In yet another brutal take-down of ‘Lord’ Christopher Monckton’s claims to royalty and relevance, Bob Ward at The Guardian exposes the fabrications Monckton has whipped up to endear Margaret Thatcher fans to his own ‘work’ as a climate skeptic.

Ward’s piece, “Thatcher becomes latest recruit in Monckton’s climate sceptic campaign,” illustrates again the main point that DeSmogBlog readers know all too well – that climate denialism is about politics, not science.

Ward, who is policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at London School of Economics and Political Science, was inspired to write the piece after reading Monckton’s outlandish claims in a blog posted on Anthony Watts’ blog.

In his guest blog on WattsUpWithThat, Monckton claims that, among all the advisers to Margaret Thatcher in the mid-80s, he was “the only one who knew any science.” 

Monckton is not a scientist by any stretch, he holds a journalism degree. Apart from his recent paid speeches at tea parties and climate conferences as an anti-science crusader, his career in daily news and tabloid journalism has had nothing to do with science.  But that hasn’t stopped him from pretending to be one. He’s like the fake doctor in the 1940’s advertisements who really, really wants you to trust him that cigarettes are safe, and it’s okay to spray DDT on your kids.

Monckton then goes on to suggest that “it was I who – on the prime minister’s behalf – kept a weather eye on the official science advisers to the government, from the chief scientific adviser downward.”

Bob Ward reports in the Guardian:

“This revelation might be news to Lady Thatcher. On page 640 of her 1993 autobiography Margaret Thatcher: The Downing Street Years, the former prime minister describes how she grappled with the issue of climate change, referring only to “George Guise, who advised me on science in the policy unit”. Indeed, given Monckton’s purportedly crucial role, it seems to be heartless ingratitude from the Iron Lady that she does not find room to mention him anywhere in the 914-page volume on her years as prime minister.”

So it seems that Christopher Monckton’s claims over all these years that he was a key policy advisor to Thatcher are pretty disingenuous.  That’s not surprising from a character who regularly embellishes his non-voting non-recognized title of ‘Lord’ in the House of Commons.  Luckily for Monckton, “it is not in itself an offence to pretend to be a member of the House.” Now that he’s figured that out, perhaps he’ll start calling himself Prime Minister for the heck of it.

To clarify his role in Thatcher’s government, it seems Monckton started out in the early ’80s as a scribe taking minutes at meetings of a group loosely associated with Thatcher, then wrote a paper that supposedly endeared him to Downing Street, then magically became a key policy advisor a few years hence.

But if that claim were true – that Monckton was so dear an advisor to Thatcher – why would he have left such an important post in 1986 to take an assistant editor position at a (now defunct) tabloid newspaper?

As is so often the case with Christopher Monckton, the facts just don’t ever seem to back up his version of events. 

What will the good ‘Lord’ dream up next?