Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
From our UK edition
Just as a follow up to what I was talking about below. Here’s the government’s chief scientific advisor, Sir John Beddington: ‘Professor Sir John Beddington said that time lags in the climate system meant that accumulations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere now will determine the weather we experience for the next 25 years. ‘Climate
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How can we stop weather hyperbole? I am so staggeringly bored of waking up each morning to headlines which insist we’re all going to be killed – on the roads, or through freezing to death, or in a flood. There have been four weather hyperboles already so far this year; warmest January, or warmest day
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Economic growth for the next year is predicted to be lower than 1.0%. I can’t think, offhand, or a more obvious indication that the Chancellor is gripped by some sort of weird paralysis which will result, for the rest of us, in continually declining standards of living. I have no great objection to many of
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I had forgotten about Cyprus. I suppose it was lodged somewhere near the back of my mind as a cheap British Mediterranean satrapy usefully divided into two: a southern bit, where our chavs went on holiday, and a northern bit where our criminals hide out from the filth. I was dimly aware that we had
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Scottish people are more generous than English people, contrary to the widely held belief that the Jocks are comically tight-fisted. A new study suggests that they are more likely to give money to charity than English people. I suppose it would only cause unnecessary offence if I suggested that the money they’re so happy to
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It is surely too early to demand a pogrom against Roman Catholics, as some now wish, simply because the church now has an Argie pope. It is true that Pope Frankie is committed to the “return” of the Falkland Islands to his homeland and has spoken in the manner of a banana republic dictator about
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I think we should all support the Iranian government in its legal action against the Hollywood actor and director Ben Affleck, for misrepresenting their lovely country in the film Argo. They have a serious legal team lined up to counter the suggestion raised in Argo that Iran is full of half-witted, bearded, brutal Islamist maniacs,
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Is her Majesty the Queen really at the forefront in the struggle for gay and lesbian equality? Or does she, deep down, harbour misgivings about poofs? I suppose we will never know for sure. In putting her name to the new Commonwealth Charter she will be supporting the following statement: ‘We are implacably opposed to
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Members of the World’s Most Rational and Peaceable Religion © have been going berserk in the lovely Bangladeshi town of Cox’s Bazar. Some bloke put a photo of a burned Koran on his Facebook page and the Muslims have been rioting, taking out their infantile fury on the minority Buddhist population. Setting them on fire
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According to The Grauniad, the world has lost a colossus, a political giant, an inspiring politician dedicated to rooting out corruption and standing up for the poor, etc etc. It was Hugo Chavez they were talking about, bizarrely. They even wheeled out Tariq Ali to pen a eulogy. Martin Kettle hopped about between the cracks,
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‘Can you imagine anything worse,’ a Hungarian once said to me, ‘than a Slav who thinks he’s Latin?’ He was referring to the Romanians, of course. There is a certain degree of tension in Romania between the ethnic Romanians, who run the place, and the ethnic Hungarians, who feel that they have been press-ganged into
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Another teacher has been sacked for what looks like a wholly fatuous and unjust reason; these stories come in at the rate of about two a week. Christopher Hammond, head of German at a private girls’ school in Reading, was booted out for having taken photographs of his pupils on a school trip. Or, at
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A couple of reflections upon Eastleigh. Firstly it was indeed an appalling night for Labour; midterm the party came second in this constituency in the early 90s. It received the votes a joke candidate might expect this time around. Maybe that’s because they put a comedian in the seat. I have no objection to John
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I was seated at a rather stiff and formal BBC dinner a dozen or so years back, one of those ghastly occasions upon which the boss class attempt, painfully, to commune with the corporation untermenschen over noisette of chicken, or something similar. There were perhaps 15 of us, drawn from various levels of the BBC
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Apologies for my absence – had a week’s holiday, somewhere distant from thunderstorms and snow. Coming back last night on an Oman Airlines flight, in cattle class, the air stewardess trolley babe asked me which of the two set hot meals of stewed shit I would prefer. I told her that I didn’t really fancy
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I got a text message the other day, inviting me to a party. This is a nice thing to happen, and not an everyday event. I have become used to all modern forms of communication bringing nothing but trouble; the more modern they are, the more unpleasant will be the message. If it arrives via
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There’s another one of those fatuous “studies” in the papers today, based upon that favourite newspaper device, the false correlation. This time it’s about marriage; if you want to make your marriage work, move to Dorset, because part of it has the highest number of married couples in the country and they are more likely
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Well at least — so far — no middle-class food has been found to contain large chunks of horsey. It’s all been in the junk they feed the chavs. It’s true that Waitrose withdrew some beefburgers for sale a week or two back, but this was only a ‘precautionary measure’ and later the burgers were
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Now here’s something to warm the heart. A bunch of medics from Liverpool have set up an organisation called ‘Street Doctors’, where they go out and teach gang members how to staunch and sew up stab wounds. The obvious downside to this pioneering initiative is that we will probably, as a consequence, be left with
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Ah, at last the scales have fallen from Jemima Khan’s lovely fluttery little doe eyes. Having forked out £20,000 towards Julian Assange’s bail, the pouting metro-lefty socialite has come to the conclusion that the bloke is a bit of a rum chap, all things considered. She has even compared him to the barking charlatan who
