Rod Liddle

The thing that got me about the photo-graph which prompted the Daily Mail’s harmless but now infamous headline ‘Never mind Brexit — who won Legs-it!’ was what I shall call the Sturgeon Lower Limb Mystery. In the photograph, the SNP leader seemed to be possessed of two slender and very long legs indeed. Whereas we know from television news footage that her legs are only seven inches long from her toes to that bit where they join the rest of her body. Walking to Downing Street for meetings, or being interviewed on the hoof by camera crews, Nicola Sturgeon usually resembles a slightly deranged Oompa--Loompa, or, as many have commented before, Janette Krankie.

There’s one thing that bothers me a lot about the letter sent by ‘more than 70’ MPs to the director-general of the BBC complaining about bias in its coverage of the Brexit debate. There are 650 MPs in the House of Commons, of whom 330 are Conservative. So does this mean that more than 570 of our elected representatives, including the vast majority of Tories, think the BBC is doing a bloody good job and is an exemplar of impartial reporting? If so, I suspect they have been secretly lobotomised — perhaps by members of the BBC’s impeccably fair and impartial editorial board. In the dead of night. Silently, without remorse. Chloroform, a hacksaw, a scalpel.

Allahu Akbar! Greetings from Samsun, where Turkish protestors — their eyeballs spinning in orgasmic Islamic rage — tried to set fire to the Dutch flag while chanting the usual ‘Allah’s dead good’ stuff. They used cigarette lighters and some lighter fuel and up it went — and was then jubilantly trampled on by the inflamed, howling masses. Except that it wasn’t the Dutch flag — they had got hold of the French flag by mistake. I wonder if any of the similarly inflamed Turkish protestors in the Netherlands would have noticed? My guess is most of those demonstrating in Rotterdam had spent their entire lives in the Netherlands, but possibly still wouldn’t know what the country’s flag looked like.

It was International Women’s Day on Wednesday of this last week. The Guardian had enjoined its readers to send in reports of what they had done to advance the struggle, or how they had been in some way oppressed by men — perhaps raped, or talked to as if they were stupid, or looked at a little coldly when they squirted breast milk over fellow diners at The Ivy. I tried to think of something I had done for the cause but came up short, sad to say. So instead I tried to show solidarity by spending a substantial amount of International Women’s Day looking at a photograph of Emma Watson’s tits. The actress is a radical feminist campaigner and has even been given some kind of role at the United Nations to advance the cause of female liberation across the globe.

The latest and perhaps most damaging accusation to be levelled at Donald Trump is that he likes his steaks well-done and accompanied with tomato ketchup. He was seen ordering exactly this dish last week. It would not surprise me if he also had a side order of battered onion rings. I do not know if the person who cooked the steak was an immigrant and, this being the case, added a gobbet of alien phlegm to the griddle. If so, Trump didn’t seem to mind. He chomped away, dipping bits of incinerated meat in his ketchup, quite unconcerned that over here in Blighty a new sneerfest was rapidly getting underway. ‘The man’s a monster,’ someone tweeted. ‘He eats like my toddler and acts like him too,’ some dappy woman commented. You give your toddler steak?

I have a bone to pick with Camilla Long – a colleague of mine at the Sunday Times, where she is the film reviewer. She gave five stars to a stop-motion animation film called Anomalisa a year or so back and I went to see it on her journalistic recommendation. Oh, and also cos it had Jennifer Jason Leigh voicing one part, the most underrated actress of the last thirty years. It was godawful; pretentious, badly scripted, shallow and dull. I thought about suing Camilla for liking a film I had not liked and thus making me endure two hours of misery. Or maybe outing her as a racist. Why? Oh, no reason. You don’t need a reason these days. She’s been outed as a racist by the idiotic leftie website The Canary.

I think on balance I would prefer people to demonstrate their opposition to political developments — Brexit, the forthcoming state visit of Donald Trump and so on — by setting fire to themselves in the manner of outraged Buddhist monks, rather than simply by clicking ‘sign’ on some internet petition. I think the self-immolation thing carries more force. It is true that a mass conflagration of a million and a half people in Trafalgar Square would, in the short term, greatly exacerbate the appalling smog afflicting London as a consequence of wood-burning stoves. But as most of the signatories of the petition against Trump coming probably own all of those stoves, we would be killing two birds with one stone.