Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley
Christopher Walter Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley is a British public speaker and hereditary peer. He is known for his work as a journalist, Conservative political advisor, UKIP political candidate, and climate denier and for his invention of the mathematical puzzle Eternity.
Early on in his public speaking career topics centred on his mathematical puzzle and conservative politics. In recent years, his public speaking has garnered attention due to his denial of climate change and his views on the European Union and social policy.
Personal life
Monckton is the eldest son of Major-General Gilbert Monckton, 2nd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, and Marianna Letitia, Viscountess Monckton of Brenchley, one-time High Sheriff of Kent and Dame of Malta. He has three brothers, Timothy, Jonathan and Anthony, and a sister, Rosa, Baroness Monckton of Dallington Forest, wife of journalist Dominic Lawson.Monckton was educated at Harrow School and Churchill College, Cambridge, where he received a B.A., and at University College, Cardiff, where he obtained a diploma in journalism studies. In 1990, he married Juliet Mary Anne Malherbe Jensen.
Monckton is a liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Broderers, an Officer of the Order of St John of Jerusalem, a Knight of Honour and Devotion of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, and a member of the Roman Catholic Mass Media Commission. He is also a qualified Day Skipper with the Royal Yachting Association, and has been a trustee of the Hales Trophy for the Blue Riband of the Atlantic since 1986.
On the death of his father in 2006 Monckton inherited the title Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, but owing to the House of Lords Act 1999 he did not gain a seat in the House of Lords.
Career
Journalism
Monckton joined the Yorkshire Post in 1974 at the age of 22, where he worked as a reporter and leader-writer. From 1977 to 1978, he worked at Conservative Central Office as a press officer, becoming the editor of the Roman Catholic newspaper The Universe in 1979, then managing editor of The Sunday Telegraph magazine in 1981. He joined the London Evening Standard newspaper as a leader-writer in 1982. After a hiatus in his career as a journalist Monckton became assistant editor of the newly established, and now defunct, tabloid newspaper Today in 1986. He was a consulting editor for the Evening Standard from 1987 to 1992 and was its chief leader-writer from 1990 to 1992.Since 2002 Monckton has had several newspaper articles published critical of the IPCC and scientific consensus on climate change.
Entrepreneurship
In 1995, Monckton and his wife opened Monckton's, a shirt shop in King's Road, Chelsea.In 1999, Monckton created and published the Eternity puzzle, a geometric puzzle that involved tiling a dodecagon with 209 irregularly shaped polygons called "polydrafters". A £1 million prize was won after 18 months by two Cambridge mathematicians. By that time, 500,000 puzzles had been sold. Monckton launched the Eternity II puzzle in 2007, but, after the four-year prize period, no winner came forward to claim the $2 million prize.
Monckton is a director of Resurrexi Pharmaceutical. It asserts it is "responsible for invention and development of a broad-spectrum cure for infectious diseases." In the BBC documentary, "Meet the Sceptics", he claimed to have cured himself of Graves' disease. UKIP's CV for Monckton claims that his methods have produced cures for multiple sclerosis, influenza, and herpes, as well as reducing the viral load of an HIV patient. In an interview with Australia's Radio National, Monckton said that his methods had had some initial successes but "we cannot claim that we can cure anything".
Political career
Political advisor to the Conservative Party
In 1979, Monckton met Alfred Sherman, who co-founded the pro-Conservative think tank the Centre for Policy Studies with Margaret Thatcher and Keith Joseph in 1974. Sherman asked Monckton to take the minutes at the CPS's study group meetings. Monckton subsequently became the secretary for the centre's economic, forward strategy, health and employment study groups. He wrote a paper on the privatisation of council housing by means of a rent-to-mortgages scheme that brought him to the attention of Downing Street. Ferdinand Mount, the head of the Number 10 Policy Unit and a former CPS director, brought Monckton into the Policy Unit in 1982. He was recruited as a domestic specialist with responsibilities for housing and parliamentary affairs, working alongside Mount and Peter Shipley on projects such as the phasing out of council housing. He left the unit in 1986 to join the Today newspaper.Monckton has said that he served as science adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher during his years with the Number 10 Policy Unit, and 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." John Gummer, who was Environment Minister under Thatcher said Monckton was "a bag carrier in Mrs Thatcher's office. And the idea that he advised her on climate change is laughable." Writing in The Guardian, Bob Ward of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment notes that Thatcher's memoirs, The Downing Street Years, do not mention Monckton and refer to George Guise as her science advisor.
Standing in by-elections for the House of Lords
Monckton inherited a peerage after the passing of the House of Lords Act 1999, which provided that "o-one shall be a member of the House of Lords by virtue of a hereditary peerage".Monckton stood unsuccessfully in four by-elections for vacant seats created by deaths among the 92 hereditary peers remaining in the Lords after the 1999 reforms. He first stood for a Conservative seat in a March 2007 by-election, and was among 31 of 43 candidates who received no votes. He subsequently stood in the crossbench by-elections of May 2008, July 2009, and June 2010, again receiving no votes. He was highly critical of the way the Lords was reformed, describing the procedure in the March 2007 by-election, with 43 candidates and 47 electors, as "a bizarre constitutional abortion."
Spokesperson and candidate for UK Independence Party
Monckton joined the UK Independence Party in 2009 and became its chief spokesperson on climate change. At the 2010 general election he was nominated as the UKIP candidate for the Scottish constituency of Perth and North Perthshire; although a hereditary peer, he was entitled to stand for election for the House of Commons as he is not a member of the House of Lords. He subsequently withdrew in accordance with UKIP's policy of not opposing other Eurosceptic parliamentary candidates. In June 2010, UKIP announced he had been appointed its deputy leader, to serve alongside David Campbell Bannerman under party leader The Lord Pearson of Rannoch, who owns an estate in Scotland adjoining Monckton's. He was succeeded in the role of deputy leader by Paul Nuttall in November 2010.In 2011 he stood as lead party-list candidate for UKIP in the Scottish Parliament constituency of Mid Scotland and Fife but did not gain election, with the UKIP list coming seventh after scoring 1.1% of the region's vote. Monckton also headed UKIP's policy unit for a while but according to the party's spokesman he had relinquished any formal role by June 2012, moving into a "semi-detached" relationship with UKIP. By January 2013 he had become UKIP's president in Scotland but was sacked by UKIP leader Nigel Farage in November 2013 following factional infighting.
Public speaking
Since 2008 he has toured Britain, Ireland, the US, China, Canada, India, Colombia, South Africa, and Australia delivering talks to groups related to the subject of Climate Change. As the Chief Policy Adviser for the US lobby group Science and Public Policy Institute he appeared at the Heartland Institute's 2008 "International Conference on Climate Change".In 2009–10 he was invited on four occasions before Congress to testify by Republican representatives. On 25 March 2009 he appeared before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment, and in 2010 before the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming invited by Jim Sensenbrenner. He followed this up with his January 2010 and July 2011 tours of Australia and New Zealand, as well as tours of China and India in December 2011. He was invited again to the US in 2012 by Republican Shannon Grove to speak before the California State Assembly and later in the year travelling to Australia at the invitation of Democratic Labor Party Senator John Madigan.
On 6 December 2012 Monckton took Burma's seat at the COP18 Climate Change Conference in Doha without permission and made a short speech attacking the idea of man-made climate change. He was escorted from the building and given a lifetime ban from attending UN climate talks. Monckton said that there had been no global warming over the last sixteen years, and thus the science should be reviewed.
Between 2009 and 2010 the film maker Rupert Murray followed Monckton on his climate change tour. The film was later broadcast on 31 January 2011 on BBC Four titled Meet the Sceptics. Prior to its broadcast its depiction of Monckton was described by fellow denialist James Delingpole as "another hatchet job" and Monckton's attempt to gain an injunction failed.
Dispute over his non-membership of the House of Lords
Monckton asserts that the House of Lords Act 1999, that deprived him of a hereditary seat, is flawed and unconstitutional. In 2006 he referred to himself as "a member of the Upper House of the United Kingdom legislature" in a letter to US Senators, and has said he was "a member of the Upper House but without the right to sit or vote." The House of Lords authorities have said Monckton is not and never has been a member and that there is no such thing as a non-voting or honorary member of the House.In July 2011 the House of Lords took the unprecedented step of publishing online a cease and desist letter to Monckton from the Clerk of the Parliaments, which said: "I must repeat my predecessor's statement that you are not and have never been a Member of the House of Lords." It concluded, "I am publishing this letter on the parliamentary website so that anybody who wishes to check whether you are a Member of the House of Lords can view this official confirmation that you are not."