Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
From our UK edition
Was Jane Austen really the best idea the women could come up with? Furious campaigning from feminists has resulted in the rather mimsy authoress being chosen to adorn the back of our new ten quid notes. There’s another woman, of course, on the other side – the Queen. But as she’s an inbred fascist agent
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I wonder how many illegal immigrants who’ve seen the government’s imprecations for them to leave the country have done exactly that? Seen the van driving around with its placard and thought: ‘That’s really tugged at my conscience, that has. I shall take myself, and family, to Gatwick Airport immediately. I am sorry to have been
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Driving along in the car on a pleasant evening earlier this week, I was happily humming along to the toe-tapping sounds of the sadly defunct deathcore stalwarts Anal Prolapse, when my wife leaned over and turned the CD player off and the radio on. Those smug and portentous pips sounded. ‘What the hell are you
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Harriet Harperson has written to the editors of seventeen national newspapers with a vast list of questions intended to discover how many women they employ, and how many are women over the age of 50. You can’t get a balanced picture of the world if women are not equally represented, she asserts in this letter.
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Snoring in the sunshine down Park Lane, in London, last week was the latest gift to Britain from the Great God of Multicultural Diversity, sixty-odd snaggle toothed Romanian gypsies. I went to speak to them for a film I was doing for the Sunday Times. The only English the vast majority knew was ‘grwnka’, which
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I wonder what possessed the jury in the Trayvon Martin case to return two not guilty verdicts when they knew the trouble it would cause. One never ceases to wonder at the self-importance, the narcissism, of those people who always believe they know better than the rest. An important section of the American population — perpetually
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Was it right for the middle aged part-Hispanic male George Zimmerman to shoot the young black male Trayvon Martin, regardless of whether or not he had just had his head kicked in by him? The ‘not guilty’ verdict has granted the USA another Rodney King moment, although race may not have been a crucial factor
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As if the poor Egyptians didn’t have enough on their plate, into the arena marches the man to sort it all out, the world’s ‘Middle East Envoy’, Tony Blair. Lucky world. Give the man his due, the Middle East is a monumentally fractious, fissiparous, disputatious neck of the woods and they all seem to hate
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This all looks terribly good fun, don’t you think? Spectacular towers which will make wonderful bonfires: it must have taken them ages. My only caveat is that they are all in Northern Ireland. Is there no enterprising alliance over here which might do something similar to celebrate the glorious military success of King William of
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I think it was the arrival into the debate of those Blairite ghosts Mandelson and Reid which helped me make my mind up. Somehow, Ed Miliband has been coerced into taking on the Unite union on the grounds that they are doing shady business on the matter of selecting candidates. Mandelson and Reid are both
From our UK edition
Someone alert the World Wildlife Fund and Sir David Attenborough. Yet another indigenous British creature is facing extinction, its ranks denuded to almost nothing by arrogant human behaviour. In particular the arrogant behaviour of women. Yes, this is the sad story of pubic lice – a familiar tale of wilful habitat destruction. Researchers say the
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It is very lucky for the BBC that Channel 4 exists. Whatever imbecilic, supposedly attention-grabbing trash the BBC commissions, there will always be its commercial rival around to commission something still more imbecilic, still more trashy. Such as — if you remember — ‘Wank Week’, a series exploring the manifest delights of masturbation. Having gained sufficient exposure with
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Lovely to see Lord Tebbit at The Spectator summer party. I reminded him that he had once written a short letter to me, which I still cherish. Back when I was editor of the BBC Today programme I had written to lots of famous people to get their views about religious belief and faith, for
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I suppose this will seem churlish, but I’d just like to add my support to the grime rapper Wiley who, upon arriving at the Glastonbury festival, tweeted to Michael Eavis: ‘Fuck you and your farm.’ I’m not sure what motivated this annoyance but credit where it’s due, it’s roughly what I’ve felt about this bloated
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A small group of MPs have put their heads above the parapet in a brave and commendable fashion by demanding that they and their colleagues should not receive large pay rises. My own view is that MPs should be paid substantially more than what they currently receive, not least because it might improve the intake
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A bunch of back bench Conservative MPs have won the right to present to parliament, via the almost pointless conduit of private members bills, a sort of alternative manifesto. A fairly uncameroonie alternative Queen’s Speech. The MPs in question include Peter Bone and Philip Hollobone, both of whom sound a little as though they had
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From which of the actors engaged in the thoroughly entertaining case of Edward Snowden has come the biggest spewing-out of cant, do you reckon? Edward himself? The Guardian? Or the Yanks or -Chinese? Edward was a fairly low-level CIA technical contractor in Hawaii when he released to the world details of his government’s clandestine electronic
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I see that they have gone for Jane Austen as the face of the new ten pound note, after a long and bitter row. I find it incredible that they decided not to take the chance to show a true commitment to multicultural diversity and have instead chosen some boring dead white woman. I wrote
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Something very odd is going to happen in your newspapers and on your television screens, perhaps this week, perhaps not. Soon, anyway. It looks likely that poor old Nelson Mandela is on his last legs and will very soon expire. As soon as he does, just you watch. You will hear of nothing else for
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Which television chef would you most like to see throttled in a restaurant? I have to say, Nigella Lawson would be well down the list for me, as I’ve always rather liked her. It’s true that some of her recipes are a little precious, especially all that fairy cake stuff, but surely not to the
