Rod Liddle

As France burned, the mullahs arrived on the scene, shook their heads sadly and immediately issued a fatwa. However, for the many Frenchmen who may have shuddered inwardly when they heard the term so invoked, this was a good fatwa, a nice fatwa, a fatwa to be proud of. The mullahs swung by and ordained that Allah would be extremely cross if Muslims torched any more cars, shot any more policemen, lobbed any more petrol bombs or murdered any more elderly white people. Allah wanted Muslims instead to stay at home, potter about the house, maybe watch a little TV.

So far, at least, we are none the wiser about why God sent an earthquake to kill so many people in Kashmir, Pakistan and Afghanistan. We can only hope that sooner or later his purpose will be made evident, so that we all might learn. Why would he torture his people so? The mullahs have been remarkably silent. The earthquake struck during the onset of Ramadan in two of the world’s most devoutly Muslim countries. It is almost unbelievable that not a single bearded cleric from this most certain and steadfast of religions has offered some sort of explanation for the appalling loss of life and destruction of property. Is it not a judgment upon the Western-imposed infidel, General Pervaiz Musharraf? Or perhaps he wishes for the restoration of the Taleban government in Kabul?

In the middle of December last year, five police officers turned up at the Welsh home of Nick Griffin, leader of the British National party, and arrested him on suspicion of inciting racial hatred. Griffin was driven to Halifax police station and forced to watch three hours’ worth of his own speeches, which the police had surreptitiously recorded. He was then released without charge, bailed and told to reappear on 2 March this year — precisely at the time campaigning is expected to begin for the next general election. Mr Griffin is standing against David Blunkett, in Sheffield Brightside. A bunch of other BNP members were arrested at the same time as Mr Griffin.

I am not sure whether it is a good thing or a bad thing that there is almost no oil left anywhere in the world. Out of a sort of childish spite, one is obviously delighted that soon enough countries like Saudi Arabia will have nothing with which to hold the world to ransom. And nothing has caused more environmental damage to our planet than the consumption of hydrocarbons (except maybe that comet which allegedly wiped out the dinosaurs). On the other hand, I am not sure that I wish my children to experience a rapid return to the Stone Age — which will be their future unless we begin to wean ourselves off both oil and, indeed, gas.

I have the feeling that nobody cares very much about Lord Butler’s report into the use of Iraq war intelligence. The public has made up its mind that the government misled us all deliberately — and issues of sloppy working practices at No. 10 seem, by comparison, small beer indeed. It was the former minister John Denham who summed up the whole business most succinctly last autumn: the government decided to go to war with Iraq and then commissioned reports and dossiers to support that decision. It should have been the other way around. From that point, all else follows. The government needed those dossiers to support its case and quite clearly went about ensuring that they did so. It is less the ineptitude of No.

Our soccer fans are by no means the most thuggish in the world, says Rod Liddle, and he’ll glass any smug Scotch git who says they are A rather smug, bearded Scotsman upbraided me the other day when I was queuing for a drink at one of those left-of-centre London wine bars where the staff look at you with opprobrium if you order the house Chardonnay. His complaint was with something I’d written about the Euro 2004 football championship — to the effect that it was OK, for 90 minutes, to loathe the opposition for their real or imagined national characteristics. It made the game more fun, I’d argued. ‘Don’t you realise that you are encouraging English football hooliganism?’ he said, stressing the word ‘English’, of course.

One of my favourite quotes of the last ten years, for a public display of unintentional black humour, came from a spokesman for Noraid, the American-based organisation which raises funds for the IRA. This chap had been asked, a few days after 9/11, to comment upon the possibility that people might perceive some similarities of method between al-Qa’eda and the good ol’ knee-cappin’ Provos. The Twin Towers had collapsed and Americans were, for the first time, acquainted with the trauma of terrorism on their own soil. The Noraid man was quite outraged by the nature of the inquiry and eventually spluttered, ‘There’s no comparison at all. None whatsoever. The IRA always gives a warning.

John Prescott is going to destroy large areas of England with new homes, even though more than 700,000 properties — enough to meet housing needs for the next four years — lie vacant. Rod Liddle urges conservatives to resist the terror According to our government, there is a shortage of affordable housing in this country, and particularly in the south of England. As a result the government, in the redoubtable, if humorous, figure of John Prescott, intends to build hundreds of thousands of new houses every year in order to meet this perceived ‘demand’.

Rod Liddle says that the government’s White Paper on public health won’t help the fatties, but if we could overcome our fear of ‘kiddie-fiddlers’, children might be able to reduce their weight on the playing field Everybody you know is on a diet because everybody you know is fat. Sometimes they’re just a bit porky, a roll of subcutaneous blubber the colour and consistency of a McDonald’s vanilla milkshake around the midriff, or at the top of the legs. Quite often, though, they’re quiveringly leviathan and — rather like our universe — in a state of perpetual, hectic expansion; the folds of enveloping flesh growing almost before your eyes.

According to a survey reported last weekend in the Independent on Sunday, almost all homosexuals are barking mad. I am using the politically correct term ‘barking mad’ so as not to incur the wrath of the mental-health pressure groups, all of which become psychotically incensed and even violent when they read of mad people being described as ‘nutters’ or ‘doolally’ or – an old favourite of mine purloined from the US demotic – ‘crazier than a shithouse rat’. So I’ll stick to ‘barking mad’ and thus forestall angry letters from Mind, et al.

The government brought the Hutton inquiry into being by its own shoddy actions. The lying and dissembling of No. 10 has so eroded public trust that, says Rod Liddle, the man responsible – Tony Blair – must go It seems as if we have another thing for which to thank the beleaguered BBC journalist, Mr Andrew Gilligan. According to Britain in Europe, that tautologically entitled pro-euro pressure group, there is no longer even the slenderest chance that the Prime Minister will attempt to drag us all into the single European currency before the next election. Ian Taylor, a Conservative MP and a board member of BiE, told the Daily Telegraph, 'Earlier in the summer they [the government] were holding to the line that we could have a referendum in this parliament.

Few people are entitled to more compassion than young men thus affected [by love]; it is a species of insanity that assails them, and it produces self-destruction in England more frequently than in all the other countries put together.William Cobbett, 1829 What on earth is the Conservative party going to do about sexual intercourse? People are having it off all over the place, willy-nilly, apparently oblivious to the possibility that one day Hell may swallow them up and devour them for such libidinous recklessness.

There is something a little reckless about having a go at the disabled lobby. I can happily question the zealousness and rectitude of the Commission for Racial Equality, Stonewall and any of a multitude of women's groups, safe in the knowledge that I am not about to be rendered black, gay or female in the foreseeable future. But disabled? Hell, who knows? This is one lobby group not to be messed with. Disablement could happen at any moment; there but for the grace of God, etc. In fact, when you study the qualifications required in order to call oneself disabled, it seems almost impossible that it won't happen in the next 48 hours or so – or, indeed, has already happened. I may well be disabled right now.

We are going through one of those horrible and debilitating periods in our history when we are convinced that everybody hates us. Racked with grief, we may even begin to hate ourselves – and thus climb into bed at night praying that we might wake up as Turks. Or Irishmen. It is partly the Eurovision Song Contest. For years we have foisted jaunty, sub-American pop pap on our European neighbours and watched as they lapped it all up, imitated it and vomited it back across the North Sea with Scandinavian or German accents. The more inane our pop exports, the more the Europeans loved them; hence that memorable high-water mark of 'Making Your Mind Up', by Bucks Fizz: a Song Contest winner, a Continental number one, and possibly the most stupid song ever written.