Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
We are approaching the deadline for the prestigious ‘Most Odious Political Commentator of the Year’ award. Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart’s joint bid is so far out in front of the pack, that the result is surely a foregone conclusion. But this should not deter us from running through some of the other noble contenders.
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Welcome to a special festive episode of The Edition podcast, where we will be taking you through the pages of The Spectator’s Christmas triple issue. Up first: our review of the year – and what a year it has been. At the start of 2024, the outcome of the US election looked very different, the UK had a
I suppose it is a mild surprise that Fifa didn’t choose Yemen to host the 2034 World Cup, as the bosses of that awful organisation seem determined to make football do a tour of the world’s most primitive and dangerous hellholes. Instead, it’s Saudi Arabia. Of course it is. Over the last ten years the
Please excuse the tone of jubilation, but I have been dancing around my kitchen for the past couple of days, in a state well beyond elation, at the removal from power of Bashar al-Assad’s murderous regime in Syria and its successors who, I am convinced, are a little like our own Liberal Democrats, except with
The evangelical preacher Stephen Green has had his conviction upheld – for standing quite near an abortion clinic in Ealing with a Bible verse in his hands in protest last February. Remarkably, this act is illegal in the UK today. Green argued that he was not protesting about the women entering the clinic, but against the
The last time I took my wife to watch Millwall play a home game, a gentleman a few rows in front of us took grave exception to the behaviour of an opposing player and identified him, very loudly, as the author of The Critique of Pure Reason – repeatedly and with venom. Having vented his
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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
