Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
From our UK edition
So, that’s it for petting farms, then. In today’s Daily Mail it is reported that some of the parents of the kids who became ill having contracted E.coli from (presumably) Godstone petting farm intend to sue for negligence. Whether they win or lose – and you have no idea how much I hope they lose
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I remember being required to attend a meeting a decade or so back at the BBC, a meeting of “The News and Current Affairs Cigarette Working Party” (NCACWP). I asked in advance if cigarettes were provided or should we bring our own, but the organizers of the thing – Human Resources, natch – weren’t amused.
From our UK edition
Rod Liddle says that celebrity adoption has become an unsavoury game of Top Trumps, and that the Ukraine would be right to turn down Elton John’s bid for a baby The world may indeed be shrinking and its people becoming an undifferentiated morass, but east of the Oder-Neisse line they are not quite the same
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Much though I like and respect the chap, isn’t Jonathan Freedland slightly overstating the case? The headline to his Guardian article read: “If Obama can’t defeat the Republican headbangers our planet is doomed.” Later in the piece, Jonny admitted that some might see this assertion as “hyperbolic” or “deranged”. Maybe. My definition of it is
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Fucking Jews! A Foreign and Commonwealth civil servant has appeared before Westminster magistrates accused of inciting racial and religious hatred. Rowan Laxton, who reportedly earns £70,000 per year at the FCO, was allegedly heard to shout “fucking Israelis………..fucking Jews” in a gym while watching a Sky news report of Israeli military action in Gaza. Confronted
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The headlines in this morning’s newspapers, and indeed on the BBC last night, were: “Israel found guilty of war-crimes”. This followed the publication of Richard Goldstone’s 600-page report which, forgive me, I haven’t read yet. I wonder, though, if those reporting the findings are not guilty of a little unconscious racism. Goldstone found both Israel
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So, spite, then: is there anybody in Britain with a more exalted opinion of themselves than George Monbiot? His entire column in today’s Guardian deals exclusively with the one subject which has obsessed the man for many years, and bored the rest of us: himself. In particular, he is outraged that the scientist Ian Plimer
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I’ve become obsessed with a woman. I think she is going to crop up in this blog quite often because I can’t get her out of my mind. She is the last thing I think about before I sleep at night. I wake with her name on my lips. I feel shivery and bereft when
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I’ve always rather liked the idea of blogging, as it seems – from the available evidence – to be motivated by two qualities I have a lot of time for: narcissism and spite. So I hope that this new blog of mine comes, in time, to be the very apogee and spitefulness and narcissism, on
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I haven’t seen much of my wife this week — she’s been camped out on the sofa, filling her boots with 9/11 porn. She loves it, can’t get enough of it, gagging for it. Sits there with a glass of pinot noir, shaking her head, knees tucked up into her chest. People falling from the
From our UK edition
Rod Liddle reflects on a recent poll which says that Russians are the world’s worst holidaymakers. Brits are just as bad, he says, leaving a trail of blood and vomit from Biarritz to Dolman Who are the worst people in the world, do you suppose, based upon your first-person contact with them? I always assumed
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Rod Liddle says the al-Megrahi affair has shown no one in a good light. American outrage is astonishingly hypocritical given their support of the IRA, and our own government is worryingly supplicant to Gaddafi’s truly evil regime What exactly was the point of the letter from our Prime Minister to the Brotherly Leader and Guide
From our UK edition
Rod Liddle takes issue with Wilbur’s grieving owners who want a change in the law to impose restrictions upon creatures such as snakes. What we really need is a new citizen’s right to defend ourselves against the feline menace It’s been a grim summer for news, all things considered, what with Afghanistan and flying pig
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Labour’s deputy leader is tipped to succeed Gordon Brown, says Rod Liddle. But her vacuous feminism, her reflex loathing of men, her lack of interest in real statistics and her worrying links with trade unions would spell disaster for the party So — Harriet Harman, then. Would you? I mean after a few beers obviously,
From our UK edition
Not so long ago, the National Consumer Council decided that some shops on railway stations were selling chocolate bars too cheaply and that the public should, for its own protection, pay more for them. This occurred at about the same time as the RSPB mulled over the possibility that it might start shooting or gassing
From our UK edition
Rod Liddle says that the Equality and Human Rights Commission has been well led by Trevor Phillips — all the more reason to play straight with figures about the treatment of immigrant applicants for housing There was a report out recently which said that men who marry much younger women tend to live rather longer
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I wonder what Stephen Fry would write on Twitter shortly after he’d been hit very hard on the top of the head with a large spanner? Most likely nothing: the dead don’t Twitter — they probably use Facebook instead. But what if the blow didn’t quite kill? Give him a couple of hours and he’d
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There is a danger in writing columns that you destroy everything. You begin by gleefully attacking your enemies, then you begin to attack your friends. You end up attacking yourself, like one of those nematode worms which, in a witless sexual frenzy, stabs itself to death with its own penis. This is the fate that
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Rod Liddle says that metropolitan liberal ideology is too deeply ingrained in local councils, social services and the judiciary to be overturned by one panic measure driven by Labour’s sudden fear of the BNP The government’s new and exciting ‘No Homes for Darkies!’ policy, announced earlier this week, has, for those of you on the
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Rod Liddle says that the French President may be right about Islam’s ideological content but that his proposal is shockingly illiberal and wrong-headed I’ve been in the Middle East for the last three or four days — just trying to help out, you know, anything one can do — and staying in a hotel which