James Delingpole: And by the way, you said it’s a conversation. It’s not a conversation. We’re not having a conversation.

Doc Malik: A conversation is meant to be an exchange of ideas.

James Delingpole: Yeah but, yeah but conversations don’t start off with all these these these tricky questions that you keep...

Doc Malik: These aren’t tricky. They’re only tricky…

James Delingpole: You think they’re not tricky

Doc Malik: No, no, they’re only tricky if you feel they’re tricky.

A seasoned journalist like James Delingpole should be well able to handle basic questions about controversial excerpts from his published works. He put them out in the public domain, after all. Instead he bristles, as former orthopaedic consultant surgeon, Dr Ahmad Malik aka Doc Malik discovered during his podcast, released on February 6, 2026. Doc Malik brought up my Substack article featuring a chapter about Delingpole’s infatuation with a 13-year-old Belgian boy on a trip to Africa from his Thinly Disguised Autobiography (first published 2003) in which he fantasised about running away with the child and starting a new life together.

Delingpole’s response:

“I feel proud of myself for having kind of given this completely unfiltered view, unfiltered portrait of of my mental thought processes when I was 19 on an overland trip in Africa when I wasn’t as certain as I am now about my sexuality”.

Whatever about sexuality, the fact that Delingpole was besotted with a child is more the issue. There’s being gay and there’s pedophilia. This one firmly falls into the pedo fantasy category. Why did he feel the need to brag about it in a book? Is he not uneasy, all these years later, about revealing so much of his inner monologue, especially as the mood has shifted considerably in the light of the Epstein revelations? Publishers Picador were clearly fine with the creepy child obsession and all the other lewd bits in the book but there’s a lot hidden in publications if you care to go analysing. So much gets past the publisher.

I read books with a highlighter these days. You never know what you’ll find.

Just to be sure I went back over the parts I’d underscored about the Belgian boy and yes, they’re bad. What was Delingpole thinking putting this in his thinly disguised autobiography? His character Josh/himself is even jealous of the boy’s minder.

In my more optimistic moments I would convince myself that his relationship with the sick Belgian was as innocent as he claimed. In my more cynical ones, I would torture myself with visions of what they might be getting up to in the camper van they had parked on the edge of our encampment.

…Because it struck me as quite outrageous that this filthy old man should have sole access to such ephebic beauty.

Sole access. What?

Delingpole blames going to an all-boys boarding school for his creepy thoughts. He tells Doc Malik:

“You probably develop crushes on boys because you haven’t got any girls around”.

Ok. Sure. But what’s the excuse for writing about wanting to run away with a child as a fully formed adult, free from boarding school life? What’s that all about?

Page 301 in a chapter called A boy’s own story, Delingpole writes:

The last time I was aroused by a bloke was when I was thirteen, at prep school, when males tend to look a lot prettier and girlier and more fanciable than they do after puberty. I try to picture all the boys I tossed off and to decide which one was the most attractive.

Clearly this boarding school experience has had a lasting impact on James Delingpole but as witnessed on the Doc Malik podcast, it’s not a topic he’s comfortable discussing. Tricky questions. Not a conversation. The problem is it undermines Delingpole’s opinions on say the Epstein files or even when he said to Doc Malik over his biscuit choice:

You’re a bit like a kind of am illuminati offering a politician a 14-year-old at a party it’s like, I mean, and I say a politician, I wouldn’t go for a 14-year-old but politicians do. I mean they have to, it goes with the job description.

Cue Doc Malik bringing up Delingpole’s book and those creepy admissions which he’s so proud of to this day. It’s tricky alright but self-inflicted trickiness. Any decent interviewer would highlight the hypocrisy.

A little further digging online and a promo article turns up written by James Delingpole flogging sex tourism to Ghana. It’s packaged as a travel piece but it doesn’t take long to figure out it’s creepier than that. Delingpole finds himself in a brothel buying a drink for a 17-year-old sex worker. The big boys brought him there. Not his fault he wound up on the seedy side of the tracks after a boozy evening with fellow tourists. Article reads:

“Can’t it wait until tomorrow?” I pleaded. My companions grinned evilly and shook their heads. “What exactly happens at the Kilimanjaro?” I asked on the short drive to downtown Accra, Ghana’s sprawling capital. “You’ll see,” someone said. By now I was beginning to panic: I’d only met these men on the flight out of London. How was I to know they weren’t sadists or psychopaths?

Poor innocent Delingpole, what could he do? Only write about his spontaneous adventure that definitely wasn’t planned.

Her name was Jeanne. She was 17, pretty-ish and came from neighbouring Togo.

Again, why is James Delingpole writing about a sexually available teenager for a travel piece? It’s weird. He claims he was the only guy who went to the brothel to drink and chat and maybe that’s true but maybe it’s not. We’ll have to take his word for it. Further down the article, at an old slave fort, Delingpole writes:

Here a charming schoolboy called Charles made me a ‘present’ of a cowrie shell in return for my address.

Charming schoolboy. What address? It’s all just a bit off for a travel piece.

Back to Doc Malik’s clash with James Delingpole. It was quite revealing. Why should anyone be ‘controlled opposition,’ as Delingpole put it, for bringing this stuff up? It’s part of the rough and tumble of journalism. If you put something out there you need to be able to defend it or at least explain it without throwing a hissy fit. It might mean nothing. It might mean something. It most certainly does constitute a conversation, tricky or otherwise. An interesting one at that.

Delingpole’s defensiveness informs us this is a sensitive subject. He attempts to sidetrack the viewer by heading off on tangents or drops wearily into crashing bore Oxford don mode, rather than tackle the tricky questions head on. Another tactic Delingpole employs is to insult and attempt to undermine his host to deflect from these tricky questions that he claims are not conversation.

It’s all rather odd behaviour.

Fair play to Doc Malik for holding firm.

Find Doc Malik’s full interview with James Delingpole HERE.

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