Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
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
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,
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
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
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
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
Josef Fritzl’s unspeakable crimes against his daughter not only sicken us, says Rod Liddle. They sharpen our confusion about day-to-day parenting in the modern world You may, by now, be losing track of Austrian nutters who lock women in basements. The latest is Josef Fritzl, who kept his daughter Elisabeth imprisoned in a dungeon for
If you take that excellent map showing negative equity ‘hot-spots’ produced by George Bridges for The Spectator a couple of weeks back, and overlay it across a map of cancer ‘hot-spots’ for the UK, you will find that those baleful dark areas, the bad places on each map, tally almost exactly. You might have expected
As nationalities proliferate, the English want their turn, says Rod Liddle — who considers himself British first. St George’s Day and ‘Englishness’ have been partially decontaminated, but we are no closer to a definition of what ‘England’ is — and quite right too Miklosvar, Transylvania It is very easy for the majority Hungarian population in
Another terrible night spent tossing and turning, racked with worry over whether or not I have ever had sex with Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democratic party. It is not something I remember doing and on the face of it, both of us being heterosexual, it seems highly unlikely. But one can never
Gays are law-abiding, better-educated than the norm, economically productive and tend to be less of a drain on the state, says Rod Liddle. They don’t stand a chance in this country Should we afford Iranian homosexuals political asylum in this country, or send them back to be hanged in their home country? I suppose there
I can’t remember what sort of foreign policy we have right now. When New Labour was elected we were told it would be an ‘ethical foreign policy’. A year or so later, Robin Cook altered this to a ‘foreign policy with an ethical dimension’, which is a rather different thing. I assume it is now
I hope you are enjoying ‘White Season’ on the BBC — a brave and groundbreaking attempt by the corporation to devote 0.003 per cent of its airtime to issues which bother 92 per cent of its licence payers. One of the senior commissioning monkeys at the BBC, Richard Klein, admitted that white people — some
According to one serious front-page newspaper report, all those bones found on the site of that former children’s home in Jersey were actually left-over props from an edition of Bergerac. The whole place is taped off, they’ve had the floppy-eared sniffer dogs in and the supposedly grisly, horrible revelations have been leading our news programmes
Rod Liddle salutes the genius of the Tory mayoral candidate in sending a spoof petition condemning himself and praising Livingstone to the skies to the Left’s in-house newspaper The battle to become Mayor of London is getting dirty. Someone from Boris Johnson’s campaign team — or maybe Boris himself — put a hilarious spoof letter
Rod Liddle says that the former Prime Minister has pulled off an astonishing feat: uniting Left and Right, Europhiles and Eurosceptics, people of all nations and creeds, online and in print, in their glorious campaign to prevent him becoming President of Europe This is shaping up to be the greatest expression of European unanimity and
Rod Liddle is infuriated by a church leader who refuses to confront the inhumanity perpetrated in the name of Islam or the consequences — visible in Malaysia — of legal apartheid I assume it is simply Dr Rowan Williams’s impressive beard which has persuaded everybody that he is an ‘intellectual’; certainly, it cannot be anything
Should members of Britain’s beleaguered and persecuted bombing community be subjected to intrusive surveillance techniques such as bugging? It seems a bit illiberal, given their very real difficulties in day-to-day life. Hard enough trying to find a safe place to hide all that fertiliser, castor beans, etc., without having to worry if your whispered conversations
This week we have been bombarded with statistics about how the smoking ban, introduced exactly six months ago, has not remotely damaged the pub trade, but has resulted in millions upon millions of people giving up smoking — so that cancer is now a thing of the past. The shovel-faced government minister Dawn Primarolo will
There is a term for what Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, did at the weekend. She announced that she would not feel safe walking the streets of London alone after dark. This, I believe, is called ‘doing a Ratner’. If you remember, Gerald Ratner was the boss of the eponymous down-market jewellery company which dissolved