Rod Liddle

And so, farewell Rowan — the only Archbishop of Canterbury ever to have suggested that Sharia Law might be a good thing for England. His flailing, his ability to be wrong-footed at every turn, his inconsistency, could not have been better summarised than by his response to the ‘can Christians wear crosses?’ controversy of the last few days. At first Rowan seemed to deride the wearing of the cross, insisting it was nothing more than a ‘decoration’ and took the part for some people of true faith. A remarkable thing to hear from an Archbishop of Canterbury, although, because it was Rowan, we sort of expected it.

A few weeks ago, in a cover piece for the magazine, Rod Liddle backed John Sentamu as the next Archbishop of Canterbury. Given that Rowan Williams announced his resignation today, here's that article again: Who shall be the next Archbishop of Canterbury, do you suppose? They are jockeying for position at the moment, suffused with godliness and the distinct suspicion that old beardie has had more than enough and may wish to shuffle off to a warm university sinecure some time soon. The more cynical among you might not give a monkey’s and, indeed, suggest that jockeying for position to inherit Rowan’s mantle is akin to jockeying within the Romanov family to inherit Nicholas II’s mantle in about 1915.

I’ve been to West Sussex a number of times and on each occasion have been struck by how stupid the local people are. I don’t mean this unkindly — it’s just how it is. Everywhere you go there are small puddles of drool where the local citizens have stood, wreathed in puzzlement over the simplest tasks — such as how to use a telephone, or how to wash their hands. So congratulations to West Sussex County Council which has just spent £100,000 filming short videos explaining to ratepayers the best way to go about these challenging activities. The film about using a phone suggests it is best to hold the device firmly in one hand — and punch in the numbers with the other.

The opening ceremony for the Olympic Games is now only a few months away, and daily the excitement mounts. I know you are looking forward to it, as I am. To involve yourself more closely, you can sign up to become a ‘Local Leader’, which seems to involve whipping up enthusiasm for the event among your neighbours and devising brilliant initiatives to capture the public’s imagination. So, Phil Turvil, a gardening expert and Local Leader, is encouraging people to grow vegetables in the official colours of the 2012 Olympics. ‘I'm excited by communities growing and sharing their tasty veg to celebrate the Games.

It’s good to see that Dr Karl Brandt has been reincarnated as an attractive young research associate at Oxford University, and is now known as Francesca Minerva. All too often the leading Nazis were reincarnated as very lowly life-forms, such as moss or krill. Reinhard Heydrich, for example, was reborn as Chlamydia and is now living inside a Slovakian woman called Svetlana. Dr Brandt, then, has lucked out. Karl spent many years supplementing his important work as Hitler’s personal physician by running the Action T4 programme, under which disabled people were killed because they had supposedly miserable lives and were a burden on the state. His conviction has survived transportation on the astral plane, luckily.

Let’s get the following out of the way first: Assad is a brutal authoritarian and Syria is not a democracy. In particular, the shelling of Homs has been an outrage. But. What proportion of the Syrian people are in favour of the uprising and support the rebel army? All of them? Most of them? Or just a few? We now have the results of the referendum on Syria’s constitution. Of course, it will most probably have been gerrymandered. And the opposition refused to take part. But on a turnout of more than 50 per cent, 89.4 per cent voted 'yes' to the changes proposed by Assad. Is this wholly meaningless? Are they fighting anywhere except Homs? It looks very peaceful in Damascus.

I don’t know if you watched the show, but there was a bravura performance from the British historian Simon Schama on Newsnight last Thursday evening. He spent much of the time furiously condemning the venality and greed of the bankers in accepting large bonuses. He was, for a while, wracked by a sort of camp hysteria, spluttering with fury, eyes revolving, hands flailing, in the manner of a nonagenarian dowager aunt addressing the question of immigration. Mr Schama divides his time, as he admitted, between the US and Britain. I wonder in which of the two countries he prefers to pay his income tax — the UK, where it’s about 50 per cent for the likes of him, or the US, where it’s a more congenial 35 per cent?

I have been asked, rightly enough, to use obscene language a little less frequently on these pages. This is something which I have strived to do. But there’s a problem, because this morning I read an article written by the actor Sean Penn, about the ‘Malvinas/Falklands’ dispute, and cannot find any way in which I can avoid using the word ‘fuckwit’.

A short observation on terminologies. You will be aware that whatever is happening to our weather was originally designated as a consequence of ‘global warming’. This then became ‘climate change’ when it was evident that freezing winters did not fit easily into the original thesis. Later, the phrase ‘climate change denier’ was popularised to demonise those who disagreed with the notion that the earth was getting warmer as a consequence of man’s stupidity. This had deliberate connotations of ‘holocaust denier’. Now I’ve noticed a new one. Opponents of the dominant paradigm are no longer called climate change deniers, they are now called ‘opponents of climate science’.

A rotten week for Richard Dawkins in his battle against God. He began it by being kebabed on the Today programme by the former Dean of St Paul’s, Giles Fraser and ended it skewered by Camilla Long in an interview (£) for The Sunday Times. Long cannily exposed his shrillness, his monumental arrogance, his tetchiness. It is a huge shame in a way, because he is a clever chap who has done an awful lot to popularise science; he has been far more a force of good than ill and it would be nice if we could remember him for his contribution to science. But we won’t. We will remember him less as Charles Darwin, which he would like, than as, ironically, Samuel Wilberforce, which he would not. Someone whom history remembers primarily for a hapless flailing.

Metropolitan police officers have been asked to write a poem celebrating the wonderful diversity of our capital. The winning entrant will get to have ‘elevenses’ with the Met’s Head of Diversity, a nice lady called Denise Milani. This is too entrancing a prospect to pass up. So, given that the poem will come from a policeman’s view, here’s my entry: Albanian gangsters with rice flails and Uzis, Ukrainian pimps with high-cheekboned floozies, Jamaicans with handguns, Somalis with knives — just some of the people enriching our lives.