Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
Kenneth Clarke has always seemed, to me, a decent sort. By far the most likeable and least lordly and arrogant of those Euro-wanking wets who plagued Thatcher and, later, Major. Nonetheless, he is always wrong. About everything. If you are ever in doubt about where you should stand on a particular issue, find out what
Continuing the domestic bliss/ tv theme, one programme I have not watched so far is The Wright Way. This is a situation comedy about somebody called Wright, as you might have imagined. It is written by the 1980s comedian Ben Elton. The show has already received a slagging from a couple of critics, largely for
I was sitting on the stoop with a cigarette after dinner while my wife browsed the television channels to see if there was anything we might want to watch. Eventually she called out: ‘There’s Treblinka: Death Camp Survivors. Or The Vicar of Dibley. Up to you – I can’t decide.’ I just thought I’d share
A man in New Zealand has just been sent to prison for three months for watching cartoons of pixies, elves and trolls enjoying sexual intercourse. I don’t know, from the court report, if this was inter-species fairy-folk sex, i.e. if it was a nasty scene of one of those enormous, wart-festooned Norse Huldrefolk applying himself
Is it the stupidity of Americans, or the stupidity of people who use social networking sites, that is responsible for the following letter, sent shortly after the Boston bombers had been identified? ‘As more information on the origin of the alleged perpetrators is coming to light, I am concerned to note in the social media
I always thought there was something a little bit sinister about that Jake The Peg character. With what he refers to as his ‘extra leg’, m’lud. And then, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I would draw your attention to the follow up hit which was entitled, signally, ‘Two Little Boys’………… So, now it’s Rolf
It kicked off a bit at Wembley last Saturday evening, during the semi-final of the FA Cup between Millwall, of south-east London, and Wigan, of somewhere in the north-west of England. A gentleman sitting a couple of rows behind me requested of a chap standing in the gangway that he perhaps ought to sit down.
If I were to make a list of the things I thought the BBC should be doing, then a report from inside North Korea would come right at the top. Obviously, I would rather it were not the fairly ludicrous John Sweeney charged with delivering the report, but hell, you can’t have everything. I’m not
If I were to make a list of the things I thought the BBC should be doing, then a report from inside North Korea would come right at the top. Obviously, I would rather it were not the fairly ludicrous John Sweeney charged with delivering the report, but hell, you can’t have everything. I’m not
I was up in Mansfield on Thursday, interviewing retired miners for a film on the good old days of 1985, UDM v NUM and so on. The miners who stayed with the NUM in Nottinghamshire were, as you might guess, very militant indeed and very left wing. They still are. I asked one of them,
This, from the BBC – just in case any further evidence were needed. ‘The leader of the al-Nusra Front, a jihadist group fighting in Syria, has pledged allegiance to the leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani said the group’s behaviour in Syria would not change as a result. Al-Nusra claims to have carried
I’m afraid we have to use Nelson Mandela as an example once again. He is proving very useful in his dotage, old Nels, as a comparison for stuff. A sort of benchmark. So, when the BBC’s Eddie Mair kebabed Boris Johnson and called him a ‘pretty nasty piece of work’, it seemed to me relevant
– Full story pages 1-96. You turn if you want to …………………… handbag …………….. polarising …………. didn’t like the IRA …………………….. was sad that her husband died …………….. not keen on miners ……………………. polarising influence ………………. resolute ………………not a huge laugh, all things considered ………… won back those islands ………….. Tory wets stupid ……….. looked
A great deal of fuss is being made about Baroness Ashton’s retirement salary. She leaves her ludicrous post as High Representative for Foreign Affairs at the European Union next year — and is being given only £400,000 to tide her over the next few years. I think that is quite modest: sometimes, you see, the
There’s a BBC website where you can find out what class you are, according to new criteria drawn up by some bloke at the LSE and a babe from Manchester University. There are apparently seven new classes – which I suppose is designed to replace the old registrar General’s Scale – ranging from ‘Elite’ to
I’ve often thought that British football needed a good dose of fascism — and now at last it has exactly this, in the form of the combative and somewhat eccentric Italian chap Paolo Di Canio. He has been installed as the manager of Sunderland, and all hell has broken loose. Di Canio has described himself as
A rather charming and typically self-deprecating Easter sermon from Archbishop Justin at Canterbury Cathedral; I’m beginning to like him. His subject was the inevitability of disillusion with things like governments and councils and ‘regulatory bodies’ and indeed Archbishops of Canterbury who are all bound, in the end, to be fucking useless (although this was not
I’m trying to imagine the BBC’s Eddie Mair interviewing Nelson Mandela, the elderly African squirming uncomfortably in his seat as Mair, like one of the late Eugene Terre’Blanche’s famous Dobermans, snarls ever more menacingly, foam dripping from his bared gums. ‘So, in 1961, with several others, you founded a vicious terrorist movement, Spear of the
Enormous thanks to OGT for alerting us all to the brilliant article from the Independent – published on Monday March 20th, 2000. Here’s the first bit of it: ‘Britain’s winter ends tomorrow with further indications of a striking environmental change: snow is starting to disappear from our lives. Sledges, snowmen, snowballs and the excitement of
Very good report from Channel Four/Telegraph reporter Alex Thomson in Syria. This is about the use of ‘chemical weapons’ by one side in the civil war. Except, it seems, there are not simply two sides in the civil war any more. First the Brit journos stopped calling it an ‘Arab Spring’, given that the rebels
