Rod Liddle

My favourite quote of the year so far comes from the author Fay Weldon. ‘If this were an all-woman society,’ she said, ‘we wouldn’t have television. We’d just have lots of nice cushions.’ Fay was making the point that it’s men who do all the -inventing and most of the work. She has since profusely apologised for this remark and others made during the same ‘off the cuff’ interview — almost certain proof, then, that what she said is largely true. But only largely, Fay. Without women we might not have discovered either of the unpleasant radioactive elements polonium and radium — both stumbled upon by Marie Curie, who was habituated (unwisely) to carry chunks of them around in her apron pocket.

You can always tell when a public figure has said something with the ring of truth about it by the abject apology and recantation which arrives a day or two later. By and large, the greater the truth, the more abject the apology. Often there is a sort of partial non-apology apology first: I’m sorry if I upset anyone, but I broadly stand by what I said, even if my wording was perhaps a little awkward. That, however, won’t do — by now the hounds of hell are howling at the back door. Social media is beside itself, wrapped up in its moronic inferno, the cybersphere splenetic with self-righteous outrage.

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thedeportationgame/media.mp3" title="The Spectator Podcast: the deportation game"] Listen [/audioplayer]For once it seemed that we were getting tough. Our patience had apparently snapped. We had been worn down by the constant news stories about foreigners whom the UK government was unable to deport — the child rapists, the fraudsters, the thieves, the gangsters, the jihadis who want us all dead, and just your plain old common-or-garden illegal residents. It always seemed that the more vile and murderous the individual and the more misery he or she intended to wreak upon the rest of us, the more likely they were to be given leave to stay here by some idiotic judge. But Myrtle Cothill was a bridge too far.

Guardian journalist in self-awareness shock. A very good piece by Hadley Freeman about the utter ubiquity of public school-educated monkeys at the top of every desirable profession (and, of course, trade). Here’s the crucial bit: Life is unfair, and I benefit from this unfairness every day. Even besides being born in the era of modern medicine and Ryan Gosling’s face, I went to a private school. As much as I’d like to think my career is all thanks to my special snowflake qualities, it’s difficult, when looking around at the rest of my heavily privately-educated profession, to draw any conclusion other than that my schooling might have helped me. Yes, Hadley. And your affluence, the two going hand in hand. She is an exception which proves the rule.

More bad publicity for the Islamic State’s ‘Kafir Tiny Tots and Babycare Service’. A burka-clad madwoman wandering through the streets of Moscow swinging a decapitated toddler’s head while shouting ‘Allahu akbar’ is just the kind of image the company wished to dispel. You begin to doubt its vetting procedures for potential nannies, and also whether or not it has a valid Investors In People certificate. The less than conscientious nanny was from Samarkand in Uzbekistan (which last had a half-decent government in about 1990). ‘I want your death,’ she screamed at the Muscovites, waving the poor child’s head about.

I have never been to the island of Guernsey. This is a large world and we have a finite amount of time on it and must make our decisions about where we visit based on necessarily limited information. We cannot know everything. I have never been to Japan, for example, because I do not wish to be crushed to death by a mass of jabbering humanity, nor take part in unpleasant sadomasochistic sex acts, nor watch people disembowelling themselves in order to affirm their masculinity. I realise that this is not all that Japan has to offer. There is also sushi, for example, and buttock-clenched politeness. I could get both of those things in Harrogate. So that’s Japan off my itinerary.

There are things that happen when you grow older — bad things, harbingers of death and decay. Past the age of 55, I mean. For example, a friend and fellow columnist confessed recently that upon rising from a sitting position he almost always unintentionally farts. A delicate little ‘glip!’ from his bottom, every time he stands up. I am a little older than him and have yet to experience this demeaning imposition, this additional whiff of misery as we trundle downhill, via the unctuous and grimly cheerful hospice attendants, to the crematorium. But I am so terrified of it happening that nowadays, when I stand up, I rise very slowly and clench my buttocks tightly together just in case. It will happen sooner or later I’m sure.

My most thrilling moment of 2016 so far — aside from watching a smug-looking woman carrying a copy of the Guardian get the heel of one shoe stuck in the escalator at Canary Wharf station (boy did she howl) — was having a Facebook friend request accepted by Trevor Lee. Trevor is a hero of mine. He was a very fast and skilful winger for my team, Millwall, and played a crucial role in our 1975/76 promotion season. He went on to play 108 times for the Lions and was adored by supporters. His name is still spoken of with a certain reverence down The Den, much as fanatical Tories will come over all breathless if you mention Sir Keith Joseph.

We were on our way to a party in south-east London when my friend, Rob, saw the graffiti. Sprayed with painful neatness on a wall: ‘Support Jeremy’. It suited the area so well — a small quadrant of our capital city that the inhabitants I dare say still think is ‘edgy’, even now after they’ve got rid of all the blacks and the white working class by pricing them out of the market. Artisan bread shops and ‘community’ pubs and vegetarian cafés. Whereas once the occupants of this enclave were engaged in actual work — plumbers, electricians, drug dealers etc. — now I would wager almost all of them get their wages from you via grants and the NHS and what have you.

A year or so back my friend and colleague Hugo Rifkind wrote a very good piece in which he argued that the issues concerning gay rights should not be resolved simply by an elongated 'eeeeuw'. In other words, heterosexual distaste at the practices of homosexuals should not determine general policy towards this minority. A good point and well made and I agreed with much of it. But it shouldn’t stop the rest of us going 'eeeeuw' from time to time, nonetheless. So, Crispin Blunt MP feels hurt because laws proscribing amyl nitrate (or 'poppers') would criminalise the entire gay community. A jar of poppers and a tube of 'lube' are always found in the bedside drawer of a gay man, we are told.