Rod Liddle

I don’t know if any of you were watching that England game. Maybe like me you did so half reluctantly, disliking the players because they are in the main ignorant, overpaid, under-achieving and consumed with hubris. But if you did you will have felt that familiar despond; it was a game the Swiss deserved to win. Again I was reminded of that very old quote – must be going back thirty years I would guess – from the then manager of Yugoslavia: “England, the lions of autumn, are but lambs come the spring.” To which he might have added “and remain so for the summer.” We are not terribly good at any time of the year, but especially poor in the spring and early summer.

I took the Caledonian sleeper train from London Euston to Glasgow on Sunday night. This is what the train did: it left Euston at 2330 and made its way to just south of Watford Junction, where it waited for twenty minutes. Then it went back south, on a different line, to just north of Kings Cross station. In all it took 94 minutes to take us, effectively, 300 yards from where we had started out. The reason for this was that the West Coast mainline was closed for engineering works, so the train needed to be diverted via the east coast mainline. The only way to get from Euston to the east coast line is to follow the procedure I detailed above. Why, then, couldn’t the train have started out from Kings Cross in the first place?

At last we crusaders for truth can reveal exactly what happened when a famous footballer who is married met the former Big Brother contestant, Imogen Thomas. I suppose you could guess what happened, but it’s better to know for sure, isn’t it? Don’t worry, we’ll use phrases like ‘asked her to perform a sex act’ rather than crudely spelling it out, so there’ll be nothing to disquiet the kiddies.

I suppose it’s wrong to lock people up for crimes they didn’t commit. But nonetheless, if George Davis had served his full sentence for an armed robbery which he probably didn’t commit in 1975, then he wouldn’t have been able to take part in the armed robbery on the Bank of Cyprus two years later, or indeed another armed robbery ten years after that. I don’t expect there’s much of an appetite in the Justice Department for preventative custody, though. But Davis was an odd sort of chap to galvanise the middle class lefties back in the 1970s, with their “Free George Davis” campaigns and graffiti. I chanted Free George Davis, sheeplike, along with the rest of them, happy to forget that the man was a violent career criminal.

I think we’re all very relieved that Vicky Pryce, the estranged wife of the Cabinet minister Chris Huhne, is not motivated by revenge in writing a book about her ex-husband and dobbing him in to the police. I think we’re all very relieved that Vicky Pryce, the estranged wife of the Cabinet minister Chris Huhne, is not motivated by revenge in writing a book about her ex-husband and dobbing him in to the police. If the book was motivated by spite and revenge because Chris had recently dumped her for a strange mannish woman who ever-so-slightly resembles the late TV comedian Jack Douglas, I think we’d all feel a little unclean reading it.

I had rather high hopes when I learned that there was to be a “Slut Walk”  through London in a couple of weeks. However, it transpires that they are not proper honest to God sluts at all, but very angry women in dungarees who will most likely not be up for it, so to speak. The Slut Walk movement began in Canada when a chief of police suggested women should avoid dressing like “sluts” if they wished to avoid being sexually assaulted by men. This provoked the usual irrational and foam-flecked fury, with hordes of women screeching that they have a right to dress however they wish without being attacked. Well, indeed. Just as I have a perfect right to leave my windows open when I nip to the shops for some fags, without being burgled.

Well, knock me down with a Ferrari, who’d have thought it? Jemima Khan and Jeremy Clarkson! The fragrant, pouting Mima — epitome of well-bred, bankrolled, metro liberal hand-wringing faux angst — getting it on with the dishevelled reactionary so far to the right-of-centre-he’s-almost-in-the-median-strip petrolhead Jeremy. Well, knock me down with a Ferrari, who’d have thought it? Jemima Khan and Jeremy Clarkson! The fragrant, pouting Mima — epitome of well-bred, bankrolled, metro liberal hand-wringing faux angst — getting it on with the dishevelled reactionary so far to the right-of-centre-he’s-almost-in-the-median-strip petrolhead Jeremy.

An interesting piece, a week or so back, from Matthew Parris in the magazine – sorry I haven’t got around to it before now. There are columns I read immediately in The Spectator and others which I lay down like a fine wine to mellow for a while, perhaps for months or even years, always knowing that they are there in their splendour waiting to be savoured, to be held aloft in a crystal goblet and their beguiling complexity of flavours – is that a hint of vanilla and perhaps peach, and, good Lord, can that be quince? – shared amongst great friends, in warmth and in silence. That’s what I do with Matthew’s columns.

The Preston North End striker, Nathan Ellington, who is black, has complained about the abuse he received while playing, briefly, for his club against Millwall on Saturday. On that medium for the half-witted and forlorn, Twitter, he said the Millwall crowd were “a disgrace to the human race,” and added: “Monkey noises and Calling (sic) me a theif (sic). All players abused.” I was at the game and heard no racist abuse whatsoever — and I was there when Ellington was warming up. No complaints were made to Millwall FC, or the police.

Why does everyone think that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, is so clever? Is it just the beard? Maybe if you nailed a beard onto Wayne Rooney people would start saying he was clever too, rather than thinking him a truculent potato-headed troll with learning difficulties. Beards are a mask, a diversionary tactic. If you say something stupid but thoughtfully stroke your luxuriant beard whilst doing so, people immediately think you’re not stupid at all, merely thoughtful, or cleverly thinking the unthinkable. Rowan’s been getting away with this for longer than I can remember. How many divisions does the Pope have? More than enough to deal with Rowan.

What, to your mind, constitutes a ‘hate crime’? I’ve been wondering about this since reading the comments of Paul Marshall, of the Cumbria CID. What, to your mind, constitutes a ‘hate crime’? I’ve been wondering about this since reading the comments of Paul Marshall, of the Cumbria CID. Paul had been expressing his great satisfaction that a shaven-headed lumpenprole idiot called Andrew Ryan had been sentenced to 70 days in prison for burning a copy of the Koran in public. Speaking in the manner of a Premier League football club manager, Marshall said: ‘Today’s result shows how seriously we take hate crime.’ And he added: ‘The incident was highly unusual for Cumbria in that we have such low levels of hate crime in the county.