Christopher Booker

Christopher John Penrice Booker (born 7 October 1937) is an English journalist and author. In 1961, he was one of the founders of the magazine Private Eye, and has contributed to it since then. He has been a columnist for The Sunday Telegraph since 1990. He has taken a stance which runs counter to the scientific consensus on a number of issues, including global warming, the link between passive smoking and cancer, and the dangers posed by asbestos. In 2009, he published The Real Global Warming Disaster.

In 2005, with Richard North, he published The Great Deception, an analysis of beginnings and growth of the European Union which has been regularly updated. In addition there are related books The Castle of Lies (1997) which look at both European and British bureaucracy. The UK Family Courts and the Social Services often feature in his Sunday Telegraph section.

Booker was educated at the Dragon School in Oxford, Shrewsbury School, and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he read History. His parents founded the girls school Knighton House.

He was married to the novelist Emma Tennant between 1963 and 1968, and to Christine Verity. In 1979, he married Valerie Patrick, with whom he has two sons; they live in Somerset.

With fellow Salopians Richard Ingrams and Willie Rushton he founded Private Eye in 1961, and was its first editor. He was ousted by Ingrams in 1963. Returning in 1965, he has remained a member of the magazine's collaborative joke-writing team ever since (with Ingrams, Barry Fantoni and current editor Ian Hislop).

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