Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.

Wednesday

Rod Liddle

Politicians boasting about the women they’ve slept with is not candour: it’s spin

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 be too sure. Given Mr Clegg’s singularly ectoplasmic tenure as leader of his party it seems to me possible that we may have had some desultory form of intercourse without my even knowing about it. He might have slithered in and then out again, wraith-like, while I was oiling the garden shears in the shed, or reading an interesting book by Will Hutton. The sensible thing to do would be to stop worrying about the whole thing entirely, as it is quite unknowable.

Wednesday

Rod Liddle

I know why the government wants to send homosexuals back to Iran to be hanged

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 is a certain, dwindling, lobby in Great Britain which would argue we could hang them here and then bill Iran for the cost. Surely not many people still cleave to such a view — although we ought to remember that within my lifetime homosexuality was illegal in Great Britain. This point is made frequently by lefties who wish to draw some sort of equivalence between the Muslim world and our own country — see, we persecuted the poofs too.

Tuesday

Rod Liddle

Pity the monks of Tibet who dare to hope that anyone will come to their aid

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 something like ‘a foreign policy with no ethical dimension whatsoever’ or maybe, since about five years ago, ‘a vigorously unethical foreign policy’. In this, I don’t suppose we are very different to most other nations and one should at least be glad that the pretence otherwise has been long dropped.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

The BBC White Season only shows how little Auntie has really changed

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 of whom he has met — have been underserved by the corporation, and especially ‘working-class’ white people. Mind you, it is surely difficult to serve such a hidden and secretive tranche of the population, especially when they live beneath stones and only venture out to get drunk and shout ‘darkie!’ at passers-by. But at least the BBC has tried to understand these awful people and shown them where they are going wrong.

Wednesday

Rod Liddle

Water, Prozac, management consultants: all completely useless

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 for a week or more. Now it may well be not multiple murders after all, but merely fake stuff left for John Nettles to find many years ago, before he forsook the Channel Islands for the scarcely gentler parish of Midsomer. This revelation surprised me less than you might imagine.

Wednesday

Rod Liddle

Boris’s most brilliant wheeze to date was the letter to the Guardian attacking him

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 in the Guardian this week. It purported to be from 100 ‘academics’, luvvies, lesbians and professional agitators, all of them aghast at the notion that the ‘right-wing and reactionary’ Boris might actually win. It was a quite brilliant work of parody — long-winded, witless, sanctimonious and marvellously self-important.

Wednesday

Rod Liddle

The biggest tent of the lot: to stop Blair becoming EU President

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 togetherness since Abba won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1974. From Gdansk in the Baltic to the Straits of Cadiz, the citizens of this fractious and culturally disparate continent are at last united. It is a remarkable achievement, when you think about it. What other politician in living memory would be able to bring together, in fervent opposition, a German Green, a Flemish supporter of Vlaams Beland, an Italian Christian Democrat and a French Socialist?

Saturday

Rod Liddle

The Archbishop is little more than a posh John Prescott in a black dress

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 he has ever said or written. His latest contribution to the national reservoir of stupidity was the business about sharia law, of course. It was both inevitable and indeed desirable that the state would, somehow, devolve to our Muslim communities jurisdiction over certain — largely domestic — disputes, he opined. Cue a justifiable outrage.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

If we don’t bug a conversation between Khan and Ahmed, who do we bug?

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 after Friday prayers are being eavesdropped upon by some spook. There is probably a European Union law about bugging Muslim terrorists, which insists you have to notify them in advance and also provide disabled access ramps if you’re bugging them in a public place.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

I am angrier with the government about the smoking ban than the Iraq war

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 have been on your television news spouting these transparent lies and adding, for good effect, that the battle is not yet entirely won: an estimated nine million people in Britain still smoke and the government intends to sort them out, in the fullness of time.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

In one sentence, Jacqui Smith became the Gerald Ratner of the Home Office

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 into nothing in 1991 when he cheerfully pronounced that his products were ‘crap’. Matt Barrett, the chief executive of Barclays, did a Ratner too, when he told a bunch of MPs that he would not let his daughters anywhere near a Barclaycard and did not use one himself because they were too expensive.

Wednesday

Rod Liddle

In the unlikely event that anyone wants my organs, it should be up to me

Rod Liddle says that the notion of ‘compulsory donations’ is oxymoronic and the pinnacle of the medical profession’s zeal to get its hands on our corpses The question is, I suppose, hypothetical in my case. Or beyond even hypothetical. They are not going to want the liver of someone who opens a bottle of Rioja just as Naughtie announces it’s time for Thought for the Day. I find it impossible to listen to that vapid, platitudinous drivel without some form of sustenance close to hand. When it’s that endlessly emollient Sikh bloke, or Anne Atkins, I make it a large Jack Daniels.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

God’s role in politics is not to underwrite bad ideas

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Hebrews XI 1 Ah yes; things not seen. A little while ago this country had itself a Prime Minister who received rather more guidance from things not seen than any of us had imagined at the time. That thing not seen was, according to Tony Blair, God; apparently these two important figures in world history would fairly regularly commune, chew the fat, put the, er, world to rights. At the time, when he was Prime Minister, Mr Blair kept this a secret: he was plainly embarrassed by the perpetual presence of his divine associate. Since he’s left office, however, Mr Blair has come clean — and I suppose it is now God’s turn to be embarrassed.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

The teddy bear teacher was released from prison too soon

So the mop-headed ingenue teacher Gillian Gibbons has been released from her torment in Sudan without being horsewhipped or banged up for too long. The Scousers — Ms Gibbons is from Liverpool, naturellement — had insufficient time to organise a candlelit vigil for her or a minute’s silence at Anfield, but they did manage to festoon lots of railings with yellow ribbons and bouquets from the local garage. The world, you might think, never changes. The Sudanese government — arguably the worst administration on earth — can now bask in the knowledge that they are deemed by the West to be compassionate and conciliatory.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

No one should be prohibited from questioning our past

Tarnow, Poland (maybe) I’m hungry, stuck here with a tube of flavoured pork fat, a bottle of bison grass vodka and 400 cut-price English cigarettes. This is the sleeper train from Krakow to Bucharest, via Budapest, at the bad, cold hour of midnight — and there’s no dining car. Just pork fat and vodka for dinner — and lunch was a hastily taken affair at the Auschwitz burger bar ’n’ grill, just down from Crematorium No. 1, a fairly joyless place, frankly, and the food not up to much. In the next berth along the commie-era carriage a Brazilian man is hopping up and down in delight because he’s never seen snow before; he’s got enough here to last a lifetime.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

The 28 days debate is a red herring compared to this attack on free speech

Samina Malik may be cretinous, but shouldn’t be criminalised Eeny meeny miny mo Catch a kafir by the toe, If he hollers, chop his head off, And put the video on YouTube. I’d better be quick, because I assume the Old Bill will be around any moment now. The little verse quoted above is my poetry debut for The Spectator and before you point out its many deficiencies of feet, metre, scansion, rhyme — not to mention its strictly limited breadth, semantically speaking — let me assure you it was intended as a pastiche. You shouldn’t take it at face value. With any luck, that will get me off the incitement to racial and religious hatred charges and also the solicitation of murder rap.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

The ‘Foxy Knoxy’ case has stirred a deep prurience about women and murder

It was true in Orwell’s day and it’s no less true now: there is nothing the British public likes more than a good, old-fashioned, grisly murder. Sixty-odd years ago, when Orwell wrote The Decline of the English Murder, the crucial ingredient was some hidden, shameful, sexual misdemeanour - almost always adultery, but sometimes homosexuality. The implication being that back then committing murder, and thus risking a possible death sentence from the courts, was preferable to some sordid secret leaking out. The English murders, the ones the public liked, were those committed in desperation by the deeply ashamed - a consequence, as Orwell saw it, of a hypocritical society. We have changed as a nation.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

Nigel Hastilow’s real crime was to dare to mention Enoch Powell at all

A policeman once told me, over lunch in the House of Commons canteen just off Westminster Hall, that the problem of immigration would be sorted for good and for all, very soon. ‘The chill north wind, from Odin’s Land, will exterminate the scum we have brought to our shores,’ he said, equably enough, and then went and queued up for some pudding behind Michael Meacher. I was left to muse upon his words. I don’t think he meant that the immigrants would all succumb to hypothermia. The invocation of Nordic mythology suggested to me that my lunch companion was a shade to the right of centre, indeed a cross between the Travis Bickle character from Taxi Driver and, oh, I don’t know, maybe Julius Streicher.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

The royal blackmail story is remarkable for the absence of outrage

I suppose there must be someone left in Britain who is surprised or shocked that a minor member of the royal family has alleged homosexual tendencies and is partial to the odd snort of cocaine. Lord Charteris of Amisfield, for example — formerly the Queen’s private secretary — would at least have pretended to be appalled, but he’s been dead for seven long years. Frankly, I suspect most British people would shrug their shoulders with resignation and boredom even if it were reported that a fairly important royal had been photographed mainlining anthrax spores while fellating a pine marten.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

The good news is, we’re all living longer; the bad news is, we’ll be miserable

Notable people who are quite right-wing live a lot longer than notable people who are decidedly left of centre. This discovery of mine is, you might argue, counter-intuitive; you would expect right-wingers to be eaten away with dyspepsia and choler, the blood vessels on their foreheads popping open every time they read of a mosque about to open, or a wildcat strike about to take place. Whereas lefties, traditionally, possess a communal ethos and are tolerant of the many and diverse ways in which our society expresses itself. Not so, however. They die younger. Of cancer.