Books by bellicose columnists with the initials R.L. are like buses — none comes along for ages, then two come at once. Having been given the heave ho from my last column some years back, I was looking forward to putting this regularly employed, high-profile Pushmi-pullyu through its paces before filleting it thinly and serving it up sliced seven ways.
The best way to read the Liddle book is as a self-loathing joke, otherwise the sheer level of sumptuous hypocrisy may choke you; this is, after all, a book bewailing modern-day selfishness by the man who left the mother of his children months after their wedding in order to be with his young mistress. He bangs on ceaselessly about what ‘we’ve’ lost, but exactly what golden age he’s yearning for isn’t clear; in the first chapter he writes that his parents didn’t like abroad as it was full of ‘wogs’, although his mother fancied a holiday in Egypt in the 1970s as they were at war with Israel and she didn’t like Jews. What a pair of charmers! Incredibly, he writes a few pages later of their ‘morality… anchored in decency’.
But Liddle’s often right about some things. He loathes Islamists, as do I, and admires Israel, as I do. He believes that Eastern European immigration has been divine for the middle class — all that cheap, biddable labour — and disastrous for the working class. And yet even our agreements made me tut loudly, as these important issues are tackled with the same level of indignation as fast food and limited leg-room on aeroplanes. He’s totally inconsistent; a chapter about women suggests ‘outrageously’ (yawn) that ladies, bless ’em, were happier before feminism because they ‘knew where their place was’.
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