Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
From our UK edition
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
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I had a horrible dream last night that I’ve never had before. In the dream, I knew I had to get up early and couldn’t get to sleep. Every time I checked the clock it got closer to 0600 and I got more and more panicked and frantic. But it was a dream. Most odd.
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The latest spurt of bile from the metro left about UKIP, and the people who voted for Ukip, comes from the extremely self-satisfied David Aaronovitch, a chap who grows more absurd each year as his waistline becomes ever more vast. Next to nobody voted for UKIP, he maintains. The 73 per cent of the population
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Farzana Iqbal, aged 25, was stoned to death by members of her family in broad daylight on the steps of a courthouse in Lahore, Pakistan, because she had married a man with whom she was in love. This was an “honour killing” and perpetrators use sharia law to justify their murders. Some 1,000 women are
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So, now almost all the votes have been counted — except for those in the Islamic Republic of Tower Hamlets, where the vibrant and colourful political practices of Bangladesh continue to keep the returning officers entertained. Allegations of widespread intimidation of voters at polling booths, postal voting fraud and a huge number of mysteriously spoiled ballot
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‘I’ve had it with these people. They are so smug; they think they know everything and they know nothing. They want a good kick in the face.’ So said a close friend of mine, more usually a Labour voter, before she went out to vote for Ukip earlier today. I think it was the Jasmine
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Should we be worried about the vast numbers of German-born people living covertly in the United Kingdom? The Office for National Statistics estimates that in 2011 some 297,000 Germans were resident here, the fifth largest non-British-born contingent (after Indians, Poles, Pakistanis and the Irish respectively). What the hell are they all up to? Sitting in
From our UK edition
Here is a preview of Rod Liddle’s column from this week’s Spectator magazine Should we be worried about the vast numbers of German-born people living covertly in the United Kingdom? The Office for National Statistics estimates that in 2011 some 297,000 Germans were resident here, the fifth largest non-British-born contingent (after Indians, Poles, Pakistanis and
From our UK edition
I would rather live next door to a German than a Romanian. I thought I’d just make that clear. I don’t mean I’d rather live next door to SS Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich than the humorously surreal dramatist Eugène Ionesco. I mean, in general, on average, given what I know about the people from both countries who have come
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D-Day would have been effected with far less trouble if, at the time, we had insisted on the same rules that pertain in Haworth’s annual commemoration of the event. The Yorkshire village holds what is now called a “1940s Weekend” – don’t mention the war – and people who wear Nazi uniforms, or the SS
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I hope you enjoyed the new post-Paxman Newsnight last night, if you still watch the programme. It was bad on a whole new level of badness (watch it here). Presented by an Afghan-Australian woman called Yalda Hakim, of whom I had never heard. Yalda was hampered in her presentational debut by being unable to string a
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I see the veteran Labour MP Austin Mitchell is in trouble for having used the word rape in a ‘deeply offensive’ context. He had castigated the government for having failed to prevent Pfizer’s attempted acquisition of AstraZeneca, and added: ‘Roll up rapists.’ The woman who described Mitchell’s use of the word as ‘deeply offensive’ was
From our UK edition
To: Karen Moran, HR Director, BBC Dear Ms Moran, I have decided to give up on the gardening this year, after a number of dispiriting setbacks. Last year I invested a fairly large amount of money, and about four hours per week, in trying to grow vegetables. But despite the fence and the pellets and
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I enjoyed Fraser’s preview of the Eurovision Song Contest; I had not known that he was such a fan. You work with someone for years, oblivious to their dark secrets, their strange peccadilloes. It was typically brave of him to come out, in public. I watched the thing, again. I thought the entry from The
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Oh dear, I don’t suppose I’ll get much support in these parts for what follows. But I’m sorta with Jenny Willott, the Liberal Democrat MP and Business Minister. She has stated that she hates Prime Minister’s Question Time “with a passion” and goes out of her way to avoid attending it. Her implication is that
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In a double blow for the beleaguered BBC, the corporation has lost three of its most compelling attractions in little more than a month: the Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman, and Susanna Reid’s legs. Paxman has said he has had enough and announced his retirement from the thinly viewed current affairs programme. Susanna Reid’s legs have
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My colleague Hugo Rifkind has been bien-pensanting around the issue of racism, to interesting effect. His thesis, in last week’s mag, seems to be that Ukip is a racist party because it says it isn’t a racist party. I suspect Hugo could show you racism in a handful dust. He also refers to the case
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On location for The Sunday Times in the exciting by-election town of Newark-upon-Trent, I asked a nice local woman about her voting intentions. What way do you think you’ll be voting, I asked. This is what she said. “Um, yes, the poll. Well, I will turn right out of my house and walk down the
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Apparently, mice think that women are useless. I don’t mean that they think women mice are useless — they’re keen enough on them, all right. I mean women women, like Rachel Reeves, the shadow secretary of state for work and pensions, and the R&B singer Rihanna, and the European Union’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs
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It used to take one hour and forty five minutes to get by train from where I live in Canterbury to central London. Now, as a consequence of HS1 and the rather annoyingly named “Javelin”, it takes a little over fifty minutes. There is not the remotest doubt that the new service has greatly improved
