Rod Liddle

These are heady days for the proponents of liberal evangelism. Saif Gaddafi had to leave a telephone call because, he explained, ‘There is shooting inside my house’ and a little further away there are people whooping loudly in Tripoli. The news of the rebels’ victory may be a shade premature at time of writing — they have form in overstating their conquests — but it looks as if ol’ Muammar has had his lot. These are heady days for the proponents of liberal evangelism. Saif Gaddafi had to leave a telephone call because, he explained, ‘There is shooting inside my house’ and a little further away there are people whooping loudly in Tripoli.

I had a sort of Tottenham High Street moment just after lunch on Tuesday. I was passing a sandwich shop near the Spectator offices and happened to see the slogan beneath its name: ‘Live your life, love our food.’ The urge came, right there and then, to torch the place and maybe rough up the counter staff but — maybe this is an age thing — the feeling quickly passed. It was the impudence of the imperative that most annoyed me, although the general fatuity of it grated too. Why would I not live my life? What’s the alternative? And what has it got to do with your food, you presumptuous idiots?

So appalled and incensed am I at the killing of gentle, loving family man Mark Duggan last Thursday that I feel only the immediate illegal acquisition of an expensive consumer durable, preferably a top end watch, will assuage my righteous wrath and lessen my grief. A Rolex should do the job, or at least something with a bit of bling about it. If possible, the watch should be liberated by myself and my homeys, my bluds, from an agent of oppression, such as a local watch shop owned by someone who isn’t me and most likely from a different race, maybe white or Asian.

So is Anders Breivik mad, or just right-wing? His lawyer has decided to go with the former, presumably on the basis that the Norwegian courts will look more kindly upon someone who is doolally than on someone who is a shade to the right of centre. He is probably right about this. There is a (usually) unspoken subtext within the liberal media here that the two are in any case synonymous, an elision between these two states of mind, right-wing and doolally. This was borne aloft on the palpable triumphalism that it wasn’t a Muslim wot done it, as we all thought; quite the reverse, it was instead one of you lot who always thinks it is Muslims, one of you Islamophobes, with your irrational fears about Muslims.

At time of writing I do not know the name of the lumpen oaf who tried to rub an ersatz custard pie in Rupert Murdoch’s face during his testimony to the Culture, Media and Sport select committee. At time of writing I do not know the name of the lumpen oaf who tried to rub an ersatz custard pie in Rupert Murdoch’s face during his testimony to the Culture, Media and Sport select committee. It is possible that it was not a person at all, but a phantasm, a creature from the dark side spontaneously brought into being by the national outpouring of hysteria and hyperbole, much as the chupacabras, or goat-sucker, will manifest himself in the peasant villages of South America when the locals are gripped by a grave but irrational fear of something.

I’d like the art therapists to be next, if at all possible. I’d like the art therapists to be next, if at all possible. I mean, next in line for the national outpouring of bile and contumely. My closest friend is an art therapist and his smugness is beginning to get my goat, especially coming from someone who wanders around loony bins at my expense with a bag of crayons and a head full of post-Freudian idiocies. So, 2012, remember, let’s take it out on the art therapists. I’ll start the Twitter campaign in November, you ring the Guardian. For the moment, though, it’s journalists, and fair enough I suppose.

Do you remember the vicious debates back in the middle of the 1990s about whether or not we should join the single European currency? We don’t have that argument much any more; even the Liberal Democrats keep their traps shut about it these days and try to change the subject when any one mentions it. Do you remember the vicious debates back in the middle of the 1990s about whether or not we should join the single European currency? We don’t have that argument much any more; even the Liberal Democrats keep their traps shut about it these days and try to change the subject when any one mentions it. Anyway, the debate back then was remarkable because almost everybody except the entire British public was in favour of the single currency.

I am thinking of starting up a free internet site called ‘Cancer and House Prices’. I am thinking of starting up a free internet site called ‘Cancer and House Prices’. Every day, a new piece of information, which I will make up, about tumours and property values and perhaps how these two phenomena are unexpectedly linked. I will also run photographs of young people you have never heard of but who sing in The Saturdays or star in things like Hollyoaks — largely nubile women in thongs with large breasts and tattoos — and supply a paragraph or two about how they haven’t got cancer or that they are about to buy a house, or simply live in a house, and how much it is worth. I expect to clean up, with all the online advertising that comes my way.

What do you suppose the chances are of this being the coldest June since records began, or maybe the dampest June since records began? My guess is that it will almost certainly be the most dramatic of some climatic variation since records began; paradoxically, every other month is. Every season is. Every year is. Every year is something. The weather is on a roll, it keeps breaking records, nothing can stop it. Why is this? The most obvious answer is climate change; we are seeing more extreme weather patterns both globally and locally. We know that the weather patterns are more extreme because we are told that they are, every week, every month, every season. Extreme weather is a consequence of man-made climate change, so we shouldn’t be surprised at this.