Rod Liddle

What image comes to mind when we think of Britain today? I was moved to contemplate this question after reading the Prime Minister’s inspiring treatise on British values, which seemed to involve ‘being quite nice’ and not referring to other people as kaffir and then trying to blow them up. Fair enough. I suppose — as an image of Britain, Sonny and Cher jihadis bringing their arcane and vicious sandblown squabble to the streets of London is perhaps a more modernist take on John Major’s vision of an old maid cycling to morning communion through the early morning mist.

What a fabulously boring England performance. I watched it only because I had this to write and now feel resentful towards you, which is unfair. Because I don’t suppose you want to hear anything about it, really. The inquest into our national team’s appalling performance at this World Cup (“I couldn’t have asked for any more from the players” – ©Roy Hodgson, every game. Well in which case, mate, you’re the wrong bloke for the job.) has of course already begun. It is being said that Woy has been given an easy ride – which is a way, I suppose, of not giving him one. But when we look for the reasons it’s worth remembering this.

Still going on, is it, the World Cup? There have been some fine games and some poor games with surprisingly thrilling conclusions. Ronaldo, with possibly the worst haircut I have seen on a human being ever, provided a wonderful chipped cross for Portugal to equalise against the USA; neither team, one suspects will trouble the big boys and I doubt the Portuguese will get out of the group. Good! Russia may also fail to do so and have been exactly as boring as Russia always are when it comes to the final stages of a World Cup. Belgium, meanwhile, look rather less menacing than all the experts suggested they would be.

I thought you might enjoy watching this debate between me and two eminently sane, rational and balanced women. If you haven’t seen it already. My publishers were anxious I should take part in order to promote my book, Selfish, Whining Monkeys. I said to them: ‘But it’s Channel 4 News. They won’t  have read the book or even given it a second thought. They’ll just sit there and shriek at me.’ Ever the cynic, huh? Join the resistance - and buy Rod Liddle's £15 new book, Selfish Whining Monkeys, for just £12.99 from the Spectator Bookshop. Click here.

It is a wicked thing to revel in someone else’s misery. Trouble is, occasionally it can’t be helped. So – bye, bye Spain! I think I would have traded England winning tonight (and therefore prolonging the agony) for Spain’s magnificently rapid exit from this world cup. Oh, Chile – you brave sons of Pinochet and Allende! Whichever you prefer – who cares? It is the more civilised parts of Latin America which have shone in this world cup – Chile themselves and Costa Rica. Brazil struggled and have been, uh, “fortunate”, Argentina looked distrait, Uruguay simply incompetent (though that opinion may need to be revised later); Mexico, the world’s great under-achievers, look set to under-achieve again.

Greg Dyke was right with that throat-slitting gesture, when England’s world cup group was announced. Seeing the quality in some of the other groups gives you an indication of how much harder we have it. Which isn’t to say we’d have breezed through, mind. But I suspect we would have beaten Russia and South Korea, who played like two mid table Championship sides. Which is pretty much what the Koreans are, really. Incidentally, my wife remarked of the Koreans, as the teams lined up, “they’re not lookers, are they?” So: tomorrow. What do we do with Mr Potato Head? Put him in the centre or leave him out altogether? I’m tending towards the latter, given his fairly awful performance against Italy.

So – Nigeria versus Iran, then. I wonder who Boko Haram were cheering for, surrounded by their infidel abductees in some sand-blown, bilharzia riven hellhole. I was cheering for our new allies, Iran. We are told every year – since about 1986 – that African teams will take world football by storm. And they never do. They’re as useless as were Zaire in 1974. But that won’t stop the BBC spending our licence fee money on the African Cup of Nations, for political reasons. And then earlier, an enormous pleasure to watch Portugal’s pouting moppets, each of them seemingly named after a seaside donkey, thoroughly thrashed by good ol’ dependable Germany.

It takes quite a lot for me to feel even mildly sympathetic towards the French, but they had my support against the semi-reformed death squad of Honduras. One should not put too much store by the character of a country’s football team – but watching the way in which the Central Americans set about France, much as they had previously set about England, it did not wholly surprise one that the benighted mosquito-ravaged country has the highest murder rate in the world. Yes, including Iraq. Its murder rate is not far off double the next contenders (all of whom come from the Caribbean, natch). I’m writing this before Argentina’s game against Bosnia and Herzegovina; I don’t think I could bear to contemplate the Argies and the French winning on the same day.

A moron has written a letter to The Guardian. I realise that this is not ground-breaking news. In the journalistic canon it is very much “dog bites man”, sure. But this brief letter exemplifies the mind-set of these awful, stunted, absolutist people. The letter was from a man called Conor Whitworth, and was in regard to a “Q&A” piece the in the Guardian magazine the previous week about the cyclist Chris Froome, one of those pieces where a sleb has to answer fatuous questions. Here’s Conor’s letter in full: “Morals are important to Chris Froome, he says in his Q&A. Wonder why he lives in Monaco?” – Conor Whitworth, Nottingham. And that’s it. If you live in Monaco, you cannot have morals.

Suspicions that FIFA is an organisation given, occasionally, to a bit of corruption will not have been allayed by the first match of the 2014 World Cup. Brazil won with two goals from a player who should have been sent off, including a penalty which clearly wasn’t a penalty, while Croatia had a perfectly good goal disallowed and were denied a rather more clear cut penalty themselves. Incidentally, I say “Brazil” – and so do ITV. So do FIFA. And so does the OED, Wikipedia and Google. But not the BBC. The BBC says “Brasil”. Of course it does.

Are all white women really prostitutes who should be avoided, as some children at those schools in Birmingham were apparently informed? This is obviously a delicate, if not rather fraught, area and one should tread carefully for fear of giving offence. I have given the matter a lot of thought and have tried to fashion a sort of middle way, amenable to both sides in the debate. So, while everyone might agree that white women are to be avoided wherever possible, it seems to me to be overstating the case to characterise them all as prostitutes. I am not even certain that one could reasonably describe ‘most’ white women as being prostitutes. The Queen, for example, is not a prostitute, and nor, to my knowledge, is the Cambridge professor of classics, television’s Mary Beard.

At last, someone has put their finger on the problem, got right down to the real nub of the issue. In an interview, the BBC’s Economics Editor Robert Peston, in a flash of brilliance, defined exactly what is wrong with the corporation - it’s way too right wing. Yes, yes, I know, you’ve been saying the same thing for years and thought nobody was listening. Well, maybe Robert was. Here he is... "If we [the BBC] think the Mail and Telegraph will lead with this [a story], we should. It's part of the culture." Next week, David Cameron reveals: “The problem with the Conservative Party is that we have way too few public school-educated people in positions of authority. It’s got to change.

I suppose the appalling shock to the soul that was occasioned by the allegation that Qatar bribed its way to hosting the 2022 World Cup was exceeded only by the startling suggestion that it was Fifa’s African delegates who trousered nearly all of the illicit money on offer. Who’d have thought, huh? The money was doled out by the Qatari crook Mohammed Bin Hammam, according to leaked emails obtained by the Sunday Times. Mo did not find bribing the Africans terribly difficult, it would seem. My favourite of the various requests for money from these venal and grasping and not terribly bright Third World panjandrums was that of a chap called Adam ‘Bomber’ Mthethwa, of Swaziland: ‘I am in dire need of finance in the region of $30,000.