The Damascene conversion of Andrew Bridgen
By James Delingpole
December 24, 2022
CHRISTMAS Eve could be a good time to remind the faithful among us of a key passage in the New Testament: ‘I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repents, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance.’
I’m thinking particularly of Andrew Bridgen MP and his brave and principled decision to speak out against Covid vaccines and vaccine injuries, first in a 20-minute speech in Parliament, then in a series of interviews including one – obviously my favourite – on the Delingpod. Bridgen’s outspokenness has earned him the loathing of his parliamentary colleagues, the fury of his party whips, and the vengeful attentions of the parliamentary standards committee which has suspended him on flimsy charges that he didn’t declare his interests when he undertook a three-day working trip to Ghana on behalf of one of his constituents. His career as an MP is dead in the water; it’s quite possible that his life is at risk.
‘So what?’ say the Furies on my sceptical side of the fence. ‘Too little, too late! If he thinks he’s going to earn our forgiveness, let alone our admiration, for admitting this stuff now when some of us have known it for nearly three years, he’s got another think coming.’
I totally get their outrage. To the Awake among us it has long been obvious that the shenanigans surrounding ‘Covid’ are part of a crime against humanity unprecedented in history. Those who participated in the charade – be they journalists who failed to inform the public, medics who pushed the experimental gene therapy, or politicians who defied the Nuremberg Code and tried to force this dangerous, invasive and unnecessary intervention on the populace – can hardly pretend that the information wasn’t out there. At best, they looked the other way; at worst, they conspired in the evil. All deserve to burn in hell unless they recant and repent.
That applies, surely, even to those low-level offenders who went along with it for a quiet life. Bridgen himself, for example. Though he voted against most of the more illiberal government policies, including the second and third lockdowns, there is at least one major blot on his record: he voted in favour of emergency legislation making it compulsory for care home workers to take the vaccine or be sacked.
This was an extraordinary decision for any MP to make, let alone one who purports to be on the libertarian right of the Conservative Party. Setting aside the issue of whether the vaccines were safe or necessary, surely the only possible course was to vote against the Bill on the simple grounds of bodily autonomy. Since when, in a supposed liberal democracy, did the State arrogate the right to blackmail anyone – on threat of losing their job – to submit to an invasive medical procedure using a substance which is still in its trial phase?
Bridgen should have said ‘No’. He knows he should have said ‘No’. As he sheepishly admitted on the Delingpod, he’s not quite sure what was going through his head at the time. Part of the problem, he explained, was that like most of his parliamentary colleagues he was not in Westminster (where such a vexed issue might have been discussed over a beer with kindred spirits) but under ‘lockdown’ at home. Also, he forlornly owned up to me, ‘I trusted the experts.’
Now for some people – as I’ve learned from the mixed response to the podcast – this doesn’t wash. Bridgen, they say, is doing a late reverse ferret to save his rotten skin. Or, worse, he has been selected as the next step in the controlled reveal whereby chosen shills (cardiologist Aseem Malhotra, they say, is another) trickle out information that was previously suppressed by the mainstream media. In their view, Bridgen is either a coward or a bad actor, or both.
I agree with them on at least one point: in these times of great deception we should constantly be on our guard for double agents, controlled opposition and gatekeepers. Just because someone is telling us some of the things we want to hear doesn’t mean we should trust them. I’d put Jordan Peterson, for example, into this category of false friends.
What is required in every case is discernment – a gift which everyone down the rabbit hole believes they possess in spades. But they cannot all be right, given how violently they disagree on the integrity or otherwise of everyone from David Icke and Alex Jones to Laurence Fox and now Andrew Bridgen. Some of us, logic dictates, cannot be as discerning as we think we are.
How can we be sure who is a goodie and a baddie? We can’t. The best we can do is make intelligent inferences based on the available evidence. In Bridgen’s case one of the things that persuades me is that he twice had the AstraZeneca ‘vaccine’ and has since suffered adverse reactions (hives, hay fever etc). If, as the more paranoid believe, MPs were all in on it, surely they would have all got the memo: ‘Don’t under any circumstances take the clot shot.’ Bridgen – and I don’t think he’s lying about this – did, twice, which seems to me to mean that he can be ruled out of the evil conspirator category. Though not, obviously, out of the gullible idiot category.
The big problem if we’re going to write off everyone who was ever a gullible idiot is that we’d have to include most of ourselves. Though I think that since early 2020 I’ve been pretty much correct on most things to do with the plandemic, central bank digital currencies, the war on farming, the Great Reset and so on, I cringe at the things I used to say and think in the years leading up to my awakening.
I believed that when I was ill the best person to see was my doctor; that vaccines were a miracle of modern medicine; that it made a big difference whether you voted Conservative or Labour; that ‘conspiracy theories’ should best be ignored . . . once you are awake and looking at the world with new eyes it seems stunningly obvious that ‘normal’ folk are under a spell and in thrall to a false narrative constructed over centuries by a sinister predator class. Clearly, this is not stunningly obvious to those still under the spell. On the contrary, they genuinely believe in the fake paradigm.
Some of these people will never wake up. But some of them will. And how are we to treat them when they do? Do we go (as some people are saying to Andrew Bridgen): ‘Sorry, mate. Should have woken up when the rest of us did. There’s no more room in the inn.’? Or do we say: ‘Welcome to the club. Took your time, mate. But better late than never.’?
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