Full of Wind

James Delingpole and I have a number of mutual friends and acquaintances, and even those who disagree with him speak warmly of him on a personal level.

But he is standing at Corby as an anti-windfarm candidate. There are no windfarms in Corby, nor even in East Northamptonshire. "Corby" does seem to be the constituency's only name; referring to it as "Corby and East Northamptonshire" was apparently an attempt to get the farming Tory vote out for an essentially New Labour candidate, the then Louise Bagshawe.

But Delingpole just assumes that windfarms must be important there, because they are so important to him that he has very recently moved out of London so that he can be annoyed by the spectacle of them. Based on that transition to a different part of the county, a matter of weeks ago, he imagines that he can pass himself off as a local candidate.

And he clearly assumes that he has a huge public profile, whereas in fact the task that he has set himself would be beyond even a columnist several times per week in The Sun or the Daily Mail,  never mind a man with a Telegraph Blog and two fortnightly columns, one of them as a television critic rather than as a commentator, in The Spectator, the mass circulation publication in which he has announced his candidacy.

It is all academic, of course. Labour, and Old Labour at that, is going to walk this by-election to fill the seat self-indulgently vacated by one of David Cameron's closest allies, the poster girl for whatever it is that his project entails. But it does give a fascinating, if far from flattering, insight into how media London sees both itself and everyone else.