It was in Westminster Magistrates’ Court, where I was sitting waiting for the judge’s verdict, that I decided I needed a better way of handling Rod Liddle’s column. As editor of this magazine, I had inherited one of the greatest writers; a force of nature loved by his readers for his bravery and candour. But it sometimes led to difficulties: in this case, criminal prosecution. The judge had a choice: prosecute our owners, the editor, or the magazine. The magazine was fined.
‘Rod was right,’ I was told by Aidan Barclay, who as proprietor had nearly ended up in the dock himself. ‘But truth is no defence. Not any more. You need to spot these things before they blow up.’
Our lawyers were kept busy, too. ‘Happy to keep the dildo reference,’ ran one email
Rod had pointed out the flaw in the retrial of Stephen Lawrence’s killers: could a jury really be unbiased given how everyone had been told that the accused were guilty? A fair point, but a court order had been issued banning people from making it. Our main lawyer was away, and his substitute had approved Rod’s article. I was away too. We needed better systems. The Rod unit was born.
Its mission: to protect the magazine’s single greatest asset in a new era of cancel culture. Not by issuing diktats or ‘guidance’, but by spotting sentences that could be maliciously misconstrued. Lawyers advised the magazine on legal risk, but no one advised on digital blow-ups that were increasingly claiming scalps all over the place. It was seldom the core of an argument that provoked; always the joke, the rhetorical flourish. The writer Kevin Myers would lose his job at the Sunday Times; the great Kelvin MacKenzie would leave the Sun; Ian Buruma would even be fired as editor of the New York Review of Books.
They did not anticipate the battles of the new era. At The Spectator, we tried to. The Rod unit’s job was not to avoid the fights, but to prepare for them – and ensure we could win. So, a magazine with barely 20 editorial staff soon had three devoted to assessing risk. They would protect, not censor, flagging any risks to the editor, so I’d be happy fighting the battle once it began. Look, they’d say: Douglas Murray is taking a swipe at a rabble-rouser in Leicester called Mohammed Hijab. He may sue. But look, we found an audio recording of Hijab at a rally: he is bang to rights. The point was to shield the writer, while preserving their creativity.
For Rod, it was always the jokes that caused the most trouble. In the digital world, they could easily be misinterpreted. And the threat was not libel courts but Ipso, the press regulator.
To know Rod was to know the most soft-hearted, least racist person you could imagine, which is perhaps why he didn’t shy away from making important points. He cared, deeply, about flourish. He disliked his work being sanitised. I once asked if there was a substitute for the f-word; he suggested the c-word. I tried to negotiate him down to ‘moron’; he put up a fight. He knew that these jokes were the essence of his work. Long debates would follow about ‘moron’ vs ‘retard’. Such were Tuesday nights at The Spectator.
Our lawyers were kept busy, too. ‘Happy to keep the dildo reference,’ ran one email from our lawyer, ‘but I would drop the paedophile reference as it’s a bit of a stretch.’ Or another: ‘Might be best to take out “ketamine-fuelled” party and replace with something like “wild”’. (Ketamine suggested illegality: Rod was joking, but sometimes it was best to take the lawyers’ advice.)
‘What evidence does Rod have that he’s still a man and “still has frank ’n’ beans”?’ (A standard of proof is needed to assess that someone is pre-op.) ‘The reference to Justin Trudeau as a sex pest should be removed – unless there is some evidence to prove it.’
When The Spectator was being sold, I had to explain to prospective buyers why our Rod unit existed. I made the case for why so much time and resource was used to protect rude jokes. At the time, we were midway through our battle with Hijab’s lawyers and could have lost hundreds of thousands of pounds. Why run such risks? Why not just avoid taking swipes at litigious street-agitators, or cut sentences that might be considered too risky or offensive? Cheaper, surely? How easy it now is for a word to be taken out of context, and for a writer to be smeared as a racist or a bigot. Why even tiptoe towards this line of fire?
Because this was a battle not just for the soul of the magazine but for the British tradition of publishing satire, of which The Spectator can proudly claim to be the world’s longest-running example. The 1711 Spectator features a rant by a parrot about the debauchery of its owner. Go to The Spectator archives and you see the Rod Liddles of their time: one saying the children of the Tolpuddle Martyrs should also be deported because their placard placed an apostrophe in Martyrs. The tradition of satirising moral fervour, of people poking fun at each other, is worth fighting for. If we lose the ability to laugh at ourselves, we lose something fundamental to our culture.
No one made readers laugh more than Rod. No one was funnier, more outrageous or on-point. The Rod unit – or red team, as I also called it – would usually find that the extraordinary things Rod wrote about were exactly as he said. He actually had done the research. His depth of learning and understanding provided the real power of his articles. The ribaldry, the risqué language, the rollercoaster: this was the journey, but always to a destination. It was also what separated him from his imitators. He knew the difference between wit and profanity.
What a great column he’d have written this week. How much fun he’d have had skewering those now hailing him as a national treasure – even though they always kept quiet (or joined the pile-on) when he was under fire.
Without him, who will write these kind of articles? There will never be anyone like Rod, but how lucky we all were to live in a world illuminated by him. He helped us to see, to think and – most of all – to laugh.
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