Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

Dancing on graves is what journalists do

There’s no need for Jan Moir to apologise for speculating about the death of the boy-band singer Stephen Gately says Rod Liddle. Why have we become so censorious and hysterical? I have to say that I don’t particularly like newspaper and magazine columnists, as people. Smug, not terribly bright, usually cowardly, lazy, always self-obsessed, self-important and narcissistic — forever brimming with themselves, a collection of mass-produced ornamental thimbles overflowing with foaming vomit. I don’t excuse myself from most of these character traits, by the way, so I suppose you can add self-loathing to the list as well.

Friday

Rod Liddle

The curse of Liddle

Ah, hell, it’s the curse of Liddle. No sooner have I sat down and written a stirring defence of the Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir, who had been vilified for suggesting there was something “sleazy” about the death of Stephen Gateley, than the bloody woman apologises. Or, at least, sort of apologises. I don’t see why she should have even genuflected in the general direction of an apology; her article was not homophobic. I suppose she could have watched her back by putting in some qualifying adjectives here or there – but then, hell, I’m hardly one to lecture on that issue. Anyway, my piece is in this week’s Spectator.

Wednesday

Rod Liddle

Malcom X’s dark secret

Malcolm X, the black liberationist hero from that wonderful decade, the 1960s, was apparently bi-sexual – a fact never mentioned to the kiddies during Black History Month, according to the campaigner Peter Tatchell. This is because, in general, blacks are much more homophobic than whites (although the excellent Tatchell does not put it quite as bluntly as this) and the guardians of black liberationist history are therefore disinclined to labour the point. Mr Tatchell spends a considerable amount of energy pointing out the vicious homophobia and misogyny in Muslim culture and rap, hip hop and ragga music, a fact which does not always endear the man to his companions on the radical left. But Tatchell is nothing if not principled.

Tuesday

Rod Liddle

Labour’s stance on the BNP is morally and intellectually wrong

It’s not just death and taxes you can depend upon – you can also be absolutely certain that the Labour Party will, at every opportunity, take precisely the wrong decision about the BNP. You may have seen Fraser’s blog about Labour MPs voting not to allow democratically elected BNP MEPs into the House of Commons. It is a convention that our European Union representatives are allowed the use of Westminster facilities, but not one which Labour will extend to the BNP for the simple reason that they do not like them. One of the first members to sign up was Andrew Dismore, MP for Hendon, who has a long and noble record of trying to ban people with whom he disagrees.

Monday

Rod Liddle

The advent of Guru Nanak is the next stop on the multicultural calendar

How will you be celebrating the birth of Guru Nanak this year? I thought we might get together for a party, bring a bottle, play a few games. The founder of the Sikh religion’s birthday is celebrated in November, although he was actually born in April: that’s just one of the mystifying things about religion, I suppose. Nanak seems a decent old cove; he once had a devotee pricked by a rose bush when he had spent too much time visiting prostitutes and explained to the miscreant that really the appropriate punishment would have been a stake through the heart, but he was a merciful mofo so he let him off with the rose bush thing. The children of Waltham Forest (the council borough, I mean.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

30 years of Viz

I have actually cried with laughter six times in my life. Once, when I was 14, watching the famous “Germans” episode of Fawlty Towers; a few years later at the Ku Klux Klan scene from Blazing Saddles. More recently I shed a shaky tear when the politician Ron Davies explained to police that he’d been “watching badgers” in a copse near the M4, and at around about the same time I saw Brass Eye’s fabulously offensive paedophilia special. Twice, though, I have been reduced to tears by the Geordie “adult” comic Viz.

Rod Liddle

The fact that Jacqui Smith got off scot-free says it all

Rod Liddle is appalled that, after knowingly swindling the taxpayer, the former home secretary faced no punishment at all. It seems unbelievable after all their grandstanding — but MPs really don’t think they have done anything wrong ‘We have got to clean up politics, we have got to consign the old, discredited system to the dustbin of history.’ — Gordon Brown That’s the problem with the dustbins of history these days — you just don’t know how often the collections are. And whether or not you have to separate out the organic matter and put it in a special green dustbin-of-history receptacle. One supposes that the former home secretary Jacqui Smith counts as organic matter, although it’s a close call.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Why have a hissy fit over the BNP?

People are getting themselves worked up into a terrible lather over the BNP’s appearance on BBC Question Time next week. Even in this neck of the woods, Melanie Phillips has criticized the Conservative Party for having selected Baroness Warsi to sit alongside fat Nick on the panel. Her argument, briefly put, is that it would have been better to put up a white working class Tory who has something in common with those people likely to vote BNP, rather than the representative of a community which will probably not do so. Well, sure, up to a point. But it is odd to see Mel captured by this liberal chattering class terror, which has succeeded in building up Nick Griffin’s appearance next week into one of the television events of the year - when it should be no such thing.

Wednesday

Rod Liddle

The scoundrel’s last refuge is to cry “racist”

During the feisty game between Swindon and Millwall on Saturday, there was a bit of a bust up between Swindon’s Kevin Amankwaah and Millwall’s veteran striker, Neil “Bomber” Harris. I cannot recall seeing Harris so infuriated in ten years of watching him play. Afterwards, all became clear. Harris fought a long and well-reported battle against testicular cancer several years ago. He told a local newspaper that Amankwaah had sneered at him because of this, making a reference to the fact he possessed only one testicle. Amankwaah, by way of response, lied – he denied saying any such thing. But something happened at Swindon; maybe Amankwaah’s colleagues rounded on him.

Monday

Rod Liddle

Whatever happened to duty, responsibility, thrift and local solidarity?

I’ve been so tied up with my financial advisers, getting my bid together for the Dartford river crossing (my plan is to prevent people from Essex visiting Kent, because I don’t like them), that I missed this letter from one of the country’s more thoughtful and free thinking Labour MPs, Denis MacShane. It’s been causing a minor stir in blogsville, not least at Aaronovitchwatch. I know that many of you resent Mr MacShane because of his wish for us all to speak German and live in a fascistic European super state led by Tony Blair, but let’s leave that to one side for a moment. His letter, to the Grauniad, was about the problem of violent, feral youths and street crime etc.

Sunday

Rod Liddle

Welcome to the era of British Olympic domination

It is wonderful news that both golf and rugby sevens have been accepted as Olympic sports. It gives us the chance of winning many more medals than if the games were simply a test of brute strength, speed, agility or skill. Now the authorities have accepted that the games should also reward GDP, raw levels of disposable income per head of population and the ability to wear pastel-shaded wool and acrylic leisure-wear without appearing unduly embarrassed. Golf in the Olympics! That should sort out the bloody Africans. Mauritania and Chad aren’t going to be in the running for any of those medals, are they?

Saturday

Rod Liddle

When will the Nobel Peace Prize be awarded to Rod ‘Seacole’ Liddle?

Another year of bitter disappointment - I have once again failed to win the Nobel Prize for Peace. My pitch – that I deserve to win it because I am not George W Bush – had a lot going for it, I thought. But instead the honour went to Barack Obama, whose pitch was identical. Neither of us – Barack or me – have done anything whatsoever to enhance world peace, aside from not being George. I assume they gave it to Barack instead of me because he is black: fair enough, I can see the point of that. Still, I think I came closer than usual in the running – the judges at least accepted my thesis and agreed with it. This has not always been the case.

Rod Liddle

The British electorate prefers its toffs to act with chutzpah

We all know the truth about the wealth and privilege of the future Tory front bench, says Rod Liddle, but it’s better to brazen it out like Boris than try to seem apologetic The Labour party’s cynical attempt to target the opposition as a party of champagne-guzzling toffs, preening and loaded Hooray-Henrys and chinless, mewing, high-born upper-crust monkeys may well work. There are still quite a lot of people in this country who are sufficiently bitter and petty to hold the Tories’ background and upbringing against them and, as it happens, I’m one of them. I suspect there are another couple of million or so of us at large, mostly north of the Watford Gap services.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Dannatt, gimmicks and half-wits

Sir Richard Dannatt’s usefulness to the Conservative Party has just reduced by about ninety per cent as a consequence of his decision to accept an advisory post with the party. Henceforth, all criticisms he makes of the conduct of the war in Afghanistan will be taken with a pinch of salt, because he is now a Tory primarily, rather than an independently-minded soldier who wants only the best for his former comrades. Worse, future criticisms of the government – should there be any – from currently serving military leaders will also lose much of their potency through association: we will not know if they too are about to hop on board the Cameron wagon as well. We might suspect their motives.

Wednesday

Rod Liddle

Generally speaking, British voters haven’t taken to the Waffen SS

I am still not sure quite why the Conservative Party is determined to ally itself in Europe with the Waffen SS and Poland’s vigorous and exciting “No Yids or Queers” party. It has no need to do so. I assume Mr Cameron is at least mildly anti-SS and, while he might not in general like homosexuals or foreigners, has no wish to behave particularly nastily toward them. The Tories are in danger of making themselves look every bit as ridiculous over Europe as they looked in 1996, if for very different reasons. The party’s new allies, the Polish Law and Order Party and the Latvian Freedom and Fatherland Party (that has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?

Monday

Rod Liddle

Cascades of contrition that changed nothing

Scouring the Sunday newspapers for any vestige of sentience, I find none whatsoever - but instead chance upon this whining, chippy, neo-Socialist drivel from Rod Liddle in the Sunday Times blaming the bankers for the economic mess from which, it’s said, we are emerging. (Incidentally, linking to oneself in a blog is narcissism on an inter-planetary scale, isn’t it? Even if you make a joke about it. It’s like masturbating to a signed of photo of oneself. While the wife is out down the shops, obviously.) The central point – that nothing seems to have been learned – holds true, though I reckon. Much as it does about that other scandal which captivated us for a while, the MPs expenses: nothing has changed.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Changing your name to Seacole will eradicate your inner racist<br />

I do hope you can forgive this diversion from the usual subject matter of my blog, but just for today I would like to deal with a personal matter. That is not to say it does not have wider implications – I believe it does; in a very real sense it has implications for all of us. I have decided, after giving the matter much thought, to change my name by deed poll to Rod Seacole-Liddle, in honour of the black nurse who helped out during the Crimean War. As some of you may have noticed I have been using the appellation for some time on these very pages; now I believe the right thing to do is to formalize the arrangement.

Wednesday

Rod Liddle

Of all Brown’s potential successors, only Cruddas fills me with enthusiasm

Who would you like to see succeed Gordon Brown as leader of the Labour Party? Still deluded by the continuation of power and the hopeless yearning that it all might come right next summer, Labour has been strangely united at its conference. Certainly compared to those conferences I well remember in 1979, 1983 and even 1987. The issue scarcely arose. I realize that asking many of you who you would prefer to lead the party, Mandelson, Straw or Harman is akin to asking you to choose between smallpox, diphtheria and bilharzia. But hell, have a heart, indulge me for a few moments. And remember that while Cameron and his ideologically ectoplasmic public school monkeys will win next year, they may not have very long to exercise whatever vague authority it is they possess.

Rod Liddle

Is it more rude to ask if someone’s going whacko than blind?

Rod Liddle says the furore surrounding Andrew Marr’s questions to Gordon Brown is academic. These rumours are rife in the blogosphere Is our Prime Minister perpetually out of his brainbox on powerful psychotropic substances, as everybody now seems to believe? Dilaudid, crystal meth, that sort of thing? Does he stagger out of bed and say: ‘Aw, Sarah, I’ve got a meeting with Harman in half an hour. Light up the crack pipe, will you?’ Looking at the man, you would not think so. That strange, strangulated smile, the ever encroaching brow — this is not the demeanour of a man who, for example, mainlines camel tranquillisers every morning. If he is scoring regularly, then I suggest he changes his dealer, because he’s being ripped off.

Tuesday

Rod Liddle

Debating the BNP

There is a thoughtful blog on these pages from Fraser, about the BNP’s now confirmed appearance on Question Time. I agree with most of it, although not the point that Nick Griffin is a good debater: at best, you might argue that the jury is out on his debating abilities, as he has never before been afforded the opportunity to debate. At worst, we might say that he is too easily thrown by some of the manifest stupidities within the BNP’s manifesto; policies one suspects he might like to jettison but is, for the moment at least, unable to do so. One interesting mode of attack would be to ask him about Islam, an ideology which these days he knows it is politically expedient to attack.