No sorry. The Lord has decided that your path is to become a monk. So I’m afraid that magnificent appendage is for peeing, only.

Why, God? Why?

The problem is that the Bible doesn’t really offer many get-out clauses. It’s not just the Lord’s Prayer that enjoins forgiveness. There’s that possibly even more annoying bit where Jesus tells us - say what? Really?? - that we should ‘Turn the other cheek.’

And then there are all the Psalms - which Jesus quoted more than almost any other book, so they must be on point - urging us to be patient and to let God take care of all the smiting.

https://www.jamesdelingpole.co.uk/Podcasts/Archive/show.php?slug=2025-08-13-psalm-37-pooyan-mehrshahi

For example, there’s Psalm 37:

Leave off from wrath; and let go displeasure. Fret not thyself else thou shalt be moved to do evil.

Time and again you find the psalmist - usually David - asking, in so many words, “How much longer am I going to put up with this injustice? It’s so unfair!”

And God’s reply is always: “Fret not. I’ve got this!”

In Psalm 73, another of my favourites, the psalmist gets so frustrated he wonders why there’s any point being good when behaving badly seems so much more profitable.

Yea, and I had almost said even as they. [ie the Ungodly] But lo, then I should have condemned the generation of thy children.

But then he goes into the sanctuary of God and learns the fate of the ungodly.

Namely how thou dost set them in the slippery places and castest them down and destroyest them.

O how suddenly do they consume, perish and come to a fearful end.

Yea, even like as a dream when one awaketh, so shalt thou make their image to vanish out of the city.

https://www.jamesdelingpole.co.uk/Podcasts/Archive/show.php?slug=2025-12-09-james-is-joined-by-preacher-stephen-white-to-unpack-the-beauty-and-depth-of-psalm-73

The language and imagery of the Psalms is so magnificent that I could spend all day reciting them. But if you’re reciting them merely for the great poetry then you’re surely guilty of the kind of vainglorious burbling Jesus warned us against in Matthew 6. You need to imbibe the meaning also - and accept that if Jesus took this stuff seriously then you probably should too.

Not, by the way, that I am remotely wasting any time fantasising about my enemies consuming, perishing and coming to a fearful end. On the contrary, I feel sorry for them because choosing the wrong path, away from God, is punishment in itself.

I prefer to take my example from one of the extraordinary monks featured in Archimandrite Tikhon’s Everyday Saints. [Unfortunately I can’t look up his name because I gave my copy to ortho bro Dick].

This monk was sent to the Gulag by the Soviets - but not before being cruelly tortured by a sadistic NKVD man who broke all his fingers. Many years later, the monk was reunited with his torturer, now so thoroughly ashamed he became an ardent Christian.

Please don’t think for a moment that I am comparing my feeble attempts at forbearance to that of this saintly monk. I’m sure I will fail to meet the exacting standards of saintliness on many, many occasions in the future, which will be my loss and your gain. After all, I’m sure my articles are SO much more fun when I’m putting the boot in rather than when I’m turning that other cheek.

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James and Dick's Christmas Special - Don't Miss Out!

I was about to start writing Part Two of my piece Most Journalists Don’t Realise They Are Working For Satan, when a thought occurred: “Hang on, James. Shouldn’t you be plugging your show?”

It’s this Saturday, on the off chance you are interested. I quite understand if you’re not: you’re probably busy, this miserable weather doesn’t make you feel like venturing away from home, and anyway, it’ll just be me and Dick on a stage talking rubbish as usual.

You’re right. Dick and I sitting on a stage talking rubbish is indeed what you’re going to get this Saturday evening. As usual we won’t be at all prepared. Well, Dick might but I won’t because I’m lazyI like to keep it real.

The only thing I will have to do in advance is wrap Dick’s present which I got him from Russia. He’s going to really love it because it is about as Dick a present as you could possibly imagine and I want to watch his little eyes light up as he tears off the wrapping.

But to be fair, I do have roughly in my mind some of the few things I want to talk about. One of them is ‘Who Really Runs The World?’, which obviously for us batshit-crazy tinfoil hat loons is one of those ongoing conversations which keeps changing the more we learn. Another is ‘Was Churchill more evil than Hitler?’ We’ve talked about this stuff before but my take on these issues in 2025 is going to be subtly different from the ones you heard in 2024 or 2023, let alone in say 2019 when I was about 90 per cent Normie. (I’m allowing myself 10 per cent off because I did at least know back then that climate change was bollocks).

Will we play the “Yes/No” game? I doubt it because the answer always “No” these days. But you never know. Perhaps Dick might surprise me. Or perhaps he might introduce a wild card game he has invented for the occasion.

There will be no Christmas decorations. Sorry but it’s too early.

Nor, likely, will I wear my Christmas jumper. Too hot.

But we will do the Lords Prayer at the beginning - inter alia, to ward off any demons and because it makes everyone feel amazingly uplifted - and Jerusalem at the end.

Also, you get to see Unregistered Chickens, who just get better and better. Or so I’m told by one of the band members. Dick and Andy the lead singer keep making bitchy remarks about the fact that even when they’re playing at my events I never come to see them. Or only for a few minutes. I try to explain, honestly, that this isn’t because I’m too grand or because I think they’re crap but because before you do a show the very last thing you want to be doing is hanging out with the audience because it drains all the energy you need for the show.

Still I think the thing you’ll enjoy most about the event is hanging out with like minded folk. You’ll be able to put faces to the names of some of the fellow Awake people you know from online. And you’ll be able to talk about all the things - Michelle Obama’s big swinging lunchpack; hybrid creatures bioengineered in the same Antartica DUMB where they breed the children for adrenochrome, were the Thunderbirds puppets actually devised as a result of remote viewing technology which enabled Gerry Anderson to see into the future from the 1960s and watch Konstantin Kisin and the other one presenting Triggerpod? etc - that you will probably avoid bringing up with family round the Christmas dinner table.

It’ll be fun. You’ll really, really enjoy it.

It will be no skin off my nose if you don’t. But I just think if you don’t come you’ll be missing out.

https://www.jamesdelingpole.co.uk/Shop/Events/james-and-dick-s-christmas-special-2025

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All They Want Is Your Soul

One of my unlikely podcast guests this week is Nick Griffin.

I say ‘unlikely’ because I’m always slightly wary of people who have been involved in mainstream politics - even if, like Griffin, it was only at the margins.

https://locals.com/jamesdelingpole/feed?post=7481845

Griffin - or Nick, as I suppose I should call him, now he’s my new mate - used to be the leader of the notorious British National Party (BNP). Like the party from which it splintered, the National Front, the BNP was and is one of those outfits which the mainstream media likes to brand as ‘fascist’ and ‘far right’ and ‘basically a bunch of Nazis.’

This would be why, in my days as an MSM journalist, Nick never crossed my radar. He wasn’t the sort of character of whom you could say to your editor “How about we hear what that Nick Griffin has to say for himself?” It would be tantamount to career suicide because, imagine, what if you quite liked him or he said something people agreed with? Far better not to take the risk - and to ignore him - as all self-respecting media folk did.

Anyway, now that very belatedly I’ve had chat with him I’ve discovered that, yes, I do quite like him. And also that he says lots of things I agree with. Many of the people who’ve listened to the podcast share my pleasant surprise. Here’s a typical comment:

“I was brought up believing the BBC hype - NickG is equivalent to Satan […] Please do bring Nick back on. Even some of my ‘awake-ish’ friends still recoil in horror at the mention of his name. This exposure can right this wrong.”

My main reservation about inviting Nick onto the Delingpod wasn’t that he’d be too controversial but that he might be a bit too conventional in his outlook, a bit Normie.

But on this, too, I was pleasantly surprised. As an example of how interesting his conversation is - and perhaps as an incentive to encourage those of you who aren’t already paid subscribers to sign up for an early listen before the podcast goes out free - I want to share with you one of his best anecdotes.

It was prompted when I asked him about whether any attempts had ever been made by shadowy forces to buy him off.

Yes, Nick said. Attempts had been made on a couple of occasions, one of them when he was a member of the National Front.

Representatives of an ultra-orthodox Jew in New York called Rabbi Schiller offered the National Front a large sum of money, on one somewhat surprising condition, which I shall reveal in a moment.

In Italy, meanwhile, on another occasion, some of Nick’s ‘far-right’ fellow travellers were made a similarly generous offer by a wealthy Jewish outfit. Again, the money was dependent on the fulfilment of one surprising term.

Then, Griffin went on, there was the example of his friend in Northern Ireland, a social marketing genius who was offered a blank cheque by Jewish interests, but only on one condition.

Here’s the interesting part. Perhaps you thought - as I certainly did - that in all three instances the Jewish donors would have made the same request: talking more about the Holocaust, maybe; toning down the anti-Semitism; avoiding criticism of Israel; something like that.

But no. The things that were requested were all very different - and also quite unexpected.

In the case of the National Front, the request was that they should stop griping about the perils and iniquities of the banking system.

With the Italians, the request was that they cease to sing the praises of Corneliu Codreanu, a Romanian fascist leader - founder of the Iron Guard - assassinated in the 1930s.

And in the case of the Northern Irish marketing guru, it was that he should stop talking about the evils of abortion.

The three very different provisos only had one thing in common: each was very dear to the heart of the people to whom the money offer had been made. To the National Front, banking was the key plank of their economic argument. To the Italians, Codreanu was a beloved romantic hero and role model. To the Northern Irishman, crusading against abortion was a moral imperative.

“They offer you everything you need,” explained Griffin. “But in every case they are only prepared to give it to you on condition that you sacrifice the thing closest to your heart.”

Perhaps experts in the Kabbala, or the Babylonian Mystery Religions, or the occult generally can explain to me what is going on here. But clearly these offers have great ritual significance - and also go some way towards explaining the nature of a world whose temporary god, according to the scriptures, is Satan.

Yes, you will be granted whatever you want. But not until you’ve first sold your soul.

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