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Aug. 22, 2019 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
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Delingpod 33: Jeffrey Lee
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Welcome to the Dellingpod with me, James Dellingpod This week is an example of why I think, no, actually I don't even think I know, why my podcast is the best podcast in the world.
It's because I've noticed recently that other people have been doing podcasts, sort of pale imitations of mine, and they've been using loads of the same guests.
So you see the same people cropping up again and again.
And I'm not dissing the usual suspects because the reason they're usual suspects is they've got loads of interesting stuff to say.
But I'm so excited about this week's guest, and I know I always say this, but he's a mate of mine, an old mate of mine from Oxford, and I haven't pretty much seen him since Oxford.
And he wrote this amazing book, which I want to draw to your attention.
I also want to talk to him about other stuff as well, but his book is called God's Wolf.
Welcome to the podcast, Jeff Lee.
Thanks, James.
And I guess there'll be a sign of how well I do if I get some invitations from those other competitive podcasts after this.
And also, I have put you on the spot now.
I mean, it is now requisite that you are one of the best podcast guests ever.
Otherwise, people are just going to go, yeah.
But the reason he's not on the podcast is because he's really boring.
Believe me, I feel the pressure and I've avoided doing this podcast up till now because of that pressure.
But I totally love, I can't recommend your book highly enough and it's about a topic which you really, one can't read enough about because it's got everything, hasn't it?
It's got swords and heat and death and chivalry and other stuff.
The Crusades.
Yeah, well, that's what attracted me, of course, initially to that period, is the romance and the, as you say, the chivalry, the unbridled violence of the medieval period, and particularly the Crusades, going to far-off places and fighting people.
Outremer.
I love that term.
Outremer was what?
The whole of the Crusader area.
Yes, so Outremer, beyond the sea, yes, it's romantic, more romantic when you say it in French, isn't it?
But yeah, so these guys were picking up from their lives in Europe and going to this remote, mysterious, holy place across the sea with no idea of what they were going to find there and with incredibly, incredibly brave and pioneering people.
When they got there, the lifestyle was so much better, wasn't it?
If they played it right, they could live so much better than they would have done in Northern Europe.
Well, yeah, there was the lifestyle and the civilization in the Middle East at that time was far ahead of Europe, which was pretty backward and barbaric.
They had running water in their homes.
They had baths.
They had carpets on the floors.
They had sugar.
They had all sorts of exotic fruits.
And they had much greater learning at the time.
The Muslim scholars had kept alive a lot of the learning of the Greek philosophers and so on.
So they had a lot more thought.
And the crusaders came upon something, a civilization in a way of life, which, yes, blew their minds.
And a lot of the crusader propaganda, actually, to try and get, after the first crusade, to get more crusaders to come to the East was based upon that.
And they were saying things like, if you come to Palestine, if you have a house in, or if you have a cottage in France, you will have a palace here in Palestine.
And for a lot of crusaders, that was true, because when they stormed cities like Jerusalem, common soldiers were seizing huge houses and all the wealth in it and suddenly transforming themselves into very wealthy men.
But they were kind of misled, weren't they?
Because the First Crusade was a raging success.
They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
They took Jerusalem.
And it was kind of all downhill from there, wasn't it, on the subsequent Crusades?
I don't think that's fair.
It's true in the sense that the first crusade, which took Jerusalem in 1099, was a success beyond anybody's wildest dreams.
It was an impossibility that these disparate armies managed to march across Europe and Turkey and down through Palestine, defeating huge armies on the way and take Jerusalem.
So that was a remarkable success.
But then they had to establish themselves in Palestine.
There were lots more cities to conquer, lots more ground to occupy.
They were still always short of manpower compared to the Muslim enemies around them.
And so it was a constant warfare.
But they still did manage to take most of that literal, which is now Israel and Lebanon, all that area, and hold it for almost 100 years.
And then still hold on to some coastal cities for another 100 years after that.
So the main crusader establishment, if you like, lasted for a century, essentially.
Yeah.
That doesn't sound very long to me, actually.
Well, in the great scheme of things, it's not, but that's many lifetimes of men.
I mean, there were many crusader families who had many generations born in the Holy Land, so they were essentially Easterners.
So at the end of that hundred years, was that it?
Were they all driven out?
After the first hundred years, so that Jerusalem fell to the Muslims again in 1187, and then the crusader presence in Palestine was restricted to the coastal cities and some castles, like the great castle at Crack des Chevaliers, which no one could take.
And they lasted again until almost 1300, when those final coastal cities were eradicated by the Mamluks from Egypt.
So the main crusader states, if you like, lasted for about 100 years, but then the crusader presence in Palestine lasted until...
The end of the 13th century.
Did you do this stuff at Oxford?
I studied Arabic and Islamic history at Oxford.
Was that to get in?
Actually no, it wasn't, but it was an area of interest of mine.
I've been interested in the Israeli-Palestine conflict for a long time and I studied other languages and I thought Arabic would be interesting.
But also one of the reasons I studied that was because I loved history and I was able to study with one of the greatest historians in the world, Patricia Croner, on that subject.
But also that the course allowed me to do one period of European history, which was the medieval period, which I loved, and so I was able to do that focusing on the Crusades while I was at Oxford, yes.
I don't think I know of anyone else who's reading that.
I mean, how many were there on the course?
That specific course, I think I was the only one who was doing those two things.
But of course, there were lots of people doing Arabic, and lots of people doing Arabic with other subjects.
A lot of people did Arabic and Persian, for instance.
So you can speak Arabic?
Yeah.
And any other Middle Eastern languages?
I have poor Farsi.
I'm married to a Persian, so I have learnt a lot of Farsi by osmosis, but I've never studied it.
Actually, Farsi is much easier to learn than Arabic.
It's an Indo-European language, so many words are very similar to the words you and I use.
So mother is mudda, brother is brada, dor is dar.
So basically what you're saying is, I can speak Persian, I just don't know it.
Exactly.
That's great.
It makes it easier for me because there are a lot of Arabic loanwords now in Persian since the Arabic conquest in the 7th century.
They don't get on, do they, the Arabs and the Persians?
They do not.
One of the first things I learned about Persians when I first met my best friend as a Persian since I was 12 years old, and I remember calling him an Arab, and I got pretty short shrift when I was 12 years old from the Persians I knew, who taught me very quickly that Persians and Arabs are very different.
Is it like the rivalry between...
I discovered when I was living in South London that there is no love lost between Caribbean black people and African blacks, because...
The black Africans look down on the Caribbean blacks because basically they got enslaved.
They're a bunch of slaves.
And the Caribbean blacks think that basically anyone who's still in Africa is a jungle bunny.
I mean, the racism among non-white people is far greater than...
Yes, I think you...
I've had that from Nigerian friends of mine as well who make those references.
And when it comes to Arabs and Persians, yes, the Persians, particularly I think from the Persian side, really look down upon the Arabs.
They call them locust eaters.
Right.
And of course the Persians have this great...
Thousands of years of history and empire and civilization.
You know, Cyrus the Great, they say, did the first human rights.
And so they look back on this imperial, civilized past, and they compared with the Arabs who conquered them, who were essentially Bedouin from the desert, and the Persians really have never really got over that.
And do the Arabs have similar kind of contempt for the Persians?
They're sort of effete and...
Not that I've come across, no.
So I don't think it goes the other way.
And I guess if you're the conquerors, I guess it's easier to be blasé about those you've conquered and from whom you've taken a lot of good things of their culture like architecture and poetry and things like that, which the Arabs quite simply just absorbed into their civilization.
Now, earlier on, I heard you using the kind of the modern, politically correct pronunciation of Muslim, which is muslim.
Now, I can forgive that because, after all, you've been immersed in this culture since university.
But it is usually a tell.
For somebody who's about to give a really politically correct reading of the Middle East.
And I want to reassure my listeners that in your case, this ain't so.
Because God's Wolf is...
It's not the conventional history of the Crusades, is it?
You've challenged some of the conventional views about the Crusades.
Yeah, well, it's interesting.
I say Muslim because that is how the S is pronounced in Arabic, obviously.
But yeah, I hope the book is historically correct, not politically correct.
And I didn't approach the subject from that point of view necessarily.
I approached it because I felt that the protagonist, Reynald de Chatillon, this great crusader character, had a bad press or that he wasn't properly dealt with in the sources.
But when you actually come to examine it in detail, you realize that the reason Reynald has not had his rightful place in history is because he does not fit with the current paradigm, the zeitgeist, the received narrative about what the Crusades were. the received narrative about what the Crusades were.
Exactly.
Well, I mean, Stephen Runciman, for example, is he very PC on the Crusades?
Runciman is, he wrote a marvellous three-part history of the Crusades, which everyone should read, and it's still the staple book on the subject, and I reread it all the time.
But yes, he, and certain things, he does toe a similar line.
And he has his own prejudices.
For instance, Runciman loved the Byzantine Empire.
So everything, all his crusader writing was seen through the prism of how it affected the Right.
But yes, when it comes to Reynold, he is very much in the camp of this man was a rampant, bloodthirsty aggressor.
And to a certain extent that the Crusaders as a whole were these barbaric thugs who came to mess up this lovely Middle Eastern civilization.
And if you asked most people in the street now, those that were even aware of the Crusades, they would come up with the line that, yeah, we were these brutal thugs who went and invaded Muslim territory.
And we did all these terrible things and we should feel guilty about it.
Isn't that the line?
I think that's true, and I think that people do hold that view as a whole.
In fact, the Pope, I think it was around the year 2000, issued a kind of almost an apology for the Crusades.
And there is still this kind of residual guilt that we somehow went and invaded and were running a sort of colonial experiment, and that the local Muslims were these unsuspecting, peaceful victims of Western aggression, which of course is just complete...
Anachronistic nonsense, because they were fighting amongst themselves quite happily all the time.
Just another belligerent force was introduced into that area.
And that, I think this is topical, because that view is held by, as you say, people who have any awareness of the period.
And when it comes to Reynold, I remember talking to Boris Johnson last time I saw him, a couple of years ago.
And Boris said, Jeff, he said, what are you doing now?
I said, I'm writing a biography of Reynold de Chatillon.
And Boris, of course, knew who Reynald was.
He said, why are you doing that, Geoff?
The man was a complete bum.
So this idea that crusaders were wicked has permeated even unto Downing Street.
Right.
Yes, well, you introduced him at the beginning by pointing out that a letter bomb from Al-Qaeda was addressed to Reynald de Chatillon.
Yes, the Crusades are alive.
So in 2010, I think it was, yes, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula sent a couple of bombs by FedEx to explode over Chicago, and one of them was addressed to Reynald de Chatillon, a man who died 900 years ago.
Yeah, because I think apart from Boris, who's hyper-educated, I don't think many people would have heard of him now, and yet you say his name lives among...
Yes, he's still a hate figure amongst Muslims, certainly Muslims who are engaged and Islamists, because he was a violent enemy of the Muslims at that time, an extremely effective warrior, which has led to his name going down in infamy with the Muslims, understandably.
Less so that it's understandably gone down in infamy with the West as well.
Yeah, so I think we must stop this teasing and actually cut to the chase.
Tell us a bit about this guy's extraordinary story.
So Reynald came from what is now Burgundy, a younger son, so he probably didn't have much inheritance there.
So he, like many younger sons, up sticks and went with the second crusade, in this case, to Palestine to fight the Muslims, to fight for Jerusalem and the Holy Land, which was a We're good to go.
So he became Prince of Antioch.
He was handsome, ruthless, ambitious, a very effective warrior.
As soon as he became Prince of Antioch, he started to give some other aspects to his reputation as well.
The head churchman of Antioch was very annoyed that this man had come in and taken control of the city.
So Reynolds, who teach him a lesson, had him stripped naked and tied in the sun on the top of the castle tower and smeared with honey so that bees and other insects tormented this aged prelate throughout the day.
And that was the kind of guy he was.
If someone gave him any shtick, he took no prisoners.
Yeah.
Okay, so he's Prince of Antioch, and then how does he establish his reputation?
Well, he fought the Muslims very effectively while he was Prince of Antioch, kept them away, and kept away some very powerful Muslim princes from taking control there.
He also added to his negative reputation by attacking the Byzantine island of Cyprus, which he sacked with great violence.
It must be said, though, in retribution for being cheated, By the Byzantine Emperor of some money which was owed him.
Nevertheless, what his troops did in Cyprus was something really quite extraordinarily shocking.
He then was captured by the Muslims and spent 15 years in prison in Aleppo until he was ransomed by what was then the highest ever ransom paid for a crusader leader 200,000.
Who paid that?
It's not exactly clear who paid that, but it was...
The sources say it was raised by his friends, but it's not clear who those friends were.
Now that scene in Aleppo...
I find extraordinary that anyone could survive a year in the Aleppo dungeons, let alone 15 years.
So just describe what it was like in that mound.
Yes, Aleppo was built upon this mound which has been there for centuries.
In fact, they say Abraham grazed his sheep on the hill of Aleppo, which is Haleb, which is milk in Arabic, which is where the stories come from that Abraham lived there.
And it's built on this mound which is like a warren of tunnels and dungeons.
And many crusader leaders were imprisoned there and some died there in agony.
One, Jocelyn of Edessa, the Count of Edessa, died blinded in a jail.
And then one of his sons was then thrown into the same jail by the Muslim leader there to kind of increase his agony.
The leader of the Templars as well, one of the leaders of the Templars, a Knights Templar, died there in the dungeons of Aleppo as well.
So it was really harsh imprisonment.
You didn't want to get captured, did you, by Nur al-Din, was the bad boy?
Yeah, Nur al-Din was the Muslim leader then.
He was a powerful warrior.
And when he captured these guys, he didn't ransom them.
A lot of leaders in the Middle East would be ransomed because they could be very valuable.
And so it was quite worth keeping opposition leaders alive so he could then ransom them back and make a lot of money.
Nur al-Din didn't do that.
When he captured you, if you were a leader, he stuck you in jail.
He preferred the kudos of having crusader leaders in prison to the cash which they could raise.
It was only after he died that the weaker leaders who followed him decided to ransom Reynaud and let him back into the Crusader fold.
But if you weren't a bigwig, if you weren't a prince or whatever, you were likely going to be offed, weren't you?
Probably hideously killed by the...
The Saracens or whatever.
Yeah, if you were a local Christian fighting with the Crusaders, that's it.
If you were what they called a Turcopole fighting on their side, that was automatic execution.
Beheaded?
Usually beheaded, yeah.
And then they stuck their heads on the...
They stuck their heads on spears or, you know, after some battles there were so many heads arriving back in Damascus and things, they said they were coming in like watermelons.
Yeah.
It was one of the things the Muslims liked to do after battles was behead the dead and also, unfortunately, in some cases, behead prisoners as well.
But didn't Richard I also attach the heads of captured Saracens to his Richard the Lionheart was a fantastic warrior.
His presence alone could terrify entire armies and he was known for taking the heads of the Saracens who he had killed and attaching them to his bridle so he would ride back after a battle with these heads slung around his horse.
Was that considered OTT or was it fairly routine for the period?
Pretty routine.
I don't think any of the...
Those descriptions are simply...
Those scenes are just mentioned.
They're not mentioned with any particular commentary.
They seem to be just accepted.
So, when we watch films like...
Sorry, Kingdom of Heaven.
Was that the Ridley Scott one?
Yeah.
When we watch films like that, which I haven't seen yet, but you've described it in the book.
But the general take now, Western take on the Crusades, is slightly guilt-ridden, isn't it?
And it's slightly like, we are not worthy.
The Saracens, and particularly Saladin, this marvellous prince, he was so much more civilised than we were.
We were barbaric.
And this lot were sophisticated and they discovered all the, I don't know, science and technologies that were unknown in the West and they kept the learning of the ancients going etc etc.
How accurate is that version of events?
Inaccurate, because the Muslims were just as violent and bloodthirsty as the Christians.
That whole view, which is largely the view at the moment from the West, is skewed.
It's not accurate.
There were many different Muslim factions.
There were Orthodox Sunni Muslims fighting heterodox Shia Muslims.
There were Turks fighting Arabs.
There were Kurds.
There were many different, lots of different local princelings were fighting each other so the idea that the violence came from a Christian side is just not true and the Christians themselves were just as intelligent and just as capable of adapting and being civilized as And certainly Saladin,
who, if you like, is the kind of poster boy for this idea that the Islamic civilization was inclusive and diverse and somehow more tolerant than the Crusaders, is a good example because he wasn't.
He actually had a habit of executing, of murdering prisoners after they had been taken.
And he...
Was, in my view, someone who specialised in assassination, in espionage, in a lot of the dark arts, and was certainly not someone who intended to live in any kind of tolerant, diverse compact with the Crusaders.
He wanted to eradicate them.
Right, right.
And who was the better warrior?
Well, I mean, Reynold's life is seen partly in this negative light because he's compared to Saladin, because he was a direct adversary of Saladin.
In fact, he was Saladin's most effective rival.
And when it comes to being a warrior, then Reynold wins hands down.
And Reynold actually went in the front line and fought.
With great effectiveness and bravery.
Saladin never actually got his sword bloody in combat.
He was sitting behind the lines.
In fact, the only times I've been able to find that Saladin actually used his weapon to kill another human being, both of those occasions were defenseless prisoners.
One of them was, spoiler alert, one of them was Reynold de Chatil.
Yeah, Saladin was a vengeful human being.
In fact, my next book is going to be about Saladin, and I think that it'll be a slightly different take on him.
I must say, I did get the impression that the odds were pretty stacked against you as a crusader in those times.
I mean, I don't know how they didn't get defeated every time, because they were so outnumbered, weren't they?
They were outnumbered constantly, but they were very effective warriors.
And they were well armed, they were well disciplined, they were well trained.
And interestingly, again, we have this image of them being reckless, charging knights who threw caution to the wind.
And again, that's inaccurate.
In fact, if you look at the Muslim fighters who fought against them, they would say that the Franks were the most cautious in warfare.
So they didn't commit themselves unless they felt they had a chance of winning because they knew the danger of being of over committing because they would be if they if they were wiped out, then, you know, if they lost a large number of men, that was the end.
I see that.
Yeah.
But what was their what was their tactic?
Their most powerful weapon was the mounted knight.
So a heavily armoured charge by mounted knights was their shock tactic.
And they would march along with the knights behind a screen of infantry, letting the Muslims, who were mostly fighting on horseback, to come in and attack them and get closer and closer.
And then when they felt they had the opportunity, the infantry would open and the heavily armoured knights would charge in an unstoppable charge at the enemy.
They said that watching a crusader knight, you could imagine that he could drive his lance through the walls of Babylon.
Right, okay.
That must have been awfully hot in their armour.
Yes, you'd think so.
And there are occasions when you read that of people expiring through heat stroke and things.
It's not necessarily knights.
I mean, anybody on the battlefield and on both sides.
But somehow they seemed to manage it and they would march sometimes day after day on fighting marches and manage to be effective.
So somehow they managed.
But yeah, it must have been baking.
But did they perhaps have a kind of fighting season, a bit like the Afghans do?
Because the Afghans don't fight in the heat, do they?
No, they were fighting in the height of summer.
The campaigning season in Palestine was spring to autumn, in the heat of the summer.
And they had the most amazing castles, didn't they?
I want to go to Crac de Chevalier, but you can't now, can you?
How can you go now?
It's in the middle of a civil war there.
Where is it?
It's in Syria.
It's in Syria.
Yeah, so I'm lucky I have been there.
I went before the war.
And I think it was occupied by different forces over time the last few years.
But yeah, it's the most spectacular castle.
My favourite crusader castle, though, is actually Reynold's castle, which he took over after he came out of jail, and he re-established himself as a leader in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which is now in Jordan, in a place called Kerak.
And I think it's the most underrated Crusader Castle, and also one of the most mysterious.
It's vast, but it has all these underground warrens and storerooms and dungeons, and it's never been properly excavated.
Brilliant.
It's sitting there and waiting for someone to restore it a bit and tell us all the hidden stories that are there.
And Jordan is very doable.
I mean, I've been to Jordan.
I didn't feel threatened.
Jordan is very doable.
And although there was a terrorist attack at Kerak at the castle on tourists a year or two ago.
Oh, great.
So Al-Qaeda in Jordan or whatever, ISIS in Jordan or whatever, someone decided to go and target some tourists there.
And what happened?
Well, they killed some tourists and then the Jordanian police got them.
Right, okay.
Well, that's put off about 95% of my American listeners, I think.
Well, I haven't taken my kids there, I'll put it that way.
Right, okay.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But we love a good castle.
And, um, what else haven't I asked you about, about, um, that I want to know?
So, okay, yes, the amazing battle that he fought in the, what was it called?
The one where he won big time.
Oh, Mongezade.
Yes, Mongezade.
I mean, should that be going down in history as one of the battles we should memorialise?
Well, this is one of the things that drew me to Raynald's story, because this battle was a phenomenal victory for the Crusaders.
One of the greatest victories they had in the entire period of the Crusades.
And yet, historians just skate over it as though it's a footnote.
Because they're embarrassed, because the wrong side won.
The wrong side won.
Saladin was comprehensively defeated and it took him 10 years before he could win a victory against the Crusaders after that battle.
It's said that after that he rushed home and hid himself in a dark room for a week in mourning after that battle.
But yes, but Reynold was the general of the Crusaders at that battle, and it doesn't fit with the received narrative that this barbaric, thuggish oaf could defeat the great hero who was Saladin.
I think that's one of the reasons why the achievement of the Crusaders at Mont-Gesire, where a small Crusader army defeated a much larger Saracen army, that's one of the reasons why that achievement has been relegated to a footnote.
One of the things that really struck me, reading your book, was just how few hardcore...
I mean, it was a bit like the Battle of Hastings, where you've got the Housecarls, who are a tiny body of royal kind of guards, and then you've got the Ferd, who are the basic army.
And in the same way, it seems that you had a tiny body of armoured franks doing most of the heavy fighting.
We're talking hundreds, aren't we, rather than thousands?
Yes, so of an army, the army which fought the Battle of Hattin on the 4th of July 1187, the Crusader army is estimated to have been about 18,000 or something like that, of which only 10%, so maybe 1,500, were these mounted knights, which were really the key to turning the Battle of the were these mounted knights, which were really the key to turning So you really couldn't afford to lose many knights, could you?
No, they were absolutely, they were worth their weight in gold, yeah.
Was it just because their armour was really good, or was it just because they'd been trained since childhood in this stuff?
And what made them so almost invincible?
It's hard to say, because nobody's ever seen a Crusader charge and knows what it was like, or really given an accurate description.
But I think it was a mixture of those things.
They had fantastic armor.
So, for instance, if you were a Muslim and you wanted to be wearing captured Frankish mail, I mean, that was the best mail.
And the crusader armor did stand up to Saracen arrows and so there were descriptions of the crusaders marching along doggedly.
while the Muslims are going in and shooting arrows at them until they look like hedgehogs at the end of the day.
So the armor was good.
They had good mail.
They had good helmets.
They had powerful warhorses who were trained for this purpose.
And yes, I think something which is underestimated is the amount of training which they must have done to be able to function in this incredibly effective way as a united charge.
So I think they were very, as you say, they were trained, knights were trained since childhood for this purpose, for killing.
And so they were extraordinarily effective.
I'd like to see some reenactors doing Crusader.
I'll bet you don't get much reenactors.
There is reenactment, and they reenact the Battle of Hattin now and again, but to reenact a charge is just simply too dangerous.
They can't even reenact 19th century cavalry charges very effectively.
There's much more writing evidence of those, and for instance, one of the things I read about it, One of the Napoleonic War cavalry charges.
The cavalry are charging so close together that some of these horses are actually lifted off the ground because they're actually caught between the horses on either side.
And you can imagine a huge war horse with a cavalryman on top is actually off the ground.
And I imagine the crusader, the Frankish charge of the Middle Ages being something like that with these knights getting into an incredibly compact area.
Dense wedge, unstoppable formation, and then just powering at the enemy.
And if you saw that coming, you know you had to...
There's nothing you can do to stop it, because they can't stop themselves.
Yeah, yeah.
That's really cool.
We'll never see it like again.
You say that Kingdom Heaven is a fairly accurate, apart from the PC stuff, is fairly accurate...
Yeah, I'd recommend watching it.
It's fun.
It captures, I think, the civilization of the time and the feel of the period very well.
It captures how a lot of these crusaders were very integrated into Eastern life, speaking Arabic, wearing Arabic clothes and so on.
Where it really falls down is this idea that there was a faction, the crusaders, who somehow wanted to live in peace with the Muslims and were quite happy.
You know, giving up the kingdom, giving up a Christian kingdom to the Muslims if it was going to lead to some peace, which is just not the case.
Before we go on to other stuff, I feel that we haven't stuck it enough to the kind of Edward Said school of Western guilt studies.
I mean, that book Orientalism, it poisoned the wells, didn't it, for...
Yeah, yes.
Edward Said has a lot to answer for there.
And it was a book which certainly has dated very badly, I think.
I haven't read it, by the way.
What does it say?
No, well, it says what you say, what you're getting at.
It was this idea that the West looked down upon the East and that the East has been caricatured as...
You know, as a feat and debauched and stunted.
But that's not true, is it?
You look at Richard Burton and people like that.
These people adored the Middle East.
They thought it was a fantastically exotic and wonderful and exciting place.
Yes, well, he would say that's part of the caricature, that it's somehow seen as this romantic other and...
You know, rather than, you know, real people.
And that allows you to, you know, approach it or sort of treat them in lots of different, lots of negative ways.
And Said, of course, was a Palestinian, so at the root of his grievance was the loss of Palestine to Israel in the 1940s.
Yeah.
And that has colored much of his thinking and, of course, has colored much of Muslim thinking about Yes, exactly.
If you were doing your course now, I can't imagine that your thinking on this subject would be welcome.
I honestly don't know, but I suspect not.
It is radical.
It's not the way that the period is overwhelmingly perceived.
So I'd certainly have to have a lot of arguments, I think.
To be honest, I haven't really looked into, talked to academics since I published the book.
A couple of things have come out which were, they still seem to be towing the same line, but I have a feeling that things are moving a little bit and that people are starting to have some doubts about the received narrative.
Well, before we started, before we pressed the button on my recorder, I said to you, and I do believe this actually, that...
The children of the likes of us are no longer welcome in Oxford and Cambridge.
Okay, one or two might slip through the net, but basically...
I know, for example, that one head of admissions at one Oxford college was overheard boasting about the fact that they'd rejected all the Etonians who'd applied that year, as though this was a kind of badge of honour.
And I think it's rather sad because, do you know, when we were at Oxford, it was kind of, it was, I hate to use the word diverse, but there was a mix, wasn't there?
I mean, there were the sort of public schoolies doing their Burlington Club thing, but then there were lots of northern chemists and things like that.
There was a variety.
And now I think it's a politically correct monoculture.
Well, I hope not.
My alma mater, Balliol, is now run by the lady who previously was head of the National Trust and turned that into...
Oh, God, which one?
I forget her name.
Not Helen Gosht?
Yeah, yeah, Helen Gosht.
She's terrible.
I mean, a completely low-grade, no talent.
Well, she transformed the National Trust into a kind of, as far as I could see, some kind of leftist campaigning organization.
And I hope she doesn't do the same to Balliol, where in Oxford you always hope that free speech and questioning attitude to life prevails.
But I fear that that's...
I walked a couple of years ago, I think, when I was thinking about it for my daughter.
We went to the open day.
I remember walking past Balliol and it was so woke.
It was all about persuading people from comprehensive schools and stuff and ethnic backgrounds and minorities and so forth that actually Oxford wasn't that.
It wasn't posh and it wasn't this and it wasn't that.
Whereas Balliol, in our day, I mean, your year group in Balliol was amazing.
So many, you were a golden year.
I mean, I was in Christchurch, so I was in the grandest college, but...
But I remember gravitating towards Balliol because you had such interesting people there.
You had you, Boris, Aidan Hartley, Robert Twigger, Justin Rushbrook, really interesting people who were not, well they weren't standard Bullington Club people apart from Boris who was in the Buller.
But you're an interesting, quirky crowd.
Yeah, names to conjure with.
Yeah, that's true.
Although the college was run by a leftist cabal, which actually was part of the reason that my political formation came from seeing leftists at work in that JCR. And, you know, for instance, it gives me insights into Jeremy Corbyn because I've seen precisely his politics at work in the JCR. So I know that he's simply a student politician who hasn't grown up because I... I've seen it before when I was a student.
Just on that subject about Balliol, they ran a bit of research with the alumni Balliol did and they asked what were the things which were important to the alumni and of course one of the things they suggested that we could vote on was outreach to working class communities and things.
Interestingly, that was far down the list when you looked at the results.
The one thing that the vast majority of alumni cared about was excellence.
They wanted Balliol to be a seat of excellence.
And of course, that meritocracy shouldn't mean excluding people from Eton or excluding people from anywhere.
It should be But their choice of master, or is she called a master or mistress, do you think?
Helen Gosch is an absolute no-talent.
She's a kind of low-grade civil servant who I think failed in a number of departments before being booted sideways to the National Trust.
Yeah.
to the woman who got the job of Master of Trinity, Cambridge.
Another talentless woman, Sally Davis.
Yeah.
And where did she come from?
She had some role, I think, sort of some function ruining the NHS or making it even worse.
Absolutely.
Oh, that's right.
She was chief medical officer.
Chief medical officer.
Absolute rubbish.
You know why these people got their appointments.
And it wasn't because they were the brightest and best available.
It's because they needed women to...
Yes, perhaps.
But colleges, Oxford and Cambridge colleges, seem to specialise in this kind of appointment like Alan Rushbridge and Tim Gardham from the BBC. Although Tim is a very highly intelligent human being.
But a lot of these bureaucrats seem to get appointments at Oxford colleges and Oxford Cambridge colleges.
It's a shame.
Balliol, of course, I have a particular feeling for, but they have a problem.
So they're so left-wing now, for instance, that when Balliol won University Challenge last year, the team afterwards refused to do an interview with the Daily Mail because they regarded it as a fascist rag.
They were really...
I could detect that unpleasantness coming through.
I just thought, okay, you're bright, but you're so woke that really, you're not nice people.
You're just full of unpleasant judgments on, you know, you're not fair and you're not...
That's what worries me.
Balliol used to have...
Every Oxford College and Cambridge College, I'm sure, had their defining characteristics, isn't it?
So Christchurch was quite grand and public school-y and brides-head-y and he had good oarsmen and so on.
Balliol was famous for its intellectual independence.
It wasn't as doctrinaire left-wing as, say, Wadham, which was always a kind of lefty hellhole.
If you got into Balliol, you were an original thinker, and it didn't matter whether you were on the left or the right.
You were there because you were sharp.
I'm not sure whether these distinctions still exist in Oxford colleges.
I think they've just become this, well, as I said, a monoculture of wokeness.
Well, that would be a great shame.
I mean...
Well, at Balliol, when I was there, there was quite a lot of stamping out of right-wing dissidents, if you like, certainly in student politics, which turned me against politics for many, many years, actually, until I finally realized that One had to start getting involved at one level or another.
Yeah.
But yes, it does seem that...
For me, the intellectual curiosity is the problem because a lot of what I see in certainly leftism and for instance in history is the avoidance of fact and the preference of some sort of emotional doctrine over what's really happening or what really did happen.
Is it not the case that the further back in history you go...
The more politically correct the field becomes, because in the absence of a wealth of documentation, people are free to put their interpretations on.
This is particularly a problem, I gather, in early British history, where everyone's determined to prove that ancient Britain was a land of immigrants.
I think that's probably true.
That's one of the things that attracts me, for instance, to medieval history.
If you weren't writing something about Hitler, there is no way that you will be able to read everything, all the documents, and get all the evidence together.
No human being could ever master all that.
But when it comes, for instance, to Reynald de Chatillon, I know as much as any human being possibly could.
On top of that meagre amount of original source, you are free to put your own interpretation on it.
So yes, theoretically, the further you go back in history, the more ideological it could become.
But still, you have to try and be as contextual as possible.
If you put your interpretation on the past, try and make sure that it fits as much as possible with how people would have thought at the time.
This is why I love that book I recommended to you, The World Is Not Enough.
I think it's the second best historical novel I've read after War and Peace.
And it really captures that.
It doesn't view these people through the filter of kind of post-enlightenment Western civilization.
It gets into the mindset of what it would have been like to live in those times.
Yeah, I think that's critical.
And then, of course, there's the other aspect of history, which is it does give you insights into the present if you look at the facts.
And in an area close to your heart, climate, for instance, it always baffles me why any historian could ever believe in this theory of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, because anybody who's studied history knows that the climate changes over time, knows that extreme climate events have occurred which have Flooded and killed and starved and destroyed civilizations and homes and so on.
But you have to look at that with real perspective and it's always remarkable to me that taking a doctrinaire view of the past you seem to be able to wipe out anything which is inconvenient to your current truth.
What did you learn going back to your Balliol days about the radical left?
How did they roll?
I learnt a lot about that from Balliol because A lot of these guys who were with me at Balliol actually became very successful politicians under Tony Blair.
Particularly, I remember Stephen Twigg, who was a leftist in Balliol at the time, standing in 1997, standing next to Michael Portillo, rather shamefacedly, As he was announced the winner in the 1997 election.
And many of those who I was a Belial with went on to have very successful careers as leftist politicians, MPs and so on.
But what I learned about them was they were nothing to do, even though they talked about social justice and welfare for all and so on, all they cared about was power.
Even in this tiny little pond...
All they cared about was ruling the college with an iron fist.
So if you were one of the few people who might stand up in a JCR meeting and give any kind of dissident view, particularly if you were a right winger, you would literally be shouted down.
Balliol at the time was famous for having an unlocked door.
The Balliol door was never closed.
24 hours a day was the only college that door was never closed.
And I thought this was a great symbol of openness.
And so what did they do?
They campaigned to have it closed.
The students who benefited most from having this door open all the time, from this open ethic of Balliol, the leftist clique which ran the junior common room, campaigned to have it closed.
They campaigned for everyone, all the women, to have rape alarms, because apparently they were all in danger of being raped in the college.
We said great, and we campaigned for the men to get rape alarms as well, which they had to do then.
They gave all the men rape alarms too.
Unfortunately, the only assaults I recall from that period was, this was during the period of the miners' strike, and they asked miners to come and talk in college.
And two of the miners, who they, in two different occasions, actually eventually ended up assaulting girls in the college because they came along and probably got them a bit drunk and things.
So it was very embarrassing for them.
And then straight after the university, I mean, one of the main leaders of this cabal went and joined the coal board.
Which I thought was quite interesting too.
Very funny, yeah.
I learnt a lot about the hypocrisy of the left and I learnt a lot about how they only cared about power and certainly by the time of Tony Blair, a lot of these guys who were essentially Stalinists at university had managed to modify their rhetoric so they fitted in with new labour but they didn't really care one way or the other, they just wanted to get into power.
This is the Peter Hitchens line on Tony Blair, that actually he's much more of a Trotskyite than has ever been.
He's viewed as a centrist, but actually he's much, much more left than people generally realise.
Quite possibly.
My education in this area, as I say, just turned me off politics, and I certainly didn't become a right-wing.
The Conservatives threw much better parties at university, which should have given me a clue, and I think had a much better sense of humour.
The leftists were all very po-faced and serious about things, artificially so, obviously.
But then I suppose my education in this area was continued at the BBC, where I was a part of a left liberal establishment, and then at Channel 4 News.
Where I was really in the belly of the beast at a time when, you know, New Labour were coming in and Jon Snow was, you know, would talk to Alistair Campbell before the night.
Was there a shift?
I mean, Channel 4 News now, like the BBC, is so far left that I've just given up on it.
But was there, when you were there, was it, could you see this transformation from a kind of OK news site into something else?
I can't say what it was like before, but certainly when I was there, it was extremely left-wing.
And so I became known as the voice of reason in the newsroom after the Woodrow Wyatt column, his right-wing column, because I would be the sole voice raising any kind of doubt or any alternative view, without really being at all ideological about it.
I'd sometimes say, well, have we thought about X, Y, Z? And there would be silence around the table, and we'd just kind of move on.
And so, you know, raising any questioning voice was regarded simply as just being off message.
So you had to get out of dodge?
Well, here's an example of how left-wing this was.
So there was a girl we hired on the Foreign Desk and she turned out to be a friend of my wife's.
We met a few years later when she was a literary agent.
And I said to her, well, how did you like Channel 4 News?
And she said, I hated it.
I used to have to read the Daily Mail hidden inside a copy of The Guardian.
Yeah.
Because reading a Daily Mail in the newsroom was just unacceptable.
Yeah, yeah.
I can't let you go without picking your brain for memories of Boris.
Because, I mean, it's weird, isn't it, that we happen to have known this guy who became Prime Minister.
What are the chances?
Well, you say that.
It's interesting because my key memory of Boris when we were at university is that everyone knew that Boris one day was going to be Prime Minister.
For me, it was just simply one of those things that one knew Boris was going to be PM. So that would be my main memory.
Whether that's good or bad, I don't know.
It suggests a really incredibly driving ambition, which I think he had.
But he could take his knocks.
I remember when he stood for president of the Union of Oxford and he lost.
And a lot of people, after they lost, just wouldn't try again.
Boris tried again and won.
So he's got a lot of great...
I'm a big fan.
He got me involved in politics when he started standing for Mayor of London.
It was the first time I started getting involved in politics.
Did you work with him on his?
No, I just campaigned in my local area.
I thought, this guy can do the job, and guess what?
He did.
My impression of Boris was that he was much more fully formed than the rest of us.
Where were you at school?
I was at school at Sherbin.
Okay.
So you were a hick from the sticks like me.
There were certain types, weren't there, who were much more sophisticated, like the ones who'd been to Westminster, who were just like trendy Londoners.
They were too cool for school already.
The Etonians, who knew absolutely everybody.
But most of us were just these unformed creatures trying to experiment with our identity and discover who we were and so on.
Whereas Boris had sprung to Earth fully formed, or so it seemed.
Yeah, I think that I knew his sister Rachel as well very well.
I think as a family, they were much more grown up and mature than the rest of us and always had their eyes focused on things beyond university and a kind of long-term plan or long-term ambitions, which most of us are just getting on with our daily lives and going punting and chasing girls.
Exactly.
Going punting, trying to get laid, smoking dope, I don't know about you, getting drunk, choose appreciation society and so on.
Yes, I ran that for a while, actually.
Did you?
Yeah, chap sock.
I was secretary of CHAPSOC. So, well, there you are.
There's a mark of tremendous soundness.
Yeah, exactly.
I just spent my three years there just sort of pissing about and doing a bit of...
I mean, one did work hard in those days.
Yeah.
It annoys me when I hear some of my contemporaries saying, oh yeah, we were just idiots, we wouldn't get in now, we shouldn't be there.
Actually, I've looked at how many essays I wrote, and it's a thick file, essays about 3,000 words, and we're doing two of those a week, which compared to the other universities was pretty massive.
Yeah, no, you had to work.
And certainly, I mean, if you're working with some of the tutors who I had, some of the lecturers who I admired deeply, you wanted to impress them and you wanted to have them reading your stuff.
So, yeah, you made an effort now and again.
Yeah.
Jeff, I really feel that it's about time we had some lunch.
I think we've covered most of the bases.
But look, I really recommend Special Friend that you get hold of God's Wolf because it's really good and it's got lots of violence in it and stuff that you don't know about.
I mean, one doesn't know anything about the Crusades, really, unless you're steeped in Runciman.
So a really good read.
And thank you.
Thank you, Jeff Lee.
Good to see you again after all these years.
Yeah, thanks, James.
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