Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
30 min listen
The Football Governance Bill is currently being considered in the House of Lords. It’s designed to establish an independent football regulator. No team in the football pyramid will be allowed to play professionally without the regulator’s permission. Does the Premier League really require these sorts of regulations? Will such a rigid system, and unprecedented powers,
I mentioned a couple of days ago being underwhelmed by Orbital, Samantha Harvey’s Booker Prize-winning novel. But I am a glutton for punishment, and continuing to ignore my long-held practice of never reading Booker winners, I bought last year’s victor – Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch. As I mentioned, this is about a nasty right-wing
Did you sign it, then? And if so, what were your expectations? That Sir Keir Starmer would look at the figures and say – perhaps with a tinge of remorse – ‘Yup, that’s it, I’m bang to rights, we’ll have an election?’. Or were you simply hoping to annoy him? If so, I assume you
I’ve just broken one of my own golden rules – never buy a book that has won the Booker Prize, because it will be crap. So I have only myself to blame. The rule of mine has held reasonably true, with a few exceptions, since the wonderful David Storey won it in 1976 for Saville. The
I think we can all be delighted that, at last, the University of Leicester has taken action to end one of the real problems associated with swimming pools – the presence there of awful white people, swimming about all over the place. Odious, arrogant, pasty-faced white people with their mewling, stupid white children. White people
There was a time we all looked forward to on the BBC Today programme, back in the early years of Tony Blair’s first term as Prime Minister. Late July, early August. Blair had scooted off to San Gimignano, Mandelson was probably on a yacht with an oligarch, even Campbell was away battling his weird inner demons somewhere.
I was thrilled to learn that our government intends to enjoy an ‘open’ relationship with China – one of my favourite countries, as I am sure it is yours. Sir Keir Starmer announced this intention when he bumped into Xi Jinping at the G20 beano in Rio de Janeiro. He also said: ‘We want our
I switched the radio on in my car today and it went straight to the BBC World at One on Radio Four. I thought I’d tuned it to Radio Three but instead of a mellifluous tune I got Sarah Montague. I was on the bit of the A66 in Middlesbrough where it merges with the
You would think that we Europeans might have learned a thing or two about anti-Semitism over the past century or so – and perhaps come to understand pragmatically, if nothing else, that what begins with the vicious persecution of Jews usually moves on to murdering lots of other people, too. But no. Or if we
Grade: D+ Ah, the original Linkin Park, except even more spavined. MC5 came outta Detroit in the mid 1960s and their shrieking blues metal ur-punk was afforded unnecessary respect because of their agitprop politics. Sucking up to the Black Panthers and running a bit foul of the law can do wonders for a slightly below-average
It is very kind of Nigel Farage to offer his services as a kind of intermediary between our government and the new American president. Keir Starmer certainly needs one, because protest though he might, nobody believes the line that Donald Trump is hugely impressed with the Labour government or that JD Vance has a new
I notice that the police are not treating the killings of those children in Southport as a terrorist attack. While the principal suspect has been charged with allegedly producing ricin and allegedly possessing a PDF document called ‘Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants: the al Qaeda training manual’, we have been told that
There are many reasons to remember Quincy Jones, who has died aged 91 in Los Angeles. Let me deal with just one. Jones was responsible for the soundtrack of one of the most remarkable films of the 1960s, In The Heat of The Night, which is still in my all-time top ten of movies. Directed by
It would be consoling to think that the BBC, alone among our supposedly unpartisan TV news providers, is guilty of hopelessly biased coverage of the US presidential election. This would conform to the increasingly popular notion that Auntie is in a place beyond redemption, unique in its iniquities. That notion may be true, but it
I have been trying to interest MPs of all parties in joining my call to persuade Barbados to say ‘thank you’ to Britain for the extra 17 years of life they enjoy as a consequence of their distant ancestors having been forcibly transported, hundreds of years ago, from Africa to the Caribbean. Nobody is quite
I wonder if we should join with the radical campaigning organisation Buy Larger Mansions (BLM) in order to protest about both the verdict in the Chris Kaba case and indeed the racism inherent in the Metropolitan Police? Perhaps we can get Gary Lineker and Alan Shearer to wear some BLM badges on Match of the
Are homosexuals and transgendered people more at risk from natural disasters than the rest of the population? I dare say there is a robust tranche of right-of-centre opinion which holds that they are indeed more at risk and that by and large this is a very good thing. Natural disasters are sometimes called ‘acts of
Grade: B- Given that Carrie and Corin are now in their fifties and one of them has settled down with a nice man, this is perhaps less Riot Grrl than Riot Lladies Who Lunch. You cannot expect fury to sustain itself for 30 years, not least when your band has long since ceased being an
We held a small party to celebrate the news that the UK had seen its largest rise in population in 50 years: a jump of 1 per cent in only 12 months to a respectable total of 68.3 million people. Just crisps and soft drinks, you understand. Nothing wildly extravagant. All patriots feel proud of
Rosie Duffield’s magnificently rancorous resignation of the Labour whip has reduced the number of MPs on the government side who are able accurately to identify what a ‘woman’ is by about 30 per cent. This is, then, a grave loss to Sir Keir Starmer, who could have wheeled Rosie out every time he was asked
