was the IPC Campaigning Journalist of the Year. He made a documentary for the BBC in 1979 on modernist architecture, called City of Towers. In the mid-1970s he contributed a regular quiz to Melvyn Bragg's BBC literary programme Read All About It, and he returned to The Spectator as a weekly contributor (1976–1981), when he also became a lead book-reviewer for The Sunday Telegraph. In 1979, he married Valerie Patrick, his third wife, with whom he had two sons; they lived in Somerset. 1980s In 1980, he published The Seventies: Portrait Of A Decade, and covered the Moscow Olympics for the Daily Mail, publishing The Games War: A Moscow Journal the following year. Between 1987 and 1990 he wrote The Daily Telegraphs The Way of the World column (a satirical column originated by Michael Wharton) as "Peter Simple II", and in 1990 swapped places with Auberon Waugh, after mocking Waugh who firmly requested he should write the column instead of Booker, to become a weekly columnist on The Sunday Telegraph, where he remained until March 2019. Between 1986 and 1990 he took part in a detailed investigation, chaired by Brigadier Tony Cowgill, of the charges that senior British politicians, including Harold Macmillan, had been guilty of a serious war crime in handing over thousands of Cossack and Yugoslav prisoners to the Communists at the end of the war in 1945. Their report, published in 1990, presented those events in a very different light, and Booker later published a lengthy analysis of the controversy in A Looking Glass Tragedy (1997). After 1990 From 1992 he focused more on the role played in British life by bureaucratic regulation and the European Union, forming a professional collaboration with Dr Richard North, and they subsequently co-authored a series of books, including The Mad Officials: How The Bureaucrats Are Strangling Britain (1994); The Castle of Lies (1996); The Great Deception (2003), a critical history of the European Union; and Scared To Death: From BSE To Global Warming, Why Scares Are Costing Us The Earth (2007), a study of the part played in Western society in recent decades by the 'scare phenomenon'. In 2004, he published The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories, a Jungian-influenced analysis of stories and their psychological meaning, on which he had been working for over 30 years. The book was dismissed by Adam Mars-Jones, who objected to Booker employing his