Rod Liddle

There are still 27 people left in the British Isles – at the time of writing – who are unaware of the name of the BBC presenter who allegedly paid a teenager lots of money to look at pictures of their bottom and so on. Some of them are on the remote windswept island of Foula, I believe. The rest are members of the chap’s family. Its complaints procedure is not designed to discover the truth and adjudicate appropriately I quite envy those who have not yet been told via that conduit for concentrated human misery, social media. There was a rather wonderful couple of days when the name was unknown and we had to guess, which was done, universally, with a sort of untrammelled, lascivious glee. ‘Please let it be…’ formed the preamble to every stab in the dark.

A few years ago I mentioned the profusion of moaning women on BBC Radio 4, after a longish car journey during which the station had broadcast pretty much nothing but moaning women over six and a half hours. I am glad to say that the proportion of moaning women has subsequently reduced to about 65 per cent of the station’s output, the rest of it now being taken up with infuriated and horribly subjugated black people. Watching the scales fall from the eyes of these idiots is something quite delicious to behold When I unwisely turned on the radio this afternoon it was to hear a young black lady tell her little brother: ‘They may be beating us, killing us, but that is no reason to give up’, before her father bemoaned ‘this godforsaken country’.

A teacher once told me that he couldn’t stand Pakistanis ‘because of the smell’. I was 13 at the time and it was during a classroom debate about immigration: he was very much agin, I was for. It struck me, suddenly, that he was very stupid – an astonishing realisation, as I was accustomed to believing teachers to be full of wisdom, a delusion inculcated in me by my parents. This all took place in a very large comprehensive school in the north-east of England – a good school by and large, but almost entirely white. Of the 1,800 pupils only one was not: a quiet lad of Chinese Malay extraction, I think, who was known to all the pupils and a good few of the teachers as ‘Fu Manchu’. In fact, there was another non-white face in the crowd, but we didn’t know it at the time.

‘No one has the right to judge you’ was one of the last posts made on Facebook by Staffordshire ‘mum’ (as the papers are calling her) Carla Foster shortly before discovering that, strictly speaking, this wasn’t quite true. It may well be the mantra by which everybody lives their lives these days, used to justify a myriad of anti-social behaviour stuff and bad life choices and stupidity, but it is in general a delusion. Judging people is an important part of maintaining a stable society – and we all do it. More pertinently, though, in the case of Ms Foster, it was Mr Justice Pepperall who did the judging at Stoke-on-Trent Crown Court and, hours after that Facebook post, sentenced her to two years and four months.

The recreational use of psychedelic drugs, such as LSD or peyote, declined with some rapidity from the 1980s onwards as drug-users instead snorted up cocaine’s great gift of untrammelled narcissism. And yet the desire to live in a weird fantasy land did not quite disappear – far from it. Today, if you tell people that you are a pink giraffe, they are compelled by society to believe you and not judge you as being a deluded lunatic. Her response to Billy Bragg showed that Rowling is also bunkered down in her spurious victimhood silo We no longer need Carlos Castaneda, Ken Kesey or the ghastly Timothy Leary: we have created a counter-rational fantasy world for ourselves without the help of acid or psilocybins. This much is evident every day on social media and in our newspapers.

Exciting news arrives. The Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, has let it be known that he wants more northerners nominated for honours, as part of the ‘levelling up’ programme to which this government is so deeply committed. This will change every-thing and I foresee a Conservative majority at the next election of at least 200. I thought that as The Spectator’s north of St Albans correspondent I should identify some of the brilliant northerners who will shortly be in receipt of OBEs, MBEs, knighthoods and what have you.

Iam on the horns of a dilemma, I am in a moral quandary. I had intended to spend this morning reporting a hate crime to the Metropolitan Police regarding the Theatre Royal Stratford East and the forthcoming appearance by a duo called Tambo & Bones. According to the blurb, this performance invites the audience to ‘join their journey from comedy double-act, to hip-hop superstars, to activists in an America at the epicentre of the global Black Lives Matter movement’. And therein lies my problem, because – if I am being honest – I would rather have my wisdom teeth extracted without anaesthetic by Helen Keller than join Tambo & Bones on their remarkable journey.

I had the sudden suspicion, at about ten o’clock on Saturday night, that I was the only straight male in the United Kingdom watching the Eurovision Song Contest. Or perhaps the only one watching it voluntarily. A little later a Dutch presenter, when reporting her country’s scores, said: ‘Hello girls and gays.’ It wasn’t a slip of the tongue but an accurate summation of the audience – the one in Liverpool and the rest of us, sitting in front of our televisions. There was a merciful absence of all faux-seriousness and any song which got political didn’t do well Eurovision, like Crufts, has been a gay domain for the best part of a quarter of a century, of course, but it is so gay now that it doesn’t even need to advertise its credentials with rainbow flags.

Marooned in London for a day between meetings, I walked for miles in an attempt to find something good to say about the city. This was not a wholly unsuccessful expedition – those Nash terraces have an allure, Regent’s Park has been cutely de-manicured to encourage the wildlife and it was possible to buy a plastic replica of Big Ben almost every 15 yards, which came in handy. It was the Londoners I found problematic.

I thought I had forgotten about Diane Abbott, but in fact there has been a Diane-sized hole in my life and I only properly realised this when she came back, gloriously, to fill it again. Hitherto I had been going about my business, writing columns, cooking for my family and so on, and perhaps to other people I seemed to be getting along normally enough – but in truth I was hollow inside, devoid of a sense of purpose. How uplifting it was to see her back in the headlines. It is less her stupidity that I find attractive, more her perpetual sense of confusion. She makes a series of palpably absurd comments and then, in trying to excavate herself, makes things incalculably worse.

The journos weren’t very impressed with Nicola Sturgeon’s house. Never mind the plod staring like morons at her barbecue or heaving out sacks of half-completed pools coupons to their summer marquee on the front lawn – the southern hacks were more interested in the paucity of this real estate. Her house was, we were assured, ‘modest’ and ‘humble’ and ‘unfashionable’, and most damningly of all, a ‘new-build’. Actually, not most damningly of all – that would be ‘on a new-build estate’. They were clearly appalled that it wasn’t a Georgian rectory in three acres of manicured lawns with a cottage garden, or that it didn’t have a basement kitchen-diner.

It is with great sadness that I must report the departure of the world’s only female head of state who is as fit as a butcher’s dog, Sanna Marin of Finland. Sanna’s Social Democrats – plus her allies in various awful left-wing parties – have seen their votes slump as the Finns turn to the right, meaning that the country’s next leader is likely to be a white male in lateish middle age with bad breath – same ol’, same ol’, etc. Sanna was a kind of progressive Scandi’s wet dream: raised by lesbians and thus from a ‘rainbow family’ (as she put it), the 37-year-old is also a vegetarian – in a country where almost all vegetables are illegal.

Have you had your fourth Covid booster jab yet? They are being very quiet about it these days. I used to be bombarded with injunctions to attend my local clinic, but not any more. This is a shame because a new study suggests that unless I am properly up to date with my injections, I may soon be involved in a serious car crash. The research, published in the American Journal of Medicine, shows a very strong correlation between someone’s Covid vaccine status and the probability of them being involved in a very bad road accident. The correlation suggests that those who have not been vaccinated are 72 per cent more likely to be involved in some kind of awful smash-up – a remarkable finding, but one I am prepared to believe.

Wyndham Lewis once said that ‘the ideas of a time are like the clothes of a season’ – but that, of course, is not how they are seen by liberals today. They are regarded immutable, inviolable, permanent and not up for argument. This is especially the case when they are demonstrably counter-factual, such as in the claims that a rapist is a woman, or when they are truly stupid – such as it being OK for a black actor to play a white role but not for a white actor to play a black role. These are not simply the ‘clothes of a season’, we are told, but the inevitable consequence of Progress, and there will be no going back from them.  State-provisioned childcare is one such consequence of liberal ‘progress’. You will never hear anyone argue against it.

There was a kind of peak BBC Radio 4 moment last week when the network put on a play called Bess Loves Porgy. As you might have guessed, this was a rewrite of Porgy and Bess, the twist being that Porgy was a black, disabled grime rap artist in south London. I hope it went down well with the millions of black, disabled grime rap artists in south London who are listeners to Radio 4. The network was, in the same week, continuing its serialisation of Georges – ‘Testament’s bold new adaptation of Alexander Dumas’ tale of racial intolerance’. They are absolutely obsessed with racism at R4, in a kind of mentally unhinged manner. I thought about these two plays while the ludicrous Garygate saga was playing out in the national media – and it made me tetchy and irritable.