"Sceptic at Large" Reviewed on the European Journal

Our book "Sceptic at Large"  by Roger Helmer MEP has been reviewed in the European Journal by Richard Robinson. You can view the July issue of the European Journal on http://www.europeanfoundation.org/

Highlights of the review include:

Roger Helmer is not a sceptic in the normal meaning of the word: “a person inclined to question or doubt accepted opinions”. He does not doubt. He is as certain that he is right as the targets of his attack: the Brussels bureaucrats, Europhiles and “climate change alarmists”. Neither is he a contrarian, merely seeking controversy. His positions are based on his well-reasoned response to the evidence that he sees. Sceptic at Large is, then, more a personal manifesto.


Helmer threads a narrative through extracts from his speeches and blogs which gives the book the immediacy of responding to events as they unfold. It also gives the book a sense of frustration, almost exasperation, that others cannot see his obvious truth. 

Helmer takes the opportunity to settle some old scores: with his long-standing rival in the EastMidlands, “Bill Turncoat Dunn” who, having been elected a Conservative MEP, defected to the LibDems and with Hans-Gert Pöttering, the former leader of the EPP who moved to expel him from the Group in the European Parliament.

The real Roger Helmer emerges, like the sun from behind a cloud. He is sceptical about the merits of art, literature, poetry or architecture after the early 20th century and gives us paeans to Edward Burne-Jones (“move over Michelangelo’s David … move over Moan Lisa”), to Lutyens, to Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia and to H.E. Marshall’s Our Island Story. Are there clues here to his wider world view? He appears in country attire to support the Fernie Hunt Team Chase and at the East Midlands Food Festival praising the producers of Lincolnshire Poacher Cheese.