Columns

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Forget the Grand Mess, here’s the fun stuff

There’s something a little-dispiriting about waking up one morning to find that our elected politicians are even more psychopathic, deranged and-disloyal than one had always suspected. I don’t just mean Gove and his cackling, somewhat ambitious missus. Charming though Michael undoubtedly is, and agreeably owlish in-public, I have imagined him in-darker moments standing in a blood-splattered hallway with a kitchen knife in his hand muttering over and over: ‘I did it for you, Mummy, I did it for you.’ Somehow I always thought that was in there, with Michael.

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

The pollster who called it wrong. Again

A few hours after voting started in the European Union referendum, Populus released its final opinion poll showing a ten-point lead for Remain. This carried weight because the founder of Populus, Andrew Cooper, was also pollster for the official Remain campaign. His findings had been passed to 10 Downing Street earlier, leading David Cameron and his team to become very confident. There were reports that the Prime Minister was not even going to stay up for the result: he intended to go to sleep early and wake up to victory. The vote for Brexit, by 52 per cent to 48 per cent, confounded the financial markets and wrongfooted most opinion pollsters. The telephone polls struggled; they gave undue weight to graduates, who disproportionally favoured Remain.

Rod Liddle

Three great myths of the sulking Remainers

I think my favourite moment of the referendum campaign was John Major’s intervention, a couple of weeks before polling day. In that immediately recognisable tone of condescension tinged with snippy petulance, which we all remember and love so well from the time of his magnificent stewardship of this country, he said that people who didn’t want some degree of pooled sovereignty should go and live in North Korea, oh yes. No, John, that’s where you should go. I’m sure you can persuade the fat idiot who runs the place that his people need and deserve a motorway cones hotline, even if there are no cars on the roads. It’s time for a duck shoot.

James Delingpole

Don’t gloat – this is Brexiteers’ one big chance

‘Believe me, nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.’ I think this is how quite a few of us are feeling right now, we Brexiteers. We’re over the initial giddy disbelief, the euphoric rush of ‘My God, we actually did it!’ and heading towards the Wednesday Blues stage of our trip. Why, after all that agonising and hard work, does victory taste so bitter? Well I know that in my case it has nothing to do with buyer’s remorse. I’m still very proud of what we achieved; prouder yet of the overwhelming outbreak of common sense I witnessed last week in so many of my fellow countrymen and -women.

Emily Hill

Why I lie about voting Leave

There are lies, damned lies and pretending to back Remain. I lie because I am a coward. I hug friends who burst into tears, petrified by life without the European Union. I sympathise with strangers, who act like Lady Di just died and there’s nowhere to lay flowers. I obfuscate, I mutter, I am evasive. And I am not alone. There are hordes of us who’ll not admit we voted Leave to our best friends, our next of kin. We learned to keep schtum a long time ago — thanks to social media — since they’d defriend us if said we’d vote to leave. Now they are outraged, deeply confused — and unsure which of us to blame.

Wednesday

Hugo Rifkind

Jezza’s playing Glasto: is this a good idea?

I do like a wet and muddy Glastonbury. Albeit, admittedly, not quite as much as I like a dry and sunny one. It’s different, though. When the weather is poor, you become a pioneer, remaking the land, terra-forming the turf with your trudge. On the Sunday evening you can climb high up to the top of the park, the south-west slopes, past the tipis, along from the stone circle, and you will see all that was once green turned to brown. ‘We did that,’ you may think. Glastonbury is a secular pilgrimage, but it is the filth that makes it holy. Don’t laugh at me. It does. Mud, you learn, is not a substance but a process, taking you from wet ground to a slithering, splattering slide to a sucking, squelching treacle that fights for your boots.

Rod Liddle

Can a nutter also be a terrorist?

When is a nutter not a nutter, but a politically motivated terrorist? And are those two states of being always mutually exclusive? Or are they always the same thing? That first question was asked, in a fairly gentle manner, by a Muslim mate of mine on a social media site. The thread had been about the murder of the Labour MP Jo Cox — and my friend was a little surprised to note the ease, if not eagerness, with which other commentators were ready to describe the alleged murderer as being simply a ‘loony’. I do not know, and will not pre-judge, the state of mind of Thomas Mair, the man now charged with the murder of Jo Cox.

Matthew Parris

Was there any way not to traduce Cliff Richard?

Sir Cliff Richard will not be charged with historic sex offences, say the police and Crown Prosecution Service. There is ‘insufficient evidence’. You, reader — yes, you: I cannot reveal your name because I’m making this up, but let’s call you Alan, and let’s suppose my reader-ship know very well who you are… you, Alan, respectable, hitherto-well-regarded Alan, are not going to be charged with smuggling into Britain a stash of sadomasochistic scatological pornography as a young man in 1983 because there is ‘insufficient evidence’. How do you feel about that announcement, Alan?

Thursday

James Forsyth

Cameron’s appointment with fear

The best thing that can be said for David Cameron’s current predicament is that he has been here before. His career has been punctuated by moments when the polls and the pundits have said he was done for. In 2007, with the new Prime Minister Gordon Brown enjoying a honey-moon and considering a snap election, this magazine pictured him on the cover with a noose and the headline ‘Get out of this, Dave’. He did. At times, even he has thought his leadership was over. On election day last year, he spent the early evening rehearsing his resignation speech to his closest aides. Hours later, he was hailing the ‘sweetest victory of all’. It was the Scottish referendum two years ago that caused Cameron the most worry.

Rod Liddle

Rise of the atrocity exhibitionists

Life is speeded up. It used to be that when a hideous atrocity occurred people waited a day or two, even a week, before co-opting it into their political armoury. Now it happens while the smell of cordite is still in the air and before the blood has dried. There is a breathtaking shamelessness about it and a certain narcissism, if not outright solipsism and an eagerness to demand a sort of acquired victim status. The revolting murders in an Orlando nightclub are a case in point. Some 49 people dead and 53 injured after a Muslim, presumably what we are enjoined to call a radical Muslim, ran amok with a gun.

James Delingpole

I’ve seen the future – and it’s beautiful

 Berne, Switzerland Before we vote Brexit I thought I’d pop over to Switzerland — courtesy of Die Weltwoche, the nearest local equivalent to The Spectator — to see how life will be once we escape the EU. Can confirm: it’s going to be great. We’ll be richer, freer and the views are fantastic: lakes and mountains so stupidly gorgeous that each time you look at them you think: ‘This is ridiculous. Nowhere could possibly be this ludicrously pretty.’ Then you go under a tunnel to the next valley where it’s just as lovely. It’s like gorging on a giant bar of hazelnut Lindt. And — in their understated Swiss way — they love us British.

Mary Wakefield

The day that Brexit camped in my kitchen

On Thursday last week, as the baby and I were moving in our usual slow circles around the house, from changing station to feeding station to the place of dreaded midday nap, my husband, Dom, called to say he and all his colleagues were coming over. Dom is employed by Vote Leave, the group campaigning for us to get out of the European Union. He’d been hard at work, he said, sharing his concerns about Turkey with the media, when water had begun to gush from the ceiling. Was this a desperate move by No. 10, intent on sabotage? Nope, said Dom, but we can’t stay here so I’ve invited everyone home. Ten minutes later Brexit was in the kitchen.

Thursday

James Forsyth

Brexit: the first 100 days

The Spectator Podcast Christopher Meyer, James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman discuss the first 100 days of Brexit At 5.15 a.m. on Friday 24 June 2016, David Cameron calls Michael Gove and concedes defeat in the EU referendum. The conversation is brief. With nearly all the results in, it is clear that Remain cannot overturn Leave’s advantage. Downing Street announces that Cameron will address the country before the markets open. Up to now, this scenario has just been a worst nightmare for the Remain campaign and the wildest dream of the Brexiteers. Even now, the political class is almost unanimous that ‘in’ will win. But there is little psephological evidence for their certainty.

Rod Liddle

Naked lunches and hidden bigotry

Have you got your names down yet for the Bunyadi? I’d hurry, if I were you. There’s currently a waiting list of more than 40,000, most of them homo-sexual Camden cyclists, I would guess. The Bunyadi is the country’s first nude restaurant and is, of course, in London. You go in, take all of your clothes off, sit yourself down in the noisome detritus left by the previous diner’s prolapsed rectum, and peruse the menu. Your waiters are not quite nude. They have small coverings to prevent unfortunate accidents. You would not wish to turn around in your seat to order a glass of water only to have your eye poked out by a Polish penis, or your nose immersed in a fragrant Slovak lady garden. But everything else is nude. The food too, according to the proprietors.

Hugo Rifkind

Help! I’ve started to care about politics

Once upon a time, I didn’t really care about politics. Not viscerally. Growing up in a political family, I suppose, you go one of two ways. You know those kids you’ll sometimes see being paraded around by political parents in facepaint and rosettes, waving from shoulders as though born into a cult? I wasn’t like that. More the opposite. Politics was always nearby, and sometimes even interesting, but it was nothing to do with me. Devotees often made me think of those people who support a football team and refer to it as ‘we’. Get over yourself, I always thought. You’re just a spectator. If you wanted to detect a degree of entitlement in this, I suppose you’d be entitled to.

Thursday

Mary Wakefield

Great news for fatties: it’s really not your fault

I’ve noticed for some time now that thin people, genuinely slim ones, have a secret loathing of fatties. Kindly though they may otherwise be, the sight of rolls and overhangs, jowls and bulges, makes them angry. One extremely thin woman I know finds it hard, she told me, even to have fat friends. Another shivers with horror if she catches some poor podge in the act of wolfing a treat. It’s not an aesthetic affront, she says, so much as a moral one. Where’s their willpower, where’s their grit? It’s hard to argue with a censorious thinny. We all know, these days, that there’s no excuse for being a lardarse. Faulty glands, slow metabolism — all tripe. The brutal truth is that if you’re fat it’s because you eat too much.

James Delingpole

Learning the secrets of happiness from Britain’s most foul-mouthed angler

To go fishing on the Itchen in mayfly season, you either have to be very, very rich or very, very lucky. That’s why I’m so grateful to have a friend in Mike Daunt, arguably Britain’s best-connected angler, certainly the most foul-mouthed, who invited me up for the day on to a particularly juicy beat of this idyllic Hampshire river to try to catch my first trout ever with a dry fly. I’ll cut to the chase: I got one. About two and a half pounds, I’d say; a handsome brown. I still don’t know quite how I got it — it took in the middle of the stream, where I wasn’t expecting to get a bite. One second it was not there, the next it was.

James Forsyth

The right question at the wrong time

Complaining about the EU referendum campaign has become an integral part of the referendum; even Delia Smith has got in on the act. But politicians on both sides who pretend that the choice is simple, despite having agonised over it themselves for years, are only partly to blame for the dire state of the debate. The bigger problem is that the referendum is taking place at the wrong time. It was meant to take place once the eurozone had decided how to address its own problems. The British public could then decide whether they wanted to remain in or leave the European Union armed with this knowledge. But the question is still unresolved.

Rod Liddle

Yay, root out those Jew-haters, Jeremy!

A long and arduous flight back from the Caucasus, but worth it nonetheless for the meaningful protest we had staged in the fragrant and lovely Georgian capital, Tbilisi. They have opened a vegan restaurant there called the Café Kiwi — an affront not just to ordinary Georgians, but to all right-thinking people, surely. A bunch of us stormed the place carrying large chunks of grilled lamb on skewers and spicy sausages, which we flung at the epicene customers, who cowered beneath their tables and were unable to fight back because their bones had been made as brittle as matchwood by a diet consisting entirely of nuts and berries.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Voters have no time for the flaccid centre

A depression has settled on the Liddle household ever since Norbert Hofer narrowly failed in his bid to become the president of Austria. I like a man who keeps a Glock pistol in his jacket pocket, and there is something noble in the cut of his jib. Norbert was thwarted by the voters of Red Vienna and the usual fraudulent postal ballots, most of which will have come from immigrants, as happens time and again in this country. So he lost. Instead the Austrians are saddled with a lunatic, Alexander Van der Bellen, a hand-wringing Green halfwit representing what George Orwell was habituated to call the ‘pansy left’. Interestingly, both of the two leading candidates for the job of president seem to loathe Austria and wish for it to be abolished.