Nineteen years of age keeps coming up. Delingpole was apparently 19 when he fancied the Belgian boy in Africa. He was also 19 when he was seduced by a ‘cougar’ in Greece and 19 when he lost his virginity in Venice on a spring holiday during his second year in Oxford.
Miri was 19 when she read his Thinly Disguised Autobiography which she apparently promptly forgot despite singing its praises in July 2023 along with friendly reminders of its contents from March 2025 onwards.
You can be forgiven for a lot when you’re 19. You’re still a big kid. Not quite an adult. You haven’t formed any strong opinions on much. You’re still figuring out how to negotiate this big, bad world.
I’m prompted to return to this divisive Mirigate story again thanks to a comment from long time reader, Catherine Franklin, whose opinion I respect.
So here we go again. Round three. Ding ding.
Please note these exchanges are useful and help us understand the terrain we find ourselves in as blistering as the comments section can become. These interactions inform us and encourage greater accountability, research and clarity.
Catherine is well within her rights to query my motivations in pointing out Miri Finch’s double standards when it comes to Rod Liddle and James Delinpole’s pedo apologist agendas. It’s up to me to show her where I’m coming from. No hysterics necessary. Run of the mill journalism.
So here’s Delingpole on August 20, 2013 reiterating the Belgian boy tale from Africa in the Telegraph.
Article reads:
It would be impertinent of me – and also dishonest – to look back on romantic trysts past and wish I’d ended up with anyone other than my wife. I love Tiffany and I love our children.
But let me tell you instead about a much, much more interesting instance of love at first sight. You could call it my ‘Tadzio from Death in Venice’ moment because my inamorata was, in fact, a beautiful blond youth.
I was 19 at the time, just out of school, still a virgin and, I suppose, mildly uncertain about my sexuality. It happened at a border crossing between Sudan and the Central African Republic.
Waiting interminably with my fellow overlanders to have our passports stamped by the inevitable corrupt customs officers, I spied across the other side of the grass hut one of the most exquisite creatures I have ever seen. Our eyes met and I was smitten.
I thought it was a girl at first, though I couldn’t be totally sure.
She – or was it a he? – was travelling with a man old enough to be its father. God knows what their relationship was but they weren’t family. We got chatting. They were Belgian and I was the only one in our group who spoke reasonably fluent French.
Discovering that the pretty thing was male, I felt surprised and mildly guilty to realise that it didn’t stop me fancying him.
There was an electricity between us. The older man – ruined, malarial – could see this and glowered jealously. It made me despise the older man and wish I could rescue my Tadzio from his sordid clutches. Lust didn’t come into it. (Well, not much.)
It was pure, romantic, all-consuming. As day turned to night (clearly, our border bribe hadn’t been enough), I began fantasising about our escape. My ephebe and I would run off and end up God knew where but it wouldn’t matter – the point was we would be together forever.
Anyway, we didn’t. But imagine how wonderfully, fascinatingly different it would have been if we had! No school fees, no family responsibilities. I could have been bigger than Stephen Fry.
Back to the comments section of my last Substack entitled Breakthrough! Miri AF finally admits the pedo parts in James Delingpole’s book are ‘weird and inappropriate’ and strangely enough, her associate Francis O’Neill is still making excuses for Delingpole’s ‘satire’.
Seems like Francis is going to need as much work as Miri to get an appropriate response about Delingpole’s creepy side. I’ll keep working on it, thank you.
So according to Francis O’Neill’s logic if Delingpole puts it out there in a British newspaper of record for public consumption it’s no biggie. Looks like Francis is missing the point, on purpose. Again.
Surely he knows that putting this stuff out in the newspapers is part of a larger agenda to normalise pedo behaviour using a softly softly approach. I was 19 excuse. It’s not accidental. Surely he’s just read Miri’s article on Rod Liddle. Well apply it to Delingpole. This is not hard.
Delingpole references Tadzio from Death in Venice in his Telegraph article. Who’s Tadzio?
Tadzio is a fictional 14-year-old Polish boy in Thomas Mann's 1912 novella Death in Venice. He becomes the object of a fatal, silent obsession for an aging German writer named Gustav von Aschenbach.
Ew!
Are you still with me, Catherine?
There’s more to come. Sick bags at the ready. Sticking with Venice, in his Thinly Disguised Autobiography Delingpole gives us the excruciating details involved in losing his virginity, something he wanted rid of fast, being 19 and all. Don’t ask Miri about this chapter, she’s more than likely forgotten this bit too.
The lucky recipient is a student (legal age!) known as ‘Camille/Simone/Whoever, let’s stick to Camille, shall we?’ writes Delingpole in a chapter entitled The Comfort of Strangers, a nod to Ian McEwan’s novel most likely based in Venice.
‘Not only is she clever enough to be sitting her Oxbridge exams herself later this year, but also she has a brother at Magdalen. He’s in a the year above me, he’s grand and madly social enough to have been elected a member of the Buller (code for Bullingdon Club) and she’s been to stay with him loads of times…’
Sounds like Delingpole was more excited about the prospect of the Buller brother than poor Camille but he uses her to unshackle himself from the burden of virginity. In the same room is Delingpole’s brother Dick also losing his virginity. Delingpole considers it a race.
He wrote it, not me! There’s no point getting angry with me about these things put out into the public domain for all to read. It’s not my fault for noticing these things.
Shall we go on? Deep breaths. Let’s proceed.
From Africa to Venice and now to Greece - 19 year old James Delingpole sure does get around. In this article in The Telegraph from September 29, 2009, Delingpole again blurs the lines with a softly, softly approach. His ‘cougar’ is 36. He’s 19. A 17 year age gap. What’s the problem? Well there is no real issue between consenting adults but you’d have to wonder about the agenda behind such a headline, hints that the ‘prey’ enjoys it, asks for it, begs for it, learns from it, wants the attention. That creepy agenda again.
Article reads:
“Would you mind awfully if I seduced you?” asked the attractive older woman sitting next to me on the bus, placing one hand meaningfully on my bare, suntanned thigh.
“Er, no,” I replied.
And I didn’t. Not one bit. I was 19; she – it later transpired – was 36, a lecturer at London University. And if there’s one thing you want above all else when you’re 19, it’s uncomplicated, deliciously meaningless sex with a good-looking woman who is totally up for it, knows what she’s doing, and isn’t secretly wishing that you were a bit older and more experienced because that’s not what she’s after. What she wants is your youth.
The woman – I’ve forgotten her name, unfortunately, but then we didn’t waste too much time exchanging CVs – was what I suppose would now be called a “Cougar”. These are the Mrs Robinson types, celebrated in the new Courteney Cox sitcom Cougar Town, who like to prey on the tender flesh of young men half their age.
When you put it like that it does sound slightly vampiric, and I gather that some feminists are up in arms at this “ridiculous and belittling” depiction of the single older woman and female sexuality, which, so they say, owes more to stereotypical male fantasy than reality.
Well they’ve got the “male fantasy” bit right. Until it happens to you, you imagine it’s the sort of thing that only happens in “readers’ true experiences” pages in girlie mags. That’s why, as the seduction progressed, I kept having to pinch myself to be sure I wasn’t dreaming.
It was the summer of my first year at university, and I’d gone to the Greek island of Spetses because I liked John Fowles’s The Magus. There, on a beach, I positioned myself reasonably close to some nice-looking women who turned out to be a bit older than I thought. We got talking; we had an Ouzo or three; we took the bus back into town; and that’s when I received my kind offer.
There’s this great myth among adolescents that older women teach you all sorts of amazing sexual tricks. This isn’t really true – or at least it’s certainly not the most important thing they teach you. What I really learned from this magical, brilliant woman – thank you, whoever you are! – is that sex is something you can enjoy without hang-ups.
Too often in your early sexual years as a man, you’re made to feel as if sex is something you can only really get through trickery (either guile or more usually alcohol), that you’re a bit rubbish at it, and that you’re frankly rather squalid for having insisted on it so soon in the relationship. Older women have no truck with these games. They are as grateful for your efforts as you are for their instruction. It is the perfect symbiotic relationship.
That’s why I’m always deeply puzzled when a female teacher gets had up – and sometimes even put away – for having sex with one of her boy pupils. How can that possibly be right? First, it’s physically impossible for a woman to rape a man: if he’s capable, then he’s interested. Second, at least one – and preferably several – sexual encounters with an older woman is what every heterosexual male needs to make him better in bed and happier in his skin.
Is this not Rod Liddle enough for you, Catherine? Delingpole is excusing female teachers acting in a predatory fashion towards their students because the ‘prey’ should be thrilled to have an opportunity to learn from an older woman. Nothing about the wonky power differential or taking advantage of a minor.
Isn’t it funny how somebody as well researched as Francis O’Neill can play dumb to these articles which take all of two seconds to find on the Internet.
I can’t seem to get a direct response from Francis O’Neill on these simple questions. Mr ‘Just Asking Questions’ has a happy knack of dodging them when directed his way about somebody he’s been making excuses for because of the platform afforded to himself, Miri and Leo Biddle.
I also pointed Francis in the direction of this article which boils down to a piece about sex tourism in Ghana. Here’s the full thing in case it disappears off the Internet.
Article ends.
In other words this is a sex tourism article explaining where you can find disadvantaged young ones to use while making out they’re begging for it so what’s the problem? Unless you believe that poor ole Delingpole was dragged kicking and screaming to the brothel just because he happened to bump into some nameless strangers on the plane. No, there’s another agenda behind articles like these. If I was dispatched to Ghana to write a travel piece, you’re not going to find out where the hot spots are for prostitution. It’s probably why they don’t send me.
It’s not clear what age Delingpole was for his adventure in Ghana. He’ll probably tell you 19.
Anyway there’s a clear pattern emerging from these pieces that can’t be ignored try as some might, even if Delingpole was a shining light during the Covid scam and he was. Sadly that’s not enough. It turns out the truther scene is riddled with competing agendas that involve gaining trust from people considered conspiracy theorists or just those with working critical faculties.
That’s why these bust-ups are useful. Messy but useful.
They help us question those who’ve appointed themselves the arbiters of truth and justice. We get to see how they respond to basic questions. We get to see them playing dumb. We get to see them projecting and spitting the dummy.
It’s intriguingly revealing.
Related articles:
Blind spot or turning a blind eye? Miri AF and the Delingpole problem
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