Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.

Only one man could bridge this footballing divide

From our UK edition

It reminded me a little of that wonderful Christmas Day truce in the first world war, when the two sides briefly came together, put aside their homicidal enmities and played a game of football and sang carols. The venue was the Riverside Stadium in Middlesbrough, fittingly on Good Friday. Boro, then second in the Championship,

The BBC’s real crime is its relentless political bias

From our UK edition

I am not convinced that the BBC did very much wrong regarding Scott Mills. No matter how boring the BBC’s seemingly endless retinue of mediocre gay exhibitionists, a man is surely innocent until proven guilty. It may even be that the Corporation treated the bloke unfairly by sacking him, unless they know something that we

Where’s my free BMW?

From our UK edition

My friend Will Clouston, the leader of the Social Democratic Party, dropped round with his wife for a bite to eat this week and showed me an ancient book he had picked up in a second-hand store in Hexham. It was titled Select Fables, with cuts designed by Thomas and John Bewick, and it dates

Huw Edwards’s defenders owe the Sun an apology

From our UK edition

I wasn’t wildly impressed with Channel Five’s dramatisation of the fall of Huw Edwards. But it should at least remind people that it was good old-fashioned tabloid journalism in the public interest by the Sun – and especially the now North America editor Scarlet Howes – that uncovered exactly what the newsreader had been up

The real reason the left hates Israel

‘Listen to what the man on the left of the camera has to say about Israel, the man who is addressed as Nick,’ a radical Corbynista friend suggested to me the other day in a social media message designed to change my mind about the Middle East. It’s part of a sustained campaign on his

Trump should ditch the faux concern for the people of Iran

From our UK edition

Live long enough and all your cherished memories of childhood will end up besmirched somehow. For many of us Boomers the 1970s are now nothing but a long, brownish and noisome stain. We might have expected Gary Glitter would be outed as a nonce and ditto the unequivocally foul Jimmy Savile. But come on, who

Reform’s retreat isn’t what I want

From our UK edition

An addendum to my piece in the mag this week, partly for clarification and partly to reinforce the point, for idiots, that Reform’s retreat isn’t something I wish for, simply what I have observed happening. The main point being that the voting public has shifted because it perceives various battles have been won, because that’s

Has Reform peaked?

From our UK edition

Murton is a rather frowsy former pit village in County Durham, about half a dozen miles down the A19 from Sunderland. Chip shops, tanning salons, elderly people with no teeth on mobility scooters, huge cannabis farm in the disused old Co-op store which has just been busted by the Old Bill. It almost became a

Harry Styles has a cute voice

Grade: B In which the foppish Davy Jones figure from the manufactured band One Direction (Zayn Malik being Peter Tork; One Direction didn’t have a Mike Nesmith) sheds the soft-rock pop-lite that has served him so well and goes with what he fondly believes is challengingly funky EDM, a genre which I do not believe

What is the point of an ‘anti-Muslim hostility tsar’?

From our UK edition

Derrida et al were right. The written English language (langue) can be vague and elliptical and the intended meaning not always assured. The syntax suggests to me that this will be someone who oversees anti-Muslim hostility Back in about 1980, when I was working as a reporter for the South Wales Echo, the paper’s cartoonist, Gren,

Arsenal’s success is a victory for Brexit football

From our UK edition

I notice Arsenal have gone seven points clear at the top of the Premier League table and are thus very likely to win the title – a victory, then, for Brexit football. I watched the game between the Gunners and Chelsea at the weekend and it genuinely was like watching Wimbledon versus Sheffield Wednesday in

Won’t someone please think of Dubai’s influencers?

The human spirit is incredibly resilient really. Even in the depth of our concern over the Israeli-American war against Iran, the worry about what might come next, we can still find time to feel a warm and comforting sense of schadenfreude over the large number of British women with stapled-on lips who are cowering in

Have the Brits forgotten what a song actually is?

From our UK edition

The Brits are always awful, so much so that they exist in a place beyond criticism, so obvious are the failings. Just the sight of the award winners applauding themselves is enough to make me reach for the bucket. So all this goes largely without being said and one passes over it without comment, just

My night at the Baftas

From our UK edition

Sometimes things work out much better than one could have imagined, as if God, looking down, had decided that for whatever reason, a favour should be dispensed in my direction, a blessing. Perhaps occasioned by my diligence and faith, perhaps not. It is impossible to explain these benedictions. Sufficient to say that on Sunday night,

Don’t underestimate the ‘stop Farage’ alliance

From our UK edition

So Thursday came and Oxford went to the pollsAnd made its coward vote and the streets resoundedTo the triumphant cheers of the lost souls –The profiteers, the dunderheads, the smarties.From Autumn Journal by Louis MacNeice, (1938) The electorate quite often gets it wrong, even if we are not meant to admit as much. It certainly

To understand pure stupidity, watch The News Agents

From our UK edition

There have been numerous surveys over the years intended to prove that conservatives are more stupid than liberals and vice versa, so many that it is almost impossible to draw any meaningful conclusion. It is of course an important issue and so, in lieu of yet another survey, could I suggest that you watch a

I was right about Peter Mandelson

From our UK edition

A fight between Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson? A difficult one to call, really. Like a war between Pakistan and Turkey: you kind of want both sides to suffer unimaginable losses. It happened fairly often, though, in that uniquely dysfunctional Blair government and before, when his cabal of liars and smarmers were preparing for power.

Why won’t the BBC use the word ‘Jews’?

From our UK edition

I was intrigued to learn from the BBC Today programme on Tuesday that ‘buildings across the UK will be illuminated this evening to mark Holocaust Memorial Day, which commemorates the six million people murdered by the Nazi regime more than 80 years ago’. Who were these unfortunate ‘people’, I wondered? Just anyone at all? Was