I only met Rod Liddle a few times, though at The Spectator and the Sunday Times I worked alongside him and to a large degree in his shadow. He was irascible and lugubrious and bloody funny, both in person and in print. Like a lot of bogeymen, in person he was a delight and nothing like his image. He was humble and polite and faintly decorous, keen to know what you thought and to know what you knew – even though he was clear about what he knew and generally put it better than anyone else, week in and week out.
At first he was a guilty pleasure, someone who would write down what the rest of us were thinking, often without the decorous need in speech to acknowledge the validity of views of those who differ. There was an element of reading Rod that was like reading Viz in my teenage years – a little bit naughty, the schoolboy yelling ‘bum’ at a junior school teacher.
Then came the realisation that this often hilarious scribe was not a provocateur at all – he was simply the best critic of people whose world view was imposed with unthinking zeal. They were the people doing harm and Rod was the exemplar of his journalistic generation, yelling that the emperor has no clothes.
He was not racist or transphobic or Islamophobic or any of those things – he was just enraged by the willingness of officialdom to peddle the absurdity that the public wants more immigration or that men are women, and the unwillingness of officialdom to point out what motivated most grooming gangs or terrorists. He was not naughty or provocative or insensitive – he was the guy pointing out the violence of thought and action being done to good old-fashioned British common sense.
And boy was he a good writer. Every week you gasped at the audacity of the sentences, the rich analogies, the poking of pomposity and the arresting way he put his case. I love reading columns over a lunch at my desk (when I’m not hammering my expenses etc) but learned not to read Rod while eating or drinking because nearly every week there was a joke so good I would splutter and spit out my food at the sheer audacity and genius of the words. Without the humour, he might have been a bore. With it, he was one of the essential voices of the age.
And all this in the rumpled form of a plump gentleman of the North East, an expert on football and vino as well. One of my favourite bits of writing by Rod came in lockdown when he recounted buying the second case that week of Sauvignon Blanc. When the vintner reminded him of the previous purchase, Rod replied: ‘The wife drinks a lot.’ There was something of the seaside postcard about some of his humour, but there was also the lacerating joy when he got fully to grips with the true depths of someone’s cant.
Every week you gasped at the audacity of the sentences, the rich analogies, the poking of pomposity
As a reader I knew the genius of A. A. Gill, the similarly memorable sentences and ideas, but to know someone like Rod as a colleague, in the age of digital dashboards detailing the number of readers and subscribers was to know the full scale of a readership’s admirations. At the ST you wanted your stuff to be up there every week with Rod and Clarkson, to be the best of the rest among the Pogrunds, Nikkhahs and Aitkenheads. At The Spectator it was very simple. The podium each week was nearly always Rod and Douglas Murray, a similarly clear-eyed figure with a scalpel for a pen, and one other. You always wanted to be the one other.
The questions began to come of course in recent weeks. Why wasn’t he there? Is he ok? Journalists delve deeply into the lives of others but seldom welcome the same scrutiny. There wasn’t quite omertà. I knew he was ill, but not how ill. I once wrote to Christopher Hitchens, with whom I had previously spent one of the great instructive drinking sessions of my life, when I knew he was dying, to try to express something of my admiration for his writing ability and his great bravery as a writer, to tell him that his work would live on. I didn’t get a reply. Perhaps it was too on the nose, perhaps he had thousands of such messages, but I am glad I did so to this day.
I will regret forever not saying the same to Rod. RIP.
Comments