Rod Liddle

‘We’re fearless. We challenge everything, especially ourselves. We seek the truth relentlessly. We believe in we not me. And we mean it.’Wolff-Olins mission statement There’s been quite a fuss about the official new logo for the 2012 Olympic Games in London. People are aghast at the fact that it is a) hideous and b) cost £400,000. A child, a blind man, an ape let loose with a paintbrush could all have done better, the argument goes. Well yes, of course. The jarring amalgamation of irregular shapes does indeed bring to mind the sort of graffiti one finds on walls near a home for the educationally sub-normal — and there is the faint aftertaste of Adolf Hitler, too.

Rifleman Tulbahadur Pun then seized the Bren gun, and firing from the hip as he went, continued the charge on this heavily bunkered position alone, in the face of the most shattering concentration of automatic fire, directed straight at him.... Despite ...overwhelming odds, he reached the Red House and closed with the Japanese occupants. He killed three and put five more to flight and captured two light machineguns and much ammunition. He then gave accurate supporting fire from the bunker to the remainder of his platoon which enabled them to reach their objective.His outstanding courage and superb gallantry in the face of odds which meant almost certain death were most inspiring to all ranks and beyond praise.

Ah, now, this is what we pay our licence fee for. A maniac screaming at a maniac. I hope you caught the latest edition of the BBC’s Panorama, during which the presenter, John Sweeney, went berserk at a spokesman for the Church of Scientology — bellowing in his face at full volume in the manner of an inmate at Rampton being told that his pornography allowance has been stopped. If you didn’t see the show itself, then check out the incident on YouTube on the internet — it’s been posted there by the Scientologists as if to say look, everybody, this is what we have to put up with, abuse and harrassment. The clip is quite wonderful — perhaps the most arresting moment of TV this year and utterly hilarious.

Rod Liddle says that young princes in their twenties will always prefer a peroxide blonde  with a non-U name to a fragrant, well-spoken English rose This has been a difficult week. I am still trying to come to terms with the fact that I was responsible for the traumatic break-up between Prince William and Kate Middleton. It is a terrible thing to have on one’s conscience, the dashing of young love and the hope and expectation of a nation. It’s not, of course, that I’ve been spotted dancing the night away and canoodling in Chinawhite with Kate, or Wills for that matter. I’ve never, ever, pawed a royal or a wannabe royal in a nightclub, not even Princess Michael of Kent.

The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, has suggested that the Church of England has become obsessed by homosexuals. His implication seems to be that Jesus Christ didn’t go on about them too much and so, really, neither should we. The term ‘obsessed’ is a strong one, but I think justified. If Dr Sentamu had been less tactful, he might have suggested that one half of the Church of England clergy believes homosexuals will burn forever in the fires of Hell and wishes fervently to be on hand in order to help poke down the sodomites with those famous pitchforks, while the other half is more camp than Brownsea Island. That’s a sweeping statement, I admit, but not a million miles from the truth. Sentamu, however, is a tactful man and also careful.

If you are thinking of taking your summer holiday abroad this year and have not yet alighted upon a suitable destination, then why not bear Zimbabwe in mind? It looks increasingly likely that Robert Mugabe will not be President for very much longer. Instead they’ll have someone else in charge. The general rule for African countries is that when some obscene, homicidal and incompetent tyrant is at last somehow overthrown, the civilised world breathes a sigh of relief and the new regime is, for a while, garlanded in roses.

A few weeks ago the Chinese national youth football team arrived in London to play some matches against the capital’s clubs as part of a historic, groundbreaking, goodwill visit ahead of the Olympic Games. A chance for our two nations to foment sporting respect for one another, despite our profound political differences. Sort of like Nixon’s visit to Peking in 1972, except with the top referee Dermot Gallagher in attendance, rather than Henry Kissinger. I dare say you can imagine what happened, in case you haven’t already heard. Seven members of the Chinese team were sent home after a terrific, spectacular mass brawl during the, um, friendly game against QPR. It was wonderful stuff — you can watch it all on the internet.

A couple of years ago an over-confident Scottish woman called Dr Gillian McKeith made history by being the first person ever to examine human stools on primetime television. A nutritionist — whatever that is — by trade, her shtick was to induce indolent and feckless working-class people to defecate into a tube and then — holding the tube aloft for the benefit of the viewing audience — berate them for the spineless quality of their product. From this unique vantage point she would then castigate the working-class people about their diets and force them to eat mung beans, lentils and chard, with ‘hilarious’ results. Someone somewhere obviously thought this would provide compelling television.

At last, a British school where pupils are inculcated in a strict moral code, but also taught to think for themselves. Get your kids’ names down for the King Fahad Academy in Acton, west London, quick. It’s a Muslim faith school, as you might have guessed from its title, but don’t let that put you off. The pupils, from the age of five, are taught that Christians are ‘pigs’ and Jewish people are ‘apes’ — none of that dripping-wet equivocation you get from the national curriculum. And crucially, while the teaching is strict, the children are rewarded for ingenuity and inventiveness. For example, they are asked to think up ‘some repugnant characteristics of Jews’.

Rod Liddle says that it is not only entertaining to put your money into companies that  behave naughtily. It is also economically lucrative: so buy more stocks today Are you worried about the size of the footprint you are leaving on this earth? More specifically, are you worried that it might not be big enough? I may have the solution. The Spectator Unethical Investment Fund (SUIF) is a chance for all those decent, God-fearing, rather right-of-centre citizens to put their money where their mouths are, for once. Sick of politicians whining about corporate responsibility?

There is an interesting debate doing the rounds at the moment: should we allow faith schools in Britain? The debate has been occasioned by our tortuous and interminable wrangling with all things Islamic; it has suddenly occurred to us that allowing children to be inculcated into an ideology which may be antithetical to our national culture is a dangerous and divisive thing. And during the course of filming a two-hour documentary for Channel 4 about the translation of the Bible into English, I was struck by the strange, almost perverse nature of this debate. It seems to be polarised: you are either for faith schools or you are against them. It is almost a given that if you oppose Muslim faith schools, you must, with even-handedness, oppose Church of England faith schools.

In the downstairs loo of Richard Dawkins’s house in Oxford there’s a framed award from the Royal Society; to remind visitors, or maybe Richard himself, that here lives a man of some purpose, some gravitas and intellectual clout. The Faraday prize is given to those who communicate science with brilliance and verve to the scientifically ignorant, thick general public. Richard has done a lot of that, ever since The Selfish Gene in 1976. It is his job these days; he holds the Simonyi chair in the public understanding of science at Oxford University. His latest wife, the actress Lalla Ward, has done her bit too, helping out various bereft timelords in Dr Who. Richard himself is a bit of a timelord, if you like.

First it was peanuts; now Jesus Christ has been banished from the cabins of British Airways aeroplanes. What will be next to fall victim to the apparently arbitrary scythe of censorship of the BA executives? The airline — which once enraged Margaret Thatcher by replacing the Union flag on the tail fins of its fleet with representations of radical mullahs invoking intifada, single mums taking smack, colourful gypsies and homosexuals, or something — has aroused British public opprobrium once again. It has decided that one of its employees, Nadia Eweida, must not be allowed to wear a crucifix advertising her love of Jesus Christ while she is at work.

Rod Liddle says that a society brutalised by violent imagery and the death penalty  has learned to expect such horrors as the bloodbath in the schoolhouse It was what the psychiatric services, with commendable understatement, often call a ‘special’ murder: obscure in its motive, repugnant in its selection of vulnerable and powerless victims, excessively brutal in its denouement. Charles C. Roberts, a milkman, marched into the West Nickel Mines Amish School in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, at 10.30 a.m. with a nine-millimetre automatic pistol, two shotguns, a stun gun, two knives, two cans of gunpowder and buckets containing both plastic restraints and KY Jelly, a sexual lubricant.

One of the lovely things about writing for The Spectator is that we have an extremely knowledgeable and well-read audience, so there is no need to explain the sort of stuff that one would need to explain were one writing for the Sun, say, or the New Statesman. An article about humorous verse of the mid-19th century, for example, would not require a preamble making it clear that Edward Lear did not, in his spare time, make jet aeroplanes. You know that already. This holds true for an agreeably diverse range of subjects; however, there is always an exception to test the rule.