Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
From our UK edition
Rod Liddle is outraged by the Foreign Secretary’s alleged comparison of himself to Michael Heseltine: like comparing a Big Beast to a stumpy little Muntjac deer. Where have all the political giants gone? Apparently, David Miliband’s speech to the Labour party conference was deliberately low-key because he did not wish to have a ‘Heseltine Moment’
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The party’s MPs are fatally conflicted over Gordon Brown’s leadership, says Rod Liddle. Their craven conduct reflects the awkward fact that they overwhelminglychose him in the first place There was an interesting story in the newspapers this week about an American dog which rang 911, the emergency services, when his owner had a seizure. The
From our UK edition
Isn’t it about time Muslim terrorists rethought their strategy of recording glorious martyrdom videos, in advance of failing to blow anything up? Wouldn’t it be a bit less embarrassing for all concerned? Time after time we see these imbeciles on our television news promising all sorts of mayhem and misery, the righteous and cleansing fires
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Rod Liddle says that the appointment of an inexperienced, gun-toting formerbeauty queen as his running mate may well be John McCain’s undoing Ah, just when you pro-Republican monkeys were beginning to think that John McCain was looking a pretty good bet, he goes and chooses a backwoods polar-bear-strangling Britney Spears manqué as a running mate
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Hello, hello, he’s back again. Although not necessarily — as the words of his 1972 hit had it — ‘on the right track’. Nobody, these past few weeks, has accused Gary Glitter of being on the right track. The lady in my local post office wants him strung up by his gonads and, from the
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Rod Liddle says that the stunningly tasteless announcement of Jade Goody’s cervical cancer on Indian Big Brother marks a new low. But that won’t stop TV bosses saying it is a public service Here’s a notable first for television — a contestant on a Big Brother programme was told, in front of a television audience,
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The case of Ben Collett, the footballer awarded £4.5 million for a tackle that ended his career, bodes ill for the game, says Rod Liddle. Blame the zeitgeist, not the judge If you went rock-climbing in the Andes and, halfway up a vertical cliff face, the surface beneath your feet crumbled away and you slipped
From our UK edition
The measures on ‘gas-guzzling’ cars, policing of wheelie bins and surcharges on plastic bags are based on scientific fads and, often, the government’s greed for taxpayers’ money, says Rod Liddle. The Third World won’t pay the price, and nor will big business — but we will For one weekend each year every beach in this
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It doesn’t matter who’s in charge, says Rod Liddle. Once elected, a localcouncil automatically becomes self-important and incompetent A charity called Help for Heroes, which raises money for wounded British soldiers, asked Portsmouth City Council for a £500 donation towards a proposed ‘fun day’. The council declined the request, saying that to have given money
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An apology to all readers: a couple of weeks ago, in a public-spirited sort of way, I offered advice as to how to go about getting stabbed. Although I hope you will accept that I was well intentioned, the article was clearly deficient and even offensive in two important respects. First, I neglected to explain
From our UK edition
Rod Liddle is impressed by David Cameron’s speech in Glasgow and the Tory leader’s call for greater personal responsibility. Antisocial behaviour needs to be stigmatised, not treated as an illness to be cured Good for David Cameron. There was a grotesquely fat woman in front of me in the checkout queue at Sainsbury’s this week,
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Been stabbed yet? Give it time. The latest weapon of choice for our go-getting and imaginative young people, apparently, is the ‘cat skinner’, a thin and very sharp device properly used for removing the plastic jackets from electrical cables. But also for skinning cats, I assume. And — increasingly — stabbing, or more likely slashing,
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Rod Liddle looks back at the case of the British Council employee who dared to speak the truth about Islamic ideology — and notes that what was heretical in 2004 is now almost orthodox A madman has been bombarding Fleet Street journalists with extremely long emails, asking for redress, for a hearing. He feels traduced.
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Rod Liddle on the case of Bushra Noah, the headscarf-wearing Muslim who has just won £4,000 from the Wedge hair salon I used to dye my hair — Midnight Auburn, from Clairol. Yes, because I’m worth it. I did it myself, once every three or four months or so, always ruining several perfectly good towels
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A few years ago I had to take my pet rat, Heydrich, to the vet’s after my youngest son threw him head first at the bedroom wall. After that, Heydrich walked oddly and began acting in an unpredictable manner, certainly not in a fit state to, say, quell unrest in Czechoslovakia. The vet prescribed a
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A week or so back, my two-year-old daughter said to me, apropos of nothing: ‘You have been sad since you lost Jesus.’ I didn’t really know what to do, so I looked at her open-mouthed for a bit and then fixed myself a stiff drink. Best not to get involved, I reckon. Later — again,
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I watched the entirety of this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, camped out on the sofa with acute sinusitis, dosed up on antibiotics and Sudafed. Every so often some hirsute Balkan hag would appear before me, gyrating and caterwauling as if her life depended upon it, and my ears would begin to bleed. I have never
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Rod Liddle says the Commons vote securing the 24-week limit is no more than a craven politician’s fudge, designed to postpone the day when the law of the land finally catches up with the indisputable findings of science An awful lot of people we know are being laid off at the moment, or finding their
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I had hoped to bring you a little more fine detail about Cherie Blair’s menstrual cycle this week — I had provisional charts mapped out and so on. But at the last moment I came over a little queasy. Obviously all of us need to know precisely when she is ovulating, in case we should
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In the dark early hours of 12 November 1970 a tropical cyclone swung in from the Indian Ocean and made its way, to devastating effect, up the course of the world’s largest delta — the confluence of two huge river courses, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra — in what was then East Pakistan. The delta