Rod Liddle

Hero of the week is undoubtedly the cleaner at the Museion Bozen-Bolzano in Italy. Faced with a horrible mess in the main gallery – fag ends, empty bottles, party streamers - she cleaned it all up, put it in black bags and chucked it out. Yes, of course – it was an 'installation' by the artists Sara Goldschmied and Eleonora Chiari. As the Italian art critic Vittorio Sgarbi put it, 'If she thought it was rubbish, it means it was. Art should be understood by everyone — including cleaners.' Quite – and you’d think that would be an end to it. But no, the Guardian’s art critic said instead that the cleaner’s peremptory actions were 'proof of the enduring vitality' of modern art. Proof of your enduring delusion, mate.

Two reports on the BBC Ten O'Clock News this week, both unashamedly partisan. Yes, yes, I know they are not the only reports this week guilty of bias. There’s the same ol same ol refugee hugging every night and there was also a report on the fact that our population is about to rise by ten million without even the faintest suggestion that this might not be a bloody good thing. But I mean two specific reports. One, by Reeta Chakrabarti about protests outside abortion clinics. This was the most egregiously biased piece of reporting I have seen for a long while. It took, as a statement of unalterable fact, that these protests were vile. There was not a single voice raised in defence of the protests, or against abortion. It was propaganda, pure and simple.

Everyone loves an underdog. It doesn’t matter how incompetent they might be — indeed, incompetence works in their favour. You do not expect underdogs to be adept, do you? It doesn’t really matter how vile, otiose or absurd their beliefs are, either. So long as they are up against someone more powerful, a certain sentimental section of the population will be rooting for them. Look at the Palestinians, for example. And look at Jeremy Bloody Corbyn. My wife — a Tory — said to me the other day: ‘You lot want to watch it. I’m beginning to feel sorry for the bloke. The sympathy votes will be stacking up.

Sooner or later, in this trade, one runs out of television historians to antagonise. I am doggedly working my way through the pack — and I don’t think any of the really big ones are left. I began by annoying Mary Beard and then swiftly moved on to David Starkey. Some time passed but eventually I found an opportunity to irritate Simon Schama, on BBC’s Question Time last week. He got very angry and his hands started waving all over the place. Someone on a social media site said he looked like a Thunder-birds puppet controlled by a person with Parkinson’s disease, which is a little cruel, I suppose. Simon ended a splenetic diatribe by calling me ‘suburban’, which raised a few eyebrows and indeed the accusation of snobbery.

  The Goldsmith’s imbecile Bahar Mustafa has been arrested for tweeting something with a hashtag 'kill all white men'. Obviously, she is a foul cretin. Obviously her previous moments in the limelight – organising fatuous protests from which straight white men were banned, for example – lead one to the position that any horrible fate which befalls her could not possibly be unpleasant enough. She is an ass, a halfwit. But then she is only a sort of personification of the abject stupidity which reigns within our universities; a cringing political correctness, a terror of free speech and a loathing of our country.

I was unable to join the violent protests held by Class War at the Cereal Killer Café in London last week because I had to stay at home to supervise our gardener. Yes — I know what you’re about to say. It is indeed ridiculous that one should have to stand over workmen to ensure that they are doing a decent job. But there is a patch of lawn towards the rear of our grounds which the blighters always skimp on, believing that it is too far from the house for us to notice. So I stand down there, with a cheerfully expectant expression, as the surly little man goes about his labours. The Class War march was not terribly well attended, despite the publicity it received.

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thegreatbritishkowtow/media.mp3" title="Rod Liddle and James Delingpole debate if all right wing people have bad music tastes" startat=700] Listen [/audioplayer]A friend of mine once watched Jeremy Corbyn try to rape an owl. This was the early to mid-1980s. The Labour leader used to come round to my squat in Leytonstone and we’d sit cross--legged on the floor, sniffing glue from a large plastic bag, and listen to Camper Van Beethoven’s ‘Take The Skinheads Bowling’. Jeremy was on the periphery of our little clique and we were suspicious of him because he was posh. Sometimes, when we were passing the glue bag around, we’d miss him out from sheer spite.

I read in the Daily Mail that the hunt is on for an Isis terrorist camped out in Calais who is anxious to get into the UK so that he can kill everyone. Perhaps Bob Geldof could put him up in his London flat. Certainly the people at #refugeeswelcome should be agitating to have this chap given his papers immediately – he has important work to do and it must be frustrating sitting in that camp, seeing the white cliffs of Dover beckoning in the distance. Things might get so bad that he is forced to blow himself up in France. But just one Isis terrorist? You sure ‘bout that? Meanwhile, there are queues of asylum seekers at a German church, all of them wishing to embrace Christianity so as to ease their passage into the west.