Rod Liddle

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 1989. It was Goal of the Month time and I also noticed that an Arsenal player has won this benediction just once in about six seasons. Indeed, if the club were to put together a ‘Goals of the Season’ package for fans it would consist of 12 corners taken by Declan Rice, several players wrestled to the floor in the penalty area, a scuffed shot from Madueke from two yards out which deflects off the defender for a goal. Do we mind this? I know Arsenal fans will not care one bit.

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 an elongated sigh. But one category attracted my attention this year: 'Song of the year'. Now, the Brits are reliable judges of awful songs: retrospective title winners include Frankie’s Relax and Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up and Phil Collins's – yes, Phil Collins – Another Day in Paradise. So the antenna is finely tuned to the meretricious, the banal, the imbecilic. But at least those aforementioned songs were, actually, songs – terrible may they each have been.

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, at the Baftas in the Royal Festival Hall, the angels looked kindly upon me. I go to this bun-fest every year, dressed appropriately in a dinner jacket and a cummerbund, patent-leather dress shoes and a bow tie. I ought to point out that I do not receive an invitation to this glittering event: no, I gain entrance through what is commonly known as ‘gatecrashing’.

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 single edition of The News Agents podcast and you should be left in no doubt as to the correct answer. Whether it be Jon Sopel asserting the brilliance of the appointment of Peter Mandelson as the UK’s ambassador to Washington, or almost anything Emily Maitlis says on any issue, or just to see Lewis Goodall – merely to catch the faintest glimpse – will immediately direct you to the correct conclusion.

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. Here’s Campbell on the subject: ‘He started to leave, then came back over, pushed at me, then threw a punch, then another. I grabbed his lapels to disable his arms and T.B. [Tony Blair] was by now moving in to separate us and P.M. just lunged at him, then looked back at me and shouted, “I hate this. I’m going back to London.”’ Stamp, stamp, stamp went those dainty little feet, probably clad in moccasins.

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 it a wholly indiscriminate spot of slaughter? I have some vague memory that it was one race in particular that was singled out for extermination, but the BBC dared not say their name. In fact, the sentence I quoted is wholly inaccurate: the ‘six million’ figure relates only to Jewish people.

A traditional British Christmas is not complete until we have all enjoyed the seasonal cancellation of a celebrity, under the mistletoe. Excitement mounts during Advent as to who the luckless sap might be this year and then, on cue, the little cardboard door is at last opened and we all gather around the tree for a joyous hatefest. I was fairly happy with this year’s choice, the comedian and children’s author David Walliams, as there is something about his manner and that weird shiny moonface which has always slightly irritated me.

It was with mild pleasure that I read of the decision of Robin Ince to end his association with the Radio 4 programme, The Infinite Monkey Cage. I enjoy the show, but have never been entirely sure what Ince brings to it. He is not terribly funny, nor erudite, although what he lacks in those qualities he makes for in self-regard. He is not terribly funny, nor erudite, although what he lacks in those qualities he makes for in self-regard Why did he go? Apparently the BBC think he is too outspoken on various political issues, such as Gaza and trans rights. As you might imagine, Ince is wrong (and on the latter issue, anti-scientific) on both of these issues, and it seems he refused to be silenced.

We will remember 2025 as the year that a madness which had gripped us for a decade finally succumbed to that most irritating of things, reality – and the edifice it had built began to crumble like a 1970s brutalist building constructed from high alumina cement. It is not quite the case that woke is over, as Piers Morgan believes, simply that its appurtenances have become despised and those who shout most loudly in favour of its idiotic shibboleths are confined to a smaller and smaller tranche of far-left delusionals.

Too much information. That’s what you’re about to get. I wouldn’t read another line if I were you. I will be talking, at length, about my prostate and, by extension, my old fella and why I will not let the medical clergy anywhere near either of them, not the private medics or the chaotic maniacs who work for the NHS. I don’t mind whipping it out for you, though – and so this is an article which is both repulsive in its personal revelatory details and will also, if anyone takes it seriously, result in 230 premature deaths over the next decade or something. I don’t think it’s going to get me on the shortlist for the Orwell prize, then. But telling unpopular truths hasn’t worked very well either, so never mind.

For quite a few members of the House of Commons culture, media and sport committee, the answer to the claims of left-wing bias against the BBC could be annulled by the simple expediency of firing the only supposedly right-of-centre person within the corporation, Robbie Gibb. It is a curious logic that the left employs. This is especially true in the case of Labour’s Rupa Huq, the MP for Ealing Central and Acton (which, I am told, is in London), who believes that people can only be ‘black’ if they subscribe to the same idiotic world view as herself.

Finding someone who ‘likes’ Sir Keir Starmer is a terribly enervating quest, and I have given up on it without success. It is true that I have not contacted Sir Keir’s close family members, or indeed canvassed inside the walls of Broadmoor hospital, so it may be that some tiny reservoirs of affection remain. Less reservoirs than sumps, really. But the generality is that people seem to loathe him – the responses I get when I accost people in the street and say, ‘What do you think of Sir Keir Starmer?’ are largely unprintable, except in London, where for some reason the most common reply is to invoke the name of the author of The Critique of Pure Reason, which is mystifying. Whatever, people detest him. They think he is useless, bland and untrustworthy, indecisive and stupid.