Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
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Netherlands: 3 Macedonia: 0 — Ukraine: 0 Austria 1 What’s your favourite name for a Dutch politician? I always liked Rita Verdonk, because she sounds like a bit of a goer, I don’t know why. But then there’s Wim Kok — the fleeting dream of a penis. How about Lewd Rubbers? Or was it Rude Lubbers?
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Italy 1 (Peroni, or Ciao, or something) Wales 0 Switzerland 3 (Albanian Gnome 2, Bosnian Gnome) Turkey 1 (Who cares?) Gallant Wales got themselves outplayed by Italy’s reserves but still go through to the next round, courtesy of not being thumped as badly as the Swiss were when they played Italy’s first team. Switzerland will
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England 0 Scotland 0 Hungary 1 (Fiola) France 1 (Griezmann) It is remarkable how Southgate has sucked the life out of such talented players over the last two or three years The wonderful Hungarians almost took my mind off England’s lamentable performance last night and the usual stupid, self-serving, excuses from Southgate. England are easily
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I found this shaggy dog story on the MillwallOnline site, posted by a mate called Life With The Lions. ‘It is just before the start of the Scotland vs England game, at Wembley stadium, in the Euro Championships 2020. Harry Kane goes into the England dressing room to find all his teammates looking a bit
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Turkey 0 Wales 2 (Ramsey 45, Roberts 90+5) Apologies to those of you who have been expecting my annual list of the world’s most loathsome countries, which I usually publish at this time of year. Various stuff has got in the way – not least this tournament. Once it is over I’ll get down to
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A couple of decades back the Radio Society asked me to moderate a debate for its summer festival. ‘Between who?’ I asked them and was delighted when they replied: ‘It’s entirely up to you.’ I chose the charismatic hook-handed Muslim cleric Sheikh Abu Hamza al-Masri and the then leader of the British National party, Nick
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Finland: 0 Russia: 1 (Zhukov, 45) Following an earlier, epic, encounter between these two plucky teams, Adolf Hitler commented: ‘We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.’ He had noted the parlous performance of the Red Army during the initial stages of the 1939 Winter War and thus
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Hungary (Orban 1, 90) 2 Europe and the WHO 0 Now THIS was a proper game of football. Fractious and furious, bitterly contested in front of 61,000 magnificently partisan Hungarians in Budapest. Scarcely a mask in sight and certainly not a knee. Orban has had enough of lockdown: Hungary took us back to the old
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Scotland 0 Czech Republic 2 (Schick as a parrot, 42,52) Have you ever visited Carlsbad, now known as Karlovy Vary? I’d always had a faint hankering to live there, being hugely enamoured of what we once called eastern Europe, but I’m told it’s full of the most ghastly Russians these days. Maybe Slovakia is a
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Match 3: England 1 (MBE 57) Croatia 0 I have no animus against Croatia. Catholic Slavs who think they’re Austrians, basically: not a bad mix. Many of my friends, the Spiked lot – ie former Revolutionary Communist Party – turn puce if you mention the name of the country. My mate Mick Hume, for example, wouldn’t
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Match 2: Switzerland 1 (Carl Jung 49) Wales 1 (Carl Jung og 74) Ah, the perils of arrogance and a superiority complex. Switzerland – historically perhaps the most over-achieving international football side in the world, alongside Uruguay – were hammering the Welsh. Mollocating them. This was a case of complete dominance; quick, incisive passing which
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Game One Turkey 0 Italy 3 The start of the tournament and the first game was overshadowed by the exciting news that Scotland’s players intend to kneel, when they play England next week. They had originally not intended to ‘take a knee’ – thinking it rightly (to judge from their press statements) a pointless and
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Grade: A– Imagine a really disgusting and immoral scientific experiment in which the members of Weather Report, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, King Crimson and Wire were somehow fused together into a giant caterpillar or something. This album is the kind of racket the forlorn creature might make. It sits in that usually arid zone where prog
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This is a difficult issue to raise on the eve of a major football tournament, but as a progressive individual I am deeply disturbed by the England manager Gareth Southgate’s reverence for Sir Winston Churchill. Twice in the past this man who holds English football’s most important position has cited his apparent hero. Once, commenting
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The Big Tech social media giants are having to rethink their policy of censoring anybody who suggests that Covid originated from a lab near Wuhan, rather than through some local chowing down on sweet and sour pangolin testicles. This is because it now seems quite possible, if not probable, that the virus was kindly bestowed
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A terrible thing, to be torn. Last Sunday was International Day to End Obstetric Fistula, a very painful condition affecting the nether regions of women who have just given birth. I very much wished to observe the occasion in some way, but Sunday was also World Turtle Day, which naturally commended itself to me as
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Grade: B– Advancing age has smoothed the edges of Bellshill’s finest lads, once — back in the early 1990s — arguably Britain’s best band. This is like being embalmed for ever in suffocating pleasantness. You doze off during ‘Warm Embrace’ and wake, perhaps hours later, to the same gentle, winsome, minor-key harmonies chugging by at
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The headline ‘Government to allow people to hug’ one might have expected to hear on early evening news bulletins in January 1661, shortly after Oliver Cromwell was posthumously executed and puritanism began its slow and welcome withdrawal from England. It sounds a little odd in 2021. Below the headline came the inevitable caveats from the
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It’s not just the Labour party which is institutionally incapable of understanding why the Conservative party kicked the hell out of them in these elections. It is also, of course, the BBC. The prime offender was — hold your breath in surprise — Emily Maitlis on Newsnight. Furlough and vaccines were the sole reason the
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Experts tell us that we are facing a mental health ‘time bomb’ in the UK, partly as a consequence of Covid restrictions and partly because we have a Conservative government which has as its apparent main priority a malevolent desire to see people go insane and, hopefully, kill themselves. I am paraphrasing the experts here,
