He is angry, furious, bitter and instantly resentful, he feels bullied and set upon, he’s sulking, moody and reactionary. He is, in essence, a man child.

His anger leaks into his writing, he feels convinced that the whole world is made of stupid people who fall for the lies and spin of the neo-liberal elite, or the neo liberal elite themselves. Anyone who ever voices an alternative opinion to his narrow worldview is a bully or a thug.

He rants against ‘green energy’ and ‘renewable fuels’ and ‘the lies of the anthropomorphic climate change lobbyists.’ Every word he writes screams in your ear, he is furious, frustrated that we can’t see we’re all being conned, tricked, duped by the elite who are laughing at us.

I don't get that impression at all. I find the tone of his writing sneery and condescending. He comes across as a rather lightweight defender of his own privileges and those of the folks he likes to suck up to (rich businessmen, mostly). He's only pugnacious in a snooty, public-school-debating-society way: I picture him sniggering with his posh chums each time he feels he's crafted a witty verbal rebuff or offended a minority.

I'm glad I don't live in James Delingpole's world. For this cut-price Telegraph blogger, everything exists in stark black and white, clearly delineated between good and evil - where "evil" is a sinister, UN-based, left-wing conspiracy to destroy industrialism, and "good" is represented by the efforts of a ragtag band of right-wing libertarians and climate-change deniers to beat the environmental communists/Nazis before they can take over the world. It is a schoolboy vision, deluded and naive, of a topsy-turvy world in which the Royal Society and other august scientific bodies are peopled by "liars, cheats and frauds", while the little guy surfing the internet (Delingpole himself) who courageously disbelieves the white-coated "expert" elite is always right in the end.

Delingpole says he is a Second World War enthusiast and I can't help wondering whether an early life spent poring over endless comics has somehow affected his brain. I lost count of the number of comparisons to Nazis: environmentalists are Nazis, scientists are Nazis, UN officials are Nazis, and we must fight them on the beaches and never surrender to their dastardly intellectualism and cunning, elitist plans. This is a strange and myopic Little Englandism of the internet age and I imagine reading Watermelons is akin to having dinner with Melanie Phillips - the reader is subjected to an endless barrage of unsubstantiated opinion; every case is overstated and everyone else is a Nazi.

This is a strange and myopic Little Englandism of the internet age and I imagine reading Watermelons is akin to having dinner with Melanie Phillips - the reader is subjected to an endless barrage of unsubstantiated opinion; every case is overstated and everyone else is a Nazi.

Skeletal climate troll with a skin that's nanometers thin.Scourge of the disgusting liberal bias in so-called "facts" and "reality". Once argued on the Today programme that being nasty to posh people should be seen as a "hate crime" akin to gay-bashing. Guilty, m'lud !