Rod Liddle

‘Alastair, it’s been absolutely fascinating talking to you. Thank you for your honesty.’ And thus ended Kirsty Young’s interview with Alastair Campbell, broadcast to the nation on BBC Radio 4 on Monday. This was part of the series Young Again, in which Kirsty interviews left-of-centre people, agrees with them and makes them feel better about themselves. Reform’s obvious problem is that it cannot appeal simultaneously to its divided voter base It is difficult to know how she could have been more fawning in this particular episode, short of performing what the Daily Telegraph used to refer to as ‘an obscene act’ on the psychotic former spin doctor. Later, Campbell tweeted his agreement with the analysis that Young was a ‘brilliant’ interviewer.

Then there’s the other candidate, or ex-candidate, for the Rochdale by-election, the one nobody is talking about. The Green party hopeful, Guy Otten, had his party’s support withdrawn last week and he decided to pull out over tweets he had written, some of them up to ten years ago. The one which really narked his Green colleagues, apparently, was this: ‘The Quran is full of war, slaughter, rape and pillage, with genocide and slavery as well. It’s not fit for the 21st century.’ Hmm. How to put this? I have to say, as a description of the gorier bits of the Quran it’s not terribly wide of the mark, is it?

Iwas intrigued to learn from our Defence Secretary, Grant Shapps, that we are now in a ‘pre-war’ phase and that there is an almost inevitability of eventual conflict with one or two of the world’s superpowers. I read his comments on the same day that the German newspaper Das Bild reported that Russia was planning to invade western Europe within 18 months. This is all very worrying, not least because Grant Shapps is our Defence Secretary. I don’t think I’d trust Grant to provide military back-up for a whelk stall, but then I suspect that his likely successor, John Healey, will be no more effective. The problem both men have is the problem which afflicts the West – we are incapable of being properly aggressive and can only really manage passive aggression.

Has Ed Davey resigned yet? Being a man of great decency and honour, I assume he has, leaving the party to be led by Velma from Scooby-Doo. If he hasn’t yet resigned – and from his statements at time of writing it doesn’t look as if he has that intention – then I hope he is hounded on every step of the electoral trail this year by furious postmasters and mistresses. May they ambush every photo op, like a tribe of incandescent hobbits. Yes, there were at least ten other government ministers, from all three major parties, who should feel some sense of culpability, but Davey’s tenure as Post Office minister came at a fairly crucial time in the proceedings, between 2010 and 2012.

I have never been one of those late-middle-aged right-wing men who, at night, hunkers down over the computer to pleasure himself while staring at photographs of Vladimir Putin. He doesn’t do it for me – not even that picture of him riding a horse semi-naked through a river with a very resolute expression on his stern Asiatic face. This may put me in a minority among people of my age and gender, for I understand that Vlad has legions of admirers among my peers. It is an admiration which tends to speak its name only after a few drinks have been taken and stems largely from Putin’s commendable detestation of what the West, especially the USA and UK, has become.

There was outrage in some sections of the Labour party today after its leader, Sir Keir Starmer, praised Satan. Writing in the Mephistophelian Clarion, a publication with a high proportion of readers who are lycanthropes, vampires, imps, goblins and daemons, Sir Keir said that the ‘Prince of Darkness’ had sometimes been ‘mis-understood’ by the left. ‘It seems to me only right that Lucifer should be credited with a very real dynamism and get-up-and-go, as well as for taking a diverse, vibrant and non-judgmental approach to the notion of sin.’ Sir Keir’s unexpected stance was defended by party moderates, one of whom commented: ‘There’s nothing wrong with what Keir wrote.

Occasionally I wake up in the morning with the rain pelting on the windows and the sky the colour of a gravestone and I think to myself that maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea if we had a Labour government. Partly this is simply a sense of resignation and inevitability, because we are going to have a Labour government, given that the current administration is loathed by a wearied public and shows every inclination of breathing oxygen onto that loathing so that it develops into a fully fledged visceral inferno of hatred. Partly it is because the likes of Starmer, Reeves and Streeting do not seem, to me, noticeably less likeable or competent than what we have at the moment. Sir Keir, for example, is a man of principle, and I respect that.

There is something therapeutic and healing in watching Professor Chris Whitty give evidence to the independent public inquiry into the Covid pandemic – the sense of calm emanating from the man, his occasionally Panglossian self-satisfaction, his refusal to become anything more than barely ruffled even when his interlocuters gently venture forth the suggestion: ‘Overreaction?’ The impression one gets, or perhaps is supposed to get, is of a very clever, terribly rational man in a world full of thicko scumbags. This lack of debate was exacerbated in the country at large by that curse of our age, political polarisation I watch a little daytime TV at the moment as part of my rest and recuperation programme following that car crash I mentioned a couple of weeks ago.