Sir Patrick ‘Moore, for instance, wrote (…) a very serviceable book entitled, Bureaucrats: How to Annoy Them…’

David Warren informs us:

…full of useful tips such as spreading a thin layer of candle grease across parts of a form marked “official use only,” to prevent the bureaucrat from writing in the space & thus drive him out of his little wee mind. Innumerable other suggestions, while dated to technological conditions a generation ago, may be easily adapted to the present for, as Moore noted, the bureaucratic mind has not developed in any way over the course of history, & is the closest thing we find in nature to a dead loss.

Patrick Moore’s ebullience, his extraordinary learning & extreme precision with fact (the Apollo mission used his lunar maps), his indifference to criticism, & devastating wit when confronted, made the usual progressive trolls in England leave him mostly alone (…)even when Moore founded the United Country Party, “to keep England English.“

His political career was at no point successful, but consistently entertaining. United Country went farther, to argue that neither Germans nor Frenchmen could ever be trusted (a point Moore was happy to make in fluent German or French).