Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.

Does anyone think Boris has handled this well?

I don’t know what’s happened to our football hooligans. The modern malaise, I suppose. A gradual descent into ineffectuality. Back in the day, Harry the Dog of Millwall would take an entire away stand by himself and do a few coppers on the way. He would surely turn in his grave looking at today’s lot.

A rabbi stabbed, but no hate crime?

A mystery has occurred. In The Affluent People’s Republic of North London, a rabbi was stabbed on the street multiple times by a knifeman. Rabbi Alter Yaakov Schlesinger was rescued by two builders and a Deliveroo driver and is now in hospital, where hopefully he will recover. Apparently no robbery was attempted. The police, however,

The closing down of debate worries me most

The Eastern Orthodox Church has decided that yoga is incompatible with Christianity. This is an enormous problem for me, as I am a regular practitioner of this interesting meditative calisthenic technique, but also someone who judges the sagacity of a person by the length of his beard and the mournful extravagance of his hat. So

The real problem with Newsnight

The Twitter feed of BBC Newsnight editor Esme Wren (remember, I read this stuff so you don’t have to) is full of plaintive whining that no cabinet minister will agree to appear on her benighted programme. The Twitter feed of her chief presenter, Emily Maitlis, is largely a screed of bile and petulance directed at

We can’t see the wood for the trees

I was relieved to discover, earlier this week, that the Prime Minister’s special adviser, Dominic Cummings, was a symbol of inequality in modern Britain. Relieved because I have been scouring the country for such a symbol for ages and had hitherto not succeeded in finding one. Cummings is just that symbol, according to Robert Peston,

Why does this pro-EU scientist dislike Dominic Cummings so much?

The brilliant, in his own mind, Dr Mike Galsworthy has been one of the louder voices calling for Dominic Cummings to be sacked immediately.  You may remember Dr Mike from the Brexit debate. Affiliated to the Labour party, he set up Scientists For EU, regularly spewing out a screed of tendentious, unscientific, pro-EU bollocks. His

Why couldn’t someone ask Dominic Cummings a decent question?

Is it entirely beyond the wit of our gilded political correspondents to ask a different question to the one asked by the previous interlocutor? One after the other they lined up to ask Dominic Cummings the same question, over and over again. Does Peston think he’s asking it better than Kuenssberg? Does Beth Rigby think

Why schools should stay shut

Has the stock of any politician fallen more sharply, these past three or four years, than that of Shami Chakrabarti? As the leader of Liberty, and an almost weekly performer on the BBC’s Question Time, she was a respected purveyor of leftish sanctimony to the masses, a humourless voice of conscience and, I think, self-regard.

In defence of the lockdown

I realised things were getting back to normal when I threw away a third of a tin of chopped tomatoes last week. Back in March you couldn’t get them for love or money. I still remember the appalled look on a woman customer’s face at our local farm shop, in mid-April, when she was told

Rod Liddle

The politics of book shelves

I pulled a Canadian girl in a nightclub, back when I was in my very early twenties. She seemed very nice, if somewhat quiet. We went back to her place, where I spent an agreeable night. I sneaked out just after dawn while she was still sleeping and, upon looking under the bed for my

We crave certainty over Covid-19. There isn’t any

One of the strangest developments to have occurred during this very strange time is that the Prime Minister’s special adviser, Dominic Cummings, may have attended a meeting of some people. Worse, various politicians are suggesting that he may have actually said something at this meeting. Very senior people are insisting that if Mr Cummings did

Our impatience will end the lockdown

At the farm shop this morning there was a chap panic-buying a large metal and plaster flamingo. It was the last one in stock and he looked very pleased with himself. I wondered if he had a few score more at home, hoarded in the attic. And then his long-suffering wife saying, when he arrived

Would Churchill have worn a face mask?

The problem with face masks is cutting an opening of the right size to accommodate a cigarette, without the hole compromising the safety of the mask itself. A tiresome procedure, especially for someone like me who is not terribly dexterous. I assume that very soon we will all be enjoined to wear face masks everywhere

There’s nothing equal about this virus

Filthy germ-laden townsfolk were out and about on the footpaths near my home on Easter Sunday, dragging with them their awful, mewling children. I got the dog to harass them and occasionally shouted out: ‘These are local paths for local people. Clear off.’ One youngish father — lightly bearded, self-satisfied smirk, probably a sticker on

The corona curtain-twitchers are watching

Welcome, then, to a country in which the police send drones to humiliate people taking a walk and dried pasta has replaced the pound as the national currency. ‘Gimme that pappardelle, mofo.’ ‘Not until you prise it from my cold dead hands, punk.’ A week is a long time in politics, but also a long

How reliable are the coronavirus figures?

The statistics – all of them – have become utterly meaningless, regardless of how dramatically they are presented in our newspapers. We have not been testing with anything like enough numbers to give a true picture of the spread. And so the death rate – not the actual numbers – is also meaningless and ranges