Rod Liddle

We are terribly remiss in our coverage of women’s sport in The Spectator, so I thought I would try to put this right a little by drawing your attention to last week’s 2018 Maste rs Track Cycling World Championship — in particular the sprint category for 35- to 44-year-old women. The gold medal was won, in Herculean style, by the Canadian Rachel McKinnon. Her appearance on the podium provoked some discussion. It wasn’t simply that Rachel was quite obviously a man, but that she hadn’t even the grace to disguise herself very much. Usually when men transition, they put a bit of effort into it — maybe some lippy, a pair of staple-on breasts etc. It’s not usually very convincing but hell, at least they tried. Not Rach.

I took part in a debate organised by the Times this week about reform of our divorce laws. Well, I say a ‘debate’. There wasn’t much of that. Not much in the way of dissent. The four other panellists, who included a government minister, all wished to liberalise our divorce laws. And it was chaired with great impartiality by Sir James Lawrence Munby, who was until recently the president of the Family Division of the High Court of England and Wales. He made a stirring ten-minute speech on why we need to liberalise the divorce laws. Yes, it was like one of those exquisitely balanced Newsnight debates, then. The audience consisted of 100 or so lawyers who wished to liberalise the divorce laws. So I felt a little bit, you know, isolated.

[Update: Mark Knight, the Australian cartoonist accused of racism for drawing Serena Williams, has deleted his social media accounts after receiving death threats to his family. References to his social media accounts have been removed from this article]. I have spent the morning trying to draw a cartoon of a black person without it being racist. It’s bloody difficult. Especially the lips. Make them too big and anti-racist people will accuse you of being a white supremacist peddling, in their words, the old ‘sambo’ myth. But too small and they don’t look like the lips of very many black people. It’s the same with the colour. At first, on my cartoon, I used a black felt-tip pen and so the figure came out very black indeed.

Shocking news emerges that Sandi Toksvig is paid 40pc of what Stephen Fry was on to present the lamentable programme QI. Really? It had never occurred to me that Toksvig was paid anything at all. She is boring, smug and bereft of wit. I assumed she did it out of delight at being beamed into our living rooms, knowing that everyone was quickly turning off the TV. I’m no great fan of Stephen Fry – an idiot’s conception of what intelligence is, frankly. But he presented that programme with chutzpah and humour, both qualities patently absent from Sandi’s make-up. As is make-up, of course. Sandi also complained that she was on about the same as Alan Davies. But Davies is about the only thing that makes the programme work, with his flailing, drooled, bifferdom.

I remember the moon landing very well. I was nine years old. I can remember too my sense of outrage and disillusion. ‘This is a blatant violation of the moon’s dignity and sovereignty,’ I told my parents, as the astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong attempted to secure the US flag to the lunar surface. ‘An act of imperialistic, Zionist barbarism and a statement of intent from the American government that it intends to export its white supremacy throughout the known galaxy. You will note that no people of colour were chosen as astronauts, nor women, nor people with fibromyalgia.

The crowd were singing ‘Oh, Jeremy Corbyn’ again, at a festival in Cornwall, the words appended to a riff by the White Stripes which I once liked but now find a little nauseating. Vacuous, dimbo, middle-class millennials and — worse — their stupid, indulgent parents, all waving their hands in the air for Jezza. Meanwhile, the rest of us were trying to work out if Jeremy is a sort of even more retarded Forrest Gump and thus the most stupid man ever to lead a political party in the history of our nation, or something altogether more sinister.

Were you aware that men who transition into women can suffer period pains, despite not having a uterus? Oh, they can, apparently. There is of course no scientific explanation for this phenomenon, nor could there be, other than perhaps that the transitionee is mentally ill. But it is no longer enough simply to accept that a bloke who has had his scrotum turned inside out is as authentically female as a, um, female — you have to accept his right to a whole plethora of imagined victimhoods which are real enough in proper females but couldn’t possibly pertain to him (and which may, further down the line, include this new thing ‘period poverty’).

If Jews would get out of Israel and also stop drinking the blood of gentile children, perhaps the rest of the world would like them a little more. That seems to be the fairly broad view among the Hamas groupies on the white British left as well as throughout almost the entire Islamic world. But in particular within the left of the Labour party, which has imbibed this foul ideology for a long while (dating back to the Cold War). A member of the party’s National Executive Committee, Peter Willsman, has blamed Jewish supporters of Donald Trump for fabricating claims of anti-Semitism against Labour. Willsman then asked fellow members if they had ever witnessed anti-Semitism within the party, adding: ‘I’ve certainly never seen them.

The latest exciting news is that it may very soon be possible for surgeons to perform uterine transplants, so endowing a man who has ‘transitioned’ into being a strange approximation of a woman with the ability to gestate a child. And to give birth, after a fashion. The benighted child would need to be hacked out of the man’s midriff, because there’s not enough room down there for a child to come out naturally (yes, because he’s a man). Sweden — the world leader in uterine transplants — is anxious to reclaim the title of the world’s most batshit crazy nation, which the Canadians and that simpering idiot Justin Trudeau currently have in their grasp. The uterus stuff will undoubtedly help.