Rod Liddle

‘We’re idiots, babe, it’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves.’ I listened to The Food Programme on Radio 4 this week, because the channel finder on my car radio wasn’t working and so I was stuck with it. It was, as it almost always is, four left-wing ratbags moaning to one another. As I’ve mentioned before, this is the template for almost the entirety of the station’s output: miserable women carping endlessly about everything. It is almost impossible to know what particular programme you’re listening to. You have to keep your ears tuned for key phrases which might give you an indication. If it’s a woman teacher moaning about having to do a spot of teaching, it’s probably World At One.

The Liberal Democrat party’s foreign affairs spokesgoblin, Velma from Scooby-Doo — or ‘Layla Moran’ as she is known to close friends and family —has decided that freedom of speech on university campuses is of absolutely no consequence. Indeed, she described the government’s initiative to preserve the rights of students to hear a diverse range of opinions as ‘divisive’ and quite unnecessary, while she was appearing on one of those BBC Question Time editions that nobody watches any more. Velma presumably thoroughly approved of her own party’s subsequent decision to remove the tweeted clip of her spouting this bilge so that the public couldn’t hear it.

Desperate to find someone to commemorate with a statue for having done great things, but who isn’t a white male, some people in Devon want to honour a couple of lesbian pirates. A statue of Anne Bonny and Mary Read has been proposed for the beauty spot of Burgh Island, to salute their important work in ‘breaking gender boundaries’ in the 18th century. Their long careers of psychotic violence and theft are easily eclipsed by the suggestion that they liked a spot of how’s your mother from time to time. A problem here is that there is no proof that they were actually lesbians.

Your quiz for the week is to make the connection between the following people: fun-loving Greek hack Homer, veteran US centrist Democratic party politician Dianne Feinstein, dodgy-night-at-the-theatre president Abraham Lincoln and Middlesbrough-born peripatetic James Cook. The answer is that they are the latest individuals to have been ‘cancelled’ by the woke Taleban. Don’t worry, they’ll get around to you soon enough. Homer is being kicked off college curricula in the USA because his character, Odysseus, had a habit of mansplaining to thick Greek women.

We have reached Covid-19’s first anniversary in the UK — and I really think we should do something fitting to mark the occasion. The actual date is pretty much a moveable feast. The first patient in the UK known to have died of the disease was Peter Attwood, aged 84, on 30 January. But we didn’t know then that he had Covid, finding out only about six months later. On 4 February, the government instructed all Brits living in China to get the hell out and return to the UK sharpish and breathe all over us, as I believe the press statement had it. On 11 February, the little baby was actually christened Covid-19. Perhaps we should commemorate the anniversary of something more down-home and folksy.

I was in the kitchen preparing the family’s dinner when the inauguration of Joe Biden was on TV, so I caught only mysterious fragments of his speech, over the noise of the blender and stuff. ‘I want an hour — an hour — with my own teen wolf,’ Joe seemed to say at one point. And then: ‘America, America, I give to you my vest.’ I raced through to the living room when someone announced that Garth Crooks was going to sing ‘Amazing Grace’ — good choice, Joe, I thought. Garth seems to have lost a little weight and indeed colour, but he did a decent job. It all went well enough, given the circumstances, and at no point did Joe ask why all those people were there and was it his birthday or something.

The screenwriter Russell T. Davies has said that only gay actors should be cast in gay parts, believing this leads to greater authenticity. The obvious question here is how would Russell know who is gay and who is not gay when he comes to casting? It is not always obvious, surely. Do all gay actors who attend casting sessions enter the room humming hits from Mamma Mia! before enthusing over the decor? Perhaps Russell just guesses, like I do when I’m watching the BBC weathermen flouncing around. The other obvious question is that if it’s authenticity you’re after, surely gay men must never be cast in straight roles? For reasons never properly explained, authenticity doesn’t seem to matter when it comes to straight roles.

Depictions of Thomas Carlyle and David Hume in the Scottish Portrait Gallery will be altered to make it clear they were horrible racist bastards, apparently. All of the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers are under review, including Adam Smith, who thought that people living beyond Europe were largely savage. I am not sure how they will alter the bust of Carlyle — perhaps chisel a swastika on his forehead? Carlyle was certainly rightish on many issues: you don’t get Friedrich Nietzsche in your fan club if you’re woke. But when I started reading the chap, back in the late 1970s, it was for the witty and sharp Sartor Resartus that I loved him, and his essays on heroes and hero worship.

I took advantage of Google and NORAD’s 'Santa tracking app' to find out when my presents would be delivered. It says that my gifts should arrive in eight hours. Fine, I’m happy with that. Better than Hermes. But I notice three things. First, Google seems of the opinion that Santa is either a man or a woman, contrary to traditional thinking. There is an image of a woman Santa and a man Santa together. And yet, in the sleigh itself, there is no trace of the woman. Is she at home cooking mince pies? How recherche is that? I also notice that while Santa is allowed to be a woman, she is not allowed to be black or asian. Only whites allowed: isn’t that racist on the part of Google?

It is an enormous shame that the Millwall fans who booed their players for ‘taking a knee’ in support of Black Lives Matter last week were not better acquainted with one of the British BLM leaders, Sasha Johnson — they might have taken a knee themselves out of admiration. In August Ms Johnson tweeted: ‘The white man will not be our equal but our slave.’ If there is one thing Millwall supporters respect it’s aspiration, and Ms Johnson has that in abundance. I am sure the FA, the English Football League, and indeed the Millwall club board, who condemned the booing, all wish Sasha the best of luck in her exciting project. One voice should not be allowed to demean an entire movement, of course.

How noble of the British Library to have apologised to the family of the late Poet Laureate Ted Hughes for having identified him as a beneficiary of slavery. The library’s scrupulous and deranged researchers had unearthed evidence that Hughes may have been a distant relative of a man called Nicholas Ferrar, born in 1592, and that Ferrar had some early involvement in the slave trade. Ferrar died childless so the precise link was not known, but it was enough for Liz Jolly’s maniacs to besmirch the man. Ms Jolly is chief librarian and the woman who said that racism was ‘a creation of white people’ — along with body odour, sin, cholera, poverty, werewolves and mosquitos, presumably. We are an inventive lot, after all.