There is a reason the death of Rod Liddle has provoked such a swirling tide of grief among his millions of followers, including readers of this magazine, and that is that in the last 25 years Rod came to occupy a crucial position in journalism, and indeed in our country as a whole.
His columns became a haven, a refuge, in which he gave us permission to think things that are in fact common sense, but which have for some reason become taboo. He gave us a renewed permission to laugh – at him, at ourselves, at our collective absurdities – at a time when laughter is increasingly controlled and often suppressed.
It was fruity stuff to say Africa was run by gangsters, megalomaniacs, Marxists and murderous warlords
Look at what has happened to free speech in the last couple of decades: J.K. Rowling all but cancelled just for saying a woman is a woman; the cops knocking on your door for non-crime hate incidents; students banning brilliant minds from their campuses; endless ridiculous ‘content warnings’; people fired just for a stray comment on the internet.
It’s mad, and yet more and more journalists have been invisibly capitulating. We have been toning it down, cutting that joke, sandpapering things to avoid getting into trouble.
Not Rod Liddle. In the last few years he seemed to become more and more exceptional: still blazing away from his lonely but glorious redoubt.
He had a genius, week after week, for finding the point that was obviously true but notionally unsayable, and then saying it with such zing as to cause maximum offence – and to all the right people.
It was his writing ability that really drove his enemies nuts. He was just more readable than anyone else, with a deceptively easy conversational style that moved you down the page, in a flowing argument where he always found time to let you know what he was reading or smoking or drinking (generally chilled Sancerre).
I knew I had found an ally and friend when, in 2002, Unicef decided for some reason that he and I would be ideal candidates to see the good work they were doing in Uganda, where the life expectancy was then 46, and where 56 per cent of spending came from aid agencies.
I am afraid we both came back and wrote fairly blistering pieces, in which we agreed that western aid was not the solution. As Rod said in the Guardian: ‘If Africa is hopeless, it is because it has been ruled for the past 60 or more years by a fantastic collection of conspicuously vile dictators; gangsters, incompetents, corrupt self-serving megalomaniacs, cretinous Marxist ideologues, half-wits, imbeciles, murderous tribal warlords and, plainly, the barking mad and the criminally insane. Some of them are still there, doing their whacko, hapless stuff, in Harare, Mogadishu etc.’
I mean, it’s fruitily put, but can you disagree with a word? A short time later he left the Today programme, and he was one of my very proudest signings for The Spectator. There was a long golden period (or so I remember it) when he and Peter Oborne used to take turns to open the batting, tonking it over the gasometer with every ball.
Rod’s innings has now closed far, far too early. I grieve for him, and for Alicia, and the children, and for all of us who read and loved him. The country really needs him now.
We don’t need to spend billions policing micro-aggressions and trying to cure ‘anxiety’. What we need is the mental robustness that goes with a sense of humour. God bless him, Rod understood that.
Let’s hope aspiring columnists learn his lesson: to be both funny and truthful, you also have to be brave.
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