Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
From our UK edition
Hold the front page: I’ve found a very good contemporary novel to occupy my time. Such things have become vanishingly rare, even if one is grateful for David Mitchell’s metafiction, the occasional blast from Michel Houllebecq and Ben Marcus’s engaging lunacy. By and large, modern novels lack depth, originality of form and language, political unorthodoxy
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Yes, of course, one sometimes yearns for the old days. The friend who, appearing in court on a charge of racial hatred for having shouted ‘Pikeys!’ at some Gillingham fans, was able to produce a shirt bought in the Gillingham club shop which bore the slogan ‘Pure Pikey’. Case dismissed. And then the case that
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It was to King Charles’s great credit that he refused to fall for the Trump power handshake thing and instead retracted his own hand so that the orange psychotic was left, for a nanosecond, flailing and unsure of what to do with his right arm. It is always good to call the bluff of a
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I think the best and most succinct description of the Green party was Tim Stanley’s ‘Stalin with a nose ring’. It gives a nod to the witless middle-class skankery of the party’s members and supporters but posits that there might be, underneath, a darker undercurrent. In these pages, meanwhile, Andrew Gilligan has documented many of
It is a truism that in a democracy the voters get the government they deserve – and so we should probably not complain too much if our next prime minister is a snaggle-toothed halfwit who presents to voters an infantile diorama drawn from fairy tales in which dancing is more important than manufacturing, people can
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I was sorry to see Arsenal lose the ‘Game of the Season’ to Manchester City and thought them a little unlucky. Ok, ‘sorry’ is perhaps stretching it. I don’t care very much. But I would rather Arsenal win the league than those Mancs. Still, Arsenal’s fans deserve what they get for having booed their side at the end of
It was a matter of some disappointment to me that Kanye West was barred entry to this country as a person not conducive to the public good. Millions of people have arrived here in the past 20 years and, unlike Kanye, have no intention of leaving. I am not sure what proportion of them are
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Hadiza Atunse, a 25-year-old PA, smashed her Toyota Auris into a Mini Cooper, spun out of control and flipped into a hedgerow in Wilmslow, near Manchester. When the coppers turned up, she declined to partake in a breathalyser and the police, mysteriously, did not give her a tongue swab to determine drug use. I say
Grade: C– Kanye? No, I can’t, quite. I will always quietly overlook the idiotic political sensibilities of the conformist millennial legions who comprise our pop charts – the keffiyeh-clad Hamas wannabes, the BLM halfwits, the greenies, the men-can-be-women wankpuffins – in order to let their music be judged on its own merits, free from boomer
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It reminded me a little of that wonderful Christmas Day truce in the first world war, when the two sides briefly came together, put aside their homicidal enmities and played a game of football and sang carols. The venue was the Riverside Stadium in Middlesbrough, fittingly on Good Friday. Boro, then second in the Championship,
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I am not convinced that the BBC did very much wrong regarding Scott Mills. No matter how boring the BBC’s seemingly endless retinue of mediocre gay exhibitionists, a man is surely innocent until proven guilty. It may even be that the Corporation treated the bloke unfairly by sacking him, unless they know something that we
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My friend Will Clouston, the leader of the Social Democratic Party, dropped round with his wife for a bite to eat this week and showed me an ancient book he had picked up in a second-hand store in Hexham. It was titled Select Fables, with cuts designed by Thomas and John Bewick, and it dates
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I wasn’t wildly impressed with Channel Five’s dramatisation of the fall of Huw Edwards. But it should at least remind people that it was good old-fashioned tabloid journalism in the public interest by the Sun – and especially the now North America editor Scarlet Howes – that uncovered exactly what the newsreader had been up
‘Listen to what the man on the left of the camera has to say about Israel, the man who is addressed as Nick,’ a radical Corbynista friend suggested to me the other day in a social media message designed to change my mind about the Middle East. It’s part of a sustained campaign on his
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Here’s a mark of our times. A dietician who apparently ‘bluffed’ her way into a top NHS job has been sacked for knowing less about the body and medicine in general than a reasonably well-trained spaniel. The woman claimed great experience in working with nutrition based diseases and even cancer – but colleagues soon discovered
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Live long enough and all your cherished memories of childhood will end up besmirched somehow. For many of us Boomers the 1970s are now nothing but a long, brownish and noisome stain. We might have expected Gary Glitter would be outed as a nonce and ditto the unequivocally foul Jimmy Savile. But come on, who
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An addendum to my piece in the mag this week, partly for clarification and partly to reinforce the point, for idiots, that Reform’s retreat isn’t something I wish for, simply what I have observed happening. The main point being that the voting public has shifted because it perceives various battles have been won, because that’s
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Murton is a rather frowsy former pit village in County Durham, about half a dozen miles down the A19 from Sunderland. Chip shops, tanning salons, elderly people with no teeth on mobility scooters, huge cannabis farm in the disused old Co-op store which has just been busted by the Old Bill. It almost became a
Grade: B In which the foppish Davy Jones figure from the manufactured band One Direction (Zayn Malik being Peter Tork; One Direction didn’t have a Mike Nesmith) sheds the soft-rock pop-lite that has served him so well and goes with what he fondly believes is challengingly funky EDM, a genre which I do not believe
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Derrida et al were right. The written English language (langue) can be vague and elliptical and the intended meaning not always assured. The syntax suggests to me that this will be someone who oversees anti-Muslim hostility Back in about 1980, when I was working as a reporter for the South Wales Echo, the paper’s cartoonist, Gren,
