I like Delingpole-bashing as much as the next person. No, wait, I clearly like it far, far, far, far more than the next person. Which is why it hurts me to say: leave Delingpole alone.
Not that one, though. The other one.
Dick Delingpole, James’ brother, is a UKIP candidate for Worcestershire County Council. Mindful of the fact that the Conservative party is freaking out about a purple wave – not to mention his own higher-than-average media profile, stemming not only from his sibling but also his Telegraph blog about historical re-enactment – he tweeted a joke yesterday.
That was his first mistake.
He tweeted, “I’d better get rid of this old Facebook photo before the Tories get hold of it”, accompanied by the above image, of himself photoshopped three times into the background of a photo of Hitler.
It’s never great to have to explain jokes, but let’s break this down: the joke is that Delingpole is pretending that, just as some UKIP candidates have skeletons in their wardrobes, he was secretly a member of the Nazi party in 1940. And is also secretly one of three identical triplets. The humour comes from the fact that it is obviously nonsense.
But not obvious enough, apparently. Simon Geraghty, the local Tory candidate, complained, and Delingpole ended up on the front page of the Worcester News, and then in the Guardian, where Nicholas Watt writes:
The party apologised for the Photoshopped image and said that Dick Delingpole, a candidate in Worcester who is the brother of the writer and climate change sceptic James, had a “very deep sense of humour”.
Dick Delingpole, a businessman who re-enacts scenes from history in his spare time, decided to doctor the image with Hitler to mock the way in which the Tories have been trawling social media sites to find embarrassing pictures of Ukip candidates. He placed a shot of himself on three men in Nazi uniforms standing next to Hitler.
Now, I don’t doubt that the reporters at both those papers will correctly point out that what they were doing was reporting on the “row”, rather than condemning Delingpole outright. And it is true that there is a row, with Geraghty telling the Worcester News that:
I find it absolutely sickening and abhorrent. I think the vast majority of British people will find this shocking – it’s not funny at all, it’s dreadful and I can’t believe he’s done it.
But pretending that Geraghty’s absolutely tone-deaf complaint merits filing Delingpole in the same “nazi row” cabinet as the candidate who claimed World War Two was engineered by Zionists is nonsensical.
Next time someone complains about how dull politicians are in Britain, just remind them that that didn’t happen by accident.
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