Christopher Booker

Journalist and author

Christopher Booker is a journalist and author. He is a weekly columnist in the Sunday Telegraph and author of The Great Deception: The Secret History of the European Union (2003) and The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories (2005). He began his career as a jazz critic for the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, before joining the BBC's That Was The Week That Was as a scriptwriter. He joined the Spectator as a columnist in the mid-1960s, later rejoining the Sunday Telegraph as a book reviewer. In the early '60s, he founded and became the first Editor of Private Eye, and still contributes to the magazine.

In the 1980s, Booker was part of the investigation, headed by Brigadier Tony Cowgill, into claims that British politicans were guilty of war crimes in allowing the Soviet Union to intern thousands of Cossack and Yugoslav prisoners at the end of World War Two. He later published an account of the inevtigation, A Looking Glass Tragedy (1997). In 2009, he published The Real Global Warming Disaster, which was described in The Guardian as "the definitive climate sceptics' manual".