Rod Liddle

Very good piece from Dan Hannan in yesterday's The Daily Telegraph. The gist of it being that politicians admit to Eurosceptical tendencies only once they have left office (and therefore, by extension, when it is too late to do anything about it.) This will have been prompted by both Nigel Lawson and Michael Portillo’s recent (we suppose) Damascene conversions, which have entertained us all greatly. Dan puts this down to what Milton Friedman called ‘the tyranny of the status-quo’, and of course it is true about many more things than simply our membership of the European Union.

My copy of the Times on Tuesday this week kindly provided me with a list of things to do in order that I might ‘live life to the full’. I am not at all sure that I wish to live life to the full, having met many people for whom this is their guiding philosophy and having wanted very much to punch them. The rather banal list of impulsive stuff to do — try different kinds of food, ‘snog’ a stranger, buy some nice clothes, shoot a cat with a crossbow, take lots of holidays* — was appended to an interview with one of the country’s most famous scientists, that man from the telly, Baron Winston.

Having a baby and stuck for a choice of name? Let the eminently sensible and well-adjusted people of New Zealand help you out. Their government has just released a list of names parents wished to call their kids but were banned from doing so by an overbearing and meddling state. Luckily they’re still legal over here, though. So you could go for ‘4Real’ or ‘V8’ - or, if it’s your kinda thing, ‘Anal’. There were even kids about to be called ‘2nd’ and ‘3rd’ and ‘4th’, inspiration having deserted the parents. My favourites came from New Zealand a few years back. That’ll be the twins, Benson and Hedges. And then you know how people sometimes call their kids after the romantic places they were conceived?

Great stuff from David Starkey on BBC Question Time last night, hammering away at Harriet Harman, David Dimbleby, Victoria Coren and Shirley Williams for having attained their current positions in society with considerable assistance from their famous and influential (and of course loaded) parents. Yes, precisely; it is pretty much the same every week. Starkey made the point that it is the left which does this sort of thing most often, although I think – looking at the cabinet and the staffing of Number 10 Downing Street – that he would be hard pressed to maintain that point.

There was an extraordinary meeting of the Juche Ideas Study Group (England) in London last week, held to commemorate the 81st anniversary of the foundation of the Korean People’s Army. For various domestic reasons I was unable to be present, but I think it went off quite well. Sandwiches, tea and coffee were served after the various speeches. Juche is the political ideology of North Korea, emphasising a steely self-reliance in the face of Yankee and Jap imperialist aggression. The meeting was taken by a chap called Dermot Hudson, who may or may not have recited the poem he wrote a while back about Kim Il Sung, the founder of the DPRK. I hope he did, because it deserves to be recited whenever three or four people are gathered together.

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 not being funny. I have yet to read a good review. It is on BBC One – and this, I think, is the point. Who else, other than the BBC, would commission a show from Ben Elton? Just as who would put Jeremy Hardy and Sandi Toksvig on air? Nobody, I suspect. I don’t dislike the work of these people because they are lefties, I dislike their work because it hasn’t ever been funny. (Although I suppose we should allow Ben some credit for his part in writing Blackadder.

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 that domestic moment with you.

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 Harris - and Channel Five has been forced to pull its scheduled transmission of 'Olive The Ostrich', in case Rolf’s alleged guilt somehow seeps out of the television screen and into the innocent and vulnerable ears of toddlers. But guilt of what?

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. ‘Fucking sit dahn you fucking mug,’ was the manner in which he couched his entreaty, and when he repeated his injunction the man in the gangway took vivid exception and replied thus: ‘I’m going to fuck you.’ This was not, as you might imagine, a statement of brusque and compelling romantic intent, but a harbinger for what followed — a windmilling fist directed at the man’s head.

-       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 ………..

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 taxpayer has to take a deep breath and cut his losses. Better this woman be paid £400,000 for doing absolutely nothing, rather than receive her full salary for carrying on doing useless, pointless things in Brussels. It would be interesting, though, to add up how much the state and the taxpayer has forked out for Ashton since she began her career as chairthing of the National Council for Complaining About Everything, back in the 1980s.

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 something called 'Precariat', this latter comprising people with pit bull terriers but no money to feed them. It is a chimera, in my opinion. There are two classes in this country. There is the ruling class, which is privately educated and has inherited wealth and agreeable contacts and which comprises between 60 to 80 per cent of the top jobs in the legal profession, journalism, the city and politics.