Robert Webb on his attempt at being a newspaper columnist.

Journalism Robert Webb on his attempt at being a newspaper columnist:

"Indeed, the only notable disaster in his career to date seems to have been an ill-starred attempt to write a column for the Daily Telegraph, where he took terrible offence at negative comments from the barmier, climate-change-denying fringes of the paper's online readership, and ended up getting fired after a year. "I wasn't particularly busy at the time, so what I should have been doing in three hours, I was taking a day and a half to do, while getting drunk. I'd sit in the garden, drinking and talking to myself, then go back upstairs, write another sentence, go, 'Oh, this isn't right.' I'd make such a meal of it. If I'd been more professional, I'd have just done it and got on with my life. But because I'd turned it into this three-day psychodrama, and then the bastards hated it, that was quite hard to take." He laughs. "And now they're the official opposition in most councils, it seems."

This is the column, which has a comments section that makes The Guardian's look temperate. Here's the key quote from the piece, which is actually really, really good:

"Let me have a go at understanding these people: wish me luck. I suppose that if you really think climate change is a sham; if you really think it's possible for a global scientific community to get together to fabricate a mountainous embarrassment of evidence in support of a particular theory and that, furthermore, they are able to hoodwink successfully – or even secretly conspire with – hundreds of governments and political parties, who are wildly opposed on everything else, so that there is a consensus that something should be done, then I suppose you're going to be quite annoyed when, as a result of this mammoth fraud, someone asks you to turn the central heating down."

To an extent I wonder if the reason Webb's columns are so good is because their source was a "three day psychodrama". So many of them usually look like they have been thrown together in a few minutes and probably demand about as much attention.