Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
It is of course shocking that the Justice Secretary Chris Grayling should ban prisoners from receiving books sent by their friends and relatives. We might all agree with author Philip Pullman who said that the ban is worthy of Hitler and Pol Pot and entirely typical of a government whose most senior members regularly eat
We live in a recriminatory age, one in which we are only ever a step away from the cringing, self-abnegating apology. Take the case of BBC Newsnight’s latest appointee, as economics editor, a chap called Duncan Weldon. Duncan is doing the tail between the legs thing right now, desperately attempting to excise part of his
How should the western powers react when part of a friendly nation holds an illegal referendum and votes to secede from the country in which hitherto it was located? Sanctions? Military reprisals? We’d better send the gunships to the watery redoubt of Venice, then, which has just voted overwhelmingly to leave Italy. The Venetians, part
Congratulations to Stephen Glover for writing perhaps the only sensible piece about the Crimean crisis. There is a certain force, too, to Putin’s charge that the West believes itself a chosen people to whom the normal moral rules do not apply. We have meddled, frequently with the help of military might, to spread our own
Just to ring the changes, I’ve written about the BBC and political correctness for the mag this week. Yeah, yeah, I know – you haven’t heard enough about that subject. But one of the writers of the 1970s situation comedy It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum has complained that aunty isn’t showing the series any more
Are there enough black and minority ethnic people on our television screens? The comedian Lenny Henry thinks not and has proposed targets to ensure better representation. Lenny means stuff like Midsomer Murders, I think, which famously avoided using people of colour for a very long time in its absurd but strangely comforting dramas. I think
Is the world now being fed a bit of disinformation from the Malaysians over the fate of that missing jet, flight MH370? We are now told that the pilot, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, was a ‘fanatical’ dissident, a supporter of opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, who has once again been jailed under Malaysia’s homophobic laws for
I suppose you could argue, if you were a conservative, that Tony Benn’s greatest contribution to public life was helping to render Labour unelectable for thirteen years. There’s quite a few within Labour who might wryly argue the same thing, frankly. And plenty more who had grave doubts about the man’s ‘principled’ devotion to Socialism,
There is a beautiful symmetry to all things, I think, and probably related somehow to the concept of karma. Only two weeks ago, a bunch of researchers at Durham University came up with a report which insisted that dyslexia is a meaningless term. You and I know that, of course, but we dare not say
A new National Minimum Wage of £8.80 per hour, both in London and beyond. Plenty of money set aside to police this arrangement. Four per cent stamp duty for all homes over £250,000, two per cent for all those under. We need to dampen down the housing market which has again become absurd. 60 per
Why the surprise? Of course the Prime Minister would employ a nanny from somewhere like Nepal. David Cameron is simply taking part in the familiar upper-middle class game of ‘Exploited Third World Labour Top Trumps’. The more backward, far-flung and desolate the country of origin, the higher your nanny scores. And, incidentally, the cheaper she
Do your children have a bleak and nihilistic view of the world? It’s hard to tell, really, when they spend 30 per cent of the day blamming away at those whores in Grand Theft Auto and the remaining 70 per cent asleep. How should one go about inquiring such a thing? Text them, maybe. ‘R
I don’t really know Mark Lawson; I’ve bumped into him a couple of times and he once was the moderator or question master, I forget which, on some show I was on. What I mean is he is not in my circle of friends. As it happens I don’t really have a circle of friends.
I’ve seen and read an awful lot of criticism about how weak and pathetic the West has been in responding to the developing crisis in the Ukraine, but scarcely a single word offering advice as to what it SHOULD do. It may well be that making vague threats about the Sochi G8 Summit and a
It’s ages since I last went on a decent demo and had a bit of a dust-up with the pigs. I should get out more, there’s a lot of fun to be had, throwing stuff at the police and shouting things in a self-righteous manner. I think the last one I attended was in the
So, the IRA terror suspect, John Downey, will now not face a trial for his alleged involvement in the Hyde Park and Regent’s Park bombings of 1982, in which eleven soldiers (as well as seven horses) were murdered by nail bombs. The former Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain seems to be delighted about this and
Would you buy a used car from the disc jockey Chris Moyles? I’m fairly gullible but even I’d have second thoughts if the gobby lardmountain approached me with a 2004 Nissan Micra, one careful owner mate, sound as a pound. This is what Moyles told the Inland Revenue he did for a living so that
Wouldn’t it be boring if everyone behaved much as you behave? If everyone expressed themselves similarly? Let a thousand flowers bloom, I say. Take the case of Torz Reynolds. You are almost certainly not called Torz and I would guess, too, that you count few people within your circle of friends who abide under that
I wonder if we should start our own Spectator Blog NekNominations? Open to bloggers and readers. I nominate Daniel Maris to drink a small glass of Pinot Noir while watching the early evening news. And Alex Massie to drink a flagon of Teachers while standing on the up line somewhere between Edinburgh and Alnmouth. Maybe
I don’t suppose these petitions do much good, but they may make us all feel a little better about ourselves. Muhammad Asghar is a lunatic living in Pakistan, thus scoring about as low as it’s possible to get on life’s first two throws of the dice. He is a paranoid schizophrenic and recently proclaimed himself
