Columns

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle: If we don’t stigmatise fat people, there’ll be lots more of them

Trying to get good, healthy, nutritious food down the ungrateful throats of the lower orders, especially northerners, has become a serious national problem. At the moment these awful people eat nothing but fat coated in breadcrumbs and deep-fried in engine oil, and so as a consequence they are gargantuan, slobbering masses of compacted lard, so vast that there would be room, if they so wished, for Hogarth to do their tattoos. Have you ever wandered about in the centre of Sheffield or Rotherham?

Matthew Parris

Matthew Parris: Atheists deserve better opposition

I wish I were a religious conservative: the field’s wide open. It must be dispiriting for believers to encounter so little intelligent support for belief. It’s certainly infuriating for us non-believers, because there’s hardly anyone left who seems capable of giving us a good argument. In search of a stimulating conversation about religion, we are reduced to arguing with ourselves. Which, still seething at a Spectator article purporting to be a serious examination of the case for miracles, I shall now do. I cannot argue with Piers Paul Read because he never produces an argument to answer. The magazine tagged his piece ‘I believe in miracles’, which was accurate because the essay was not a reasoned case; it was simply an attestation.

Thursday

James Forsyth

James Forsyth: Why hung parliaments are here to stay

Reshuffles are meant to demonstrate the power of a leader, to show that they are in command of their party. But what Ed Miliband, David Cameron and Nick Clegg all revealed this week was not their strengths but their fears. It was clear that Ed Miliband’s great worry is that in 2015 Labour will look like it is offering a replay of its last stint in government. In policy terms, his answer has been to make clear where he wants to break with the New Labour consensus. First, there were his frequent acts of contrition on immigration, then his conference pledge to freeze energy prices, by law, if elected. In personnel terms, his solution has been to promote a slew of MPs from the 2010 intake.

Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle: Is Hugh Grant a pawn of the mad metropolitan left?

It is a peculiar alliance, when you think of it, which wishes to bring to an end 300 years of press freedom in this country. The handsome actor Hugh Grant would rather the press didn’t find out about him being ‘noshed’, as I believe the term has it, by a prostitute on some Los Angeles freeway. I can understand that, even if I do not think he has the right to make that call, given the image he adopts to sell himself to the public. The absolutist metro liberal left, meanwhile, would have no doubt -whatsoever who was the victim in that particular scenario: the nosher, not the noshee.

Hugo Rifkind

Hugo Rifkind: For now, I’m choosing to believe in Tommy Robinson’s conversion

I’ve often thought it might be interesting to meet Tommy Robinson, or Stephen Lennon, or whatever one is supposed to call the erstwhile English Defence League frontman these days. Because, well, he’s not an idiot, is he? Or at least, not to the extent you’d like him to be. And it bugged me. I remember seeing him up against Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight a few years ago. Yes, he fell into bear-traps, quite a few of which he’d dug himself, and yes, he said more than a few things that any mainstream politician would have been crucified for, and rightly. But at core, there was something there with which Paxman simply couldn’t cope at all. This was an eloquent, white working-class voice, airing white working-class concerns.

James Delingpole

James Delingpole: I don’t automatically support Piers Morgan. So why should women automatically support Julia Gillard?

I’ve been racking my brains to think what I might have in common with Kim Jong Un and Piers Morgan. But apart from owning a spectacularly tiny penis, I simply cannot think. Certainly, when Kim is getting it in the neck for having one of his ex-girlfriends executed by firing squad to please his wife, or whenever Morgan is being criticised for being just the worst thing ever, I never find myself seized with some sudden hormonal urge to rush to their defence on account of the fact that we’re all part of the Brotherhood. Maybe, though, we’re missing a trick. Maybe we chaps of the world could enjoy so much more leeway if only we showed a bit more male solidarity. ‘Of course I had to nuke Seoul.

Thursday

James Forsyth

James Forsyth: Two men have united the Tories – Ed Miliband and Nigel Farage

 Manchester   The Tory party has been at peace with itself this week. Eurosceptic backbenchers have given Nigel Farage a verbal kicking on the fringe, Cabinet ministers have stuck resolutely to the ‘hardworking’ conference script, and even Boris Johnson has behaved himself. Gay marriage, which so divided the leadership from the grassroots, has barely been mentioned, and you’d never know that just a month ago David Cameron lost a Commons vote on Syria. The new harmonious mood has come about in part because the leadership has moved towards the rest of the party. Tory conference was once decorated with poster extolling the benefits of ‘the big society’.

Matthew Parris

Matthew Parris: The Tories mustn’t cuddle up to Ukip — just imagine if it happened on the left

Such is my respect for Spectator readers that I offer you a column whose subtext is in Latin. Ours is one of the last mainstream magazines among whose readership the phrase mutatis mutandis will be very widely understood. But the little test you and I are going to try concerns a live issue, not a dead language. For the purposes of this test I am going to paint you a scenario, and you’re going to give me the broad thrust of the advice you’d give in such circumstances. Imagine that the Labour party has been trying for some time to position itself firmly on the centre ground.

Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle: Ever since I criticised a leftist icon, the Beeb hasn’t stopped calling me

Ring, ring goes the telephone every minute God sends. Sometimes I pick it up and say hello, sometimes I don’t. I know who is calling, anyway. It is one or another media representative from the bien-pensant absolutist liberal left, and they are all in a dither about a man called Ralph Miliband, of whom they had probably never heard until a few hours ago, and whom they have most certainly not read. Their sense of excitement, these youngish callers from a multiplicity of BBC news stations and, of course, Channel 4 News, is palpable; it fizzes and crackles down the line, their outrage and their delight at possibly finding someone who might add to their outrage, perhaps cube their outrage. Unless it’s just the jackdaws hacking away at the telephone lines again. It could be that.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle: Under New Labour, it really was the loony left

There is a little vignette in the first volume of Alastair Campbell’s diaries that makes it abundantly clear that, at the time, we were being governed by people who were mentally ill. It is yet another furious, bitter, gut-churning row involving Campbell, Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson and concludes with Mandelson stamping his little feet and screaming: ‘I am sick of being rubbished and undermined! I hate it! And I want out.’ The cause of this dispute was not whether or not Labour should nationalise the top 200 companies and secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry. Don’t be silly. It was about whether Blair should wear a suit and tie to deliver a speech or if, instead, he should put on a nice pair of cords.

Hugo Rifkind

Hugo Rifkind: I spy complete indifference towards being spied

Oh, but life’s easier if you’re American. Each and every last way the state meddles with your life is an outrage. Whether it’s forcing you to have health care, or denying you the right to own the gun that Al Pacino has in Scarface, or making you wear a seat belt, or taxing you, or threatening to silence your long-held and proudly defended right to put a pillowcase on your head and be a racist, Big Government is a villain. There are people, the American thinks, and then there is power, and the latter shafts the little guy every chance he gets. It’s not like that in Britain.

James Delingpole

James Delingpole: What’s wrong with being right?

I’m trying to imagine what Britain would look like under a Ukip/Conservative coalition with Cameron as PM and Farage as his deputy. The idea fills me with horror. I think, for example, of the runaway economic boom which would result from the sudden dash to exploit our superabundant shale gas resources; I think of the revolution which would occur in education were free schools freed to make a profit; I think of the rolling back of political correctness, the reinvention of the NHS on the Singapore model, the epic reduction in public spending, the cancellation of High Speed 2, the death of the renewable energy scam. It would be a nightmare, I tell you, a complete bloody nightmare. Whatever would there be left for people like me to write about?

Thursday

Rod Liddle

The BMA’s bizarre jihad against e-cigarettes

What strategy should we adopt to cope with the British Medical Association? Its members kill more people each year than President Assad — 72,000 is the latest estimate, from the House of Commons health select committee. Perhaps it is at last time to sit down and negotiate with them, much though this will stick in the craw, like a misplaced scalpel. We say that organisations like the IRA and the BMA will ‘never win’ and that we will ‘never negotiate’ – but this is empty rhetoric, because we always end up doing so. If we could just reduce by 10 per cent the number of people killed every year through medical errors it would at least bring the figure below the combined annual deaths attributed to smoking and drinking and obesity.

Matthew Parris

Coalition with Labour would suffocate the Liberal Democrats

I write this in Glasgow, at the Lib Dem conference. Nick Clegg has invented a constitutional doctrine. The doctrine teaches that after a general election, the party that comes third (should it have cohabitation in mind) must first approach the party that won the most seats. But there is no such rule. Our unwritten constitution is clear, minimal and simple. Any two parties jointly capable of commanding a Commons majority have an effective right to form a government together whenever they wish. That right is born of their joint ability to bring down any other government on the instant. So after the general election in 2015, unguided by the rule book, Mr Clegg and his party may have to make a primitive choice.

Thursday

James Forsyth

Nick Clegg’s secret reasons to be cheerful

His party may be struggling to reach double digits in the polls, but Nick Clegg is entitled to feel smug as he heads to Glasgow for this year’s Lib Dem conference. This gathering, the penultimate one before the general election, has long been circled in Westminster diaries as the moment when a challenge to his leadership would emerge. But Clegg will arrive free from any threats to his position. Not even the coalition’s defeat over Syria has destabilised Clegg. If, in May 2010, you had told a Liberal Democrat that their leader would back the coalition going to war in the Middle East without a UN mandate and then lose a Commons vote on it, he or she would have said that he’d be finished.

James Delingpole

The RSPB is fighting for wind turbines. The birds can fend for themselves

The RSPB has come out against fracking and urged the government to ‘rethink its shale gas policies’. And of course the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds would know. After all when your skill set ranges from identifying Little Brown Jobs through your binoculars at 10,000 yards all the way to differentiating a Greater Spotted Woodpecker from a Lesser Spotted Woodpecker merely by the sound of its drumming beak, clearly it goes without saying that your insights into the merits of hydraulic fracturing and the minutiae of Britain’s energy economy deserve to be taken very seriously indeed. No, no I jest. About the first bit, anyway.

Rod Liddle

The reassuring stupidity of John Kerry

The Syrian rebels who liberated the mountain village of Maaloula apparently immediately set about converting the predominantly Christian population to Islam, using the gently persuasive techniques we have come to associate with this dynamic and expanding religion. ‘Allahu Akbar! Either you will convert to Islam or you will be beheaded,’ rebels allegedly told some villagers. Other residents were simply shot dead without all the onerous conversion palaver. It is said that the accents of the rebel soldiers were many things — Chechen, Tunisian, Moroccan, etc — but certainly not Syrian.

Hugo Rifkind

Boring politicians are a threat to democracy. That means you, Rachel Reeves

I’ve never met the woman that the Newsnight editor Ian Katz this week accidentally described as ‘boring, snoring Rachel Reeves’, so for all I know, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury might be an absolute riot. Although actually, writing that, it occurs to me that maybe I have and she was just too boring for me to remember. Perhaps we sat next to each other at some sort of function, and had a fun chat about, ooh, fiscal prudence in a post-OBR paradigm, which involved her talking and me going ‘Mmmm’, and left her thinking, ‘He seems nice, I wonder if we’ll be friends?

Thursday

Rod Liddle

What are we supposed to say when a grooming ring comes to light?

It is a tragedy that some of us are born in the wrong times. According to that increasingly gobby conduit of right-on morality, the NSPCC, girls these days feel compelled to act like porn stars in order to ingratiate themselves with boys. I am not sure quite what, in day to day life, this involves. I only know that they made no similar attempts during my adolescence, or if they did I didn’t notice. I vaguely recall one young lady in my school class telling me, when I was 14, that she had engaged in sexual intercourse the previous night with a boy from a neighbouring town. ‘What was it like, Debs?’ I asked, wide-eyed. ‘Didn’t touch the fucking sides,’ Debs spat with all the contempt she could muster.

James Forsyth

Syria vote? What Syria vote? David Cameron’s strategy is to forget it ever happened

The political conference season may be lacking in party activists nowadays, but it has lost none of its importance to the party leaders. For David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband, the next four weeks are a chance to position themselves for the final, full parliamentary year before the general election. Clegg needs to get his party members to sign off on the policies he has pursued in government, to prevent any manifesto embarrassments. Miliband needs to find an iconic policy which tells voters what his government might be like. Cameron needs to protect his right flank from Ukip, while still appealing to the centre. But none had planned for the new parliamentary term starting with the eruption of the Syrian conflict on to the British political agenda.