Rod Liddle

There was a kind of peak BBC Radio 4 moment last week when the network put on a play called Bess Loves Porgy. As you might have guessed, this was a rewrite of Porgy and Bess, the twist being that Porgy was a black, disabled grime rap artist in south London. I hope it went down well with the millions of black, disabled grime rap artists in south London who are listeners to Radio 4. The network was, in the same week, continuing its serialisation of Georges – ‘Testament’s bold new adaptation of Alexander Dumas’ tale of racial intolerance’. They are absolutely obsessed with racism at R4, in a kind of mentally unhinged manner. I thought about these two plays while the ludicrous Garygate saga was playing out in the national media – and it made me tetchy and irritable.

A little late in the day, perhaps, it has been pointed out to the intellectual colossi of South Tyneside Council that the Vikings may have been a bit right-of-centre and therefore ripe for a spot of cancelling. There is a statue, you see, of a couple of these marauding Norsemen outside a shopping centre in Jarrow. They are fat, hairy and possessed of aggressive facial expressions. Check out the queue at the nearby Greggs and it is as if that statue had somehow come to life, or a sort of life. The apple hasn’t fallen very far from the tree on Tyneside.

Once upon a time, a fox with a large bushy tail and a disingenuous smile changed his name from Reynard to ‘Chicken Little’ and applied for a post in a local hen coop. During the interview for the position, which was conducted by members of the Scottish National party, he wore red plastic wattles, which he had won in a Christmas cracker, sellotaped to his chin – although he needn’t have done so. Simply to identify as a chicken was more than enough for the thick-as-mince panel members.

I did not enjoy the Christmas festivities this year: I sang no carols, ate no turkey and failed to watch It’s a Wonderful Life. There were two reasons. First, I received my DNA heritage results from a company I’d bunged £100 or so back in the autumn. My family had been greatly looking forward to this event, hoping for a revelation that I was part Igbo or Hausa or, better still, related somehow to the unfriendly pygmies of the western mountains in Papua New Guinea. Meanwhile I was hoping to be 90 per cent English with the remaining 10 per cent Danish, as I have often considered myself to be distantly related to the Viking hero Ragnar Lodbrok, which may account for my political disposition.

Two very brief excerpts from Radio 4 last week. First, my wife turned on her radio in time to hear an actor in the afternoon play utter the words: ‘But Bob, you’ve been helping young disadvantaged black kids all your life!’ At which point, she turned off. Two days later I switched on my car radio and the display announced a ‘radical updating of Oliver Twist’ and I had just enough time to hear an actor say something like: ‘Quick, come quick! Babatunde has been shot in de leg by de gangs!’ before I too turned off. They are nothing if not psychotically obsessive at Radio 4, I think. It is worth tuning in for three seconds every few hours at random just to see what gratuitous wokery they are spraying in our direction – before switching over to something else, anything else.

I was impressed with the passion Sir Keir Starmer managed to whip up within himself when presenting Gordon Brown’s interminable plans for constitutional reform to the British people. He almost sounded engaged with the project. Apparently Gordon has been beavering away, working by the light of a low-wattage electric candle, at this stuff for a couple of years – but frankly, all anyone took from it is that Labour plans to abolish the House of Lords and devolve lots of powers to ‘the regions’. Remarkable, isn’t it?

One by one, life’s harmless little pleasures are outlawed by an overweening, repressive government. The Online Safety Bill has been doctored by MPs to stop people making use of ‘deep fakes’. This means that my enjoyable pursuit of Photoshopping the heads of politicians I dislike onto the naked, writhing bodies of Russian porn stars and sending the resultant images, anonymously, on Christmas cards to members of the local clergy is now illegal. In future I will have to get the consent of each politician before I send them off to the vicar. I had a great one recently of Liz Truss going at it like the clappers with Mark Drakeford, the First Minister for Wales.

You have to admire their bravery, don’t you? The stoicism with which they put up a fight in the name of principle and decency. The England football manager, Gareth Southgate, and his similarly equine captain, Harry Kane, had pledged that the latter would wear, throughout England’s World Cup campaign, a rainbow ‘One Love’ armband to show the team’s support for the LGBTQI community, despite objections from football’s governing body, Fifa. Nothing could stop them from displaying to the world their deep discomfort at the fact that the World Cup was being played in a place where homosexuality was illegal.

As someone who has always had a grotesquely inflated sense of his own importance, my experience speaking at Durham University again last week almost tipped me into fully blown, delusional megalomania. On the way to the venue a student informed me that in the big hall nearby several hundred people were crammed into a debate about whether Rod Liddle should be allowed to speak at Durham. Yes, only a matter of yards from another building where Rod Liddle was actually speaking.

An advert for jobs in the prison service has fallen foul of the Advertising Standards Authority because it portrays an ‘imbalanced power dynamic’. The poster showed a white prison guard (or ‘screw’ as I believe they are known) and a black prisoner. The ASA concluded that the advert was ‘likely to cause serious offence on the grounds of race, by reinforcing negative stereotypes about black men’. It would have been OK if the prisoner had been white. I am not sure what the views of the ASA would have been if both men had been black. The fact that both of the people in the ad were men also negatively reinforces a stereotype – that men tend to commit the most crime.