Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
If any other country in the Middle East had behaved as monstrously as Israel has in recent weeks, the jets would be lined up on our runways ready to do a bit of performative bombing. Never mind BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) and diplomatic pressure. I mention this because those of us who support Israel,
The grotesque halfwit who tried to have me prosecuted for ‘incitement’ was on Newsnight on Wednesday night, spouting the usual gibberish. This is Labour’s Bella Sankey, who runs Brighton council, although her presence on the BBC was more a consequence of her past directorship of Detention Action, an organisation that appears to campaign against everything
Grade: B+ There’s quite a lot to dislike about Wet Leg, even aside from their stupid name. The entirety of their lyrical canon, for starters – vapid and petulant millennial inanities, 50 per cent performative braggadocio, 50 per cent adolescent carping. Or there’s the commodification of their sexualities: they’ve traded up to being bi, just
If I had been given the vote at the age of 16, I would have put my cross beside the name of the Communist party candidate, assuming that he was not a tankie. If he was, I would have had to think long and hard; a left-wing Labour candidate might well have been preferable. I
I suppose this magazine is probably not the best forum to launch a movement to sweep away the British middle class, much along the lines of Pol Pot’s adventure in Kampuchea in the late 1970s, but one can only play with the cards one has been dealt. The more one reads the newspapers, the more
Chauve souris de la lune There is an intense and consuming stupidity within almost everything George Monbiot writes, the lumpen prose devoid of both doubt and humour. Doubt and humour are blood brothers, of course – and enemies of the kind of bovine certitude which Monbiot peddles, a cacophony of privately educated green tinged nepo leftism
Did you take part in any of the mysterious commemorations last weekend? The newspapers were full of it – something called 7/7, apparently. I read a long report on the BBC’s website about this tragedy but remained entirely unclear as to who killed the people on those trains and bus. The report said ‘bombs were
A small yield nuclear weapon, such as the American W89, dropped on Glastonbury in late June would immediately remove from our country almost everybody who is hugely annoying. You would see a marked reduction in the keffiyeh klan, for a start, and all those middle-class Extinction Rebellion protestors would find, in a nanosecond, that their
I think I have just located Peak Guardian. It can be found on page 57 of the newspaper’s latest Saturday magazine, ‘Saturday’. And it rests under the headline: ‘Should we give babies the right to vote?’ In the piece, a woman called Laura Spinney advances the case for ‘ageless voting’. She accepts that a common
It is heartening to see the lefties out marching in defence of mullahs and their enlightened rule of Iran. The Stop the War Coalition has been organising protests the length and breadth of the country, demanding ‘Hands off Iran’. It is harder for the marchers to identify specifically with their cause than it is when
It’s surely time we dropped our cynicism and got behind the government’s National Abortion Drive, another noble attempt to kickstart our floundering economy. The United Kingdom has made great strides of late in this area, recently overtaking France in the number of abortions performed annually, the figures showing the largest increase since this sort of
I don’t monitor this stuff all the time. It would be soul destroying. All that happens is that I tune in, often by accident, and there is something which once again betrays the long term, institutional, anti-Israel bias of the BBC. So, Friday night’s television news and the Middle East Correspondent Lucy Williamson. Reporting on
I recently did an online quiz to name the 100 biggest selling pop and rock acts in the USA. The Beatles came top – the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Queen and so on, along with the homegrown stuff: Elvis, the Eagles and Chicago. Noticeable by their complete absence were the Beach Boys. In the late
In the autumn of 1940, British cities were being bombed every night by large aeroplanes whose provenance was apparently of some considerable doubt. While the public almost unanimously believed the conflagrations to have been caused by the Luftwaffe, the authorities – right up to the government – refused to speculate. Indeed, when certain members of
“England, the lions of Autumn are but lambs come the Spring”. That quote is often attributed to Michel Platini, but I remember hearing it still earlier from the wily manager of Yugoslavia, Miljan Miljanic. Either way, it’s always been true. I don’t think I have ever seen a worse performance from an England team than
You may have noticed that for some while the BBC News people have stopped referring to Reform UK as ‘far right’ or ‘hard right’. That’s not because Nigel Farage has tacked to the left a little on such policies as nationalisation; one characteristic of the left is that if they consider you ‘far right’, they
Please consider this a sort of public service announcement. I mention it because sadly, you may have been unaware of what a special month this is at the supermarket Aldi. You still have time to buy a ‘Kevin the Carrot’ toy from Aldi for £3.99. Kevin is on sale all year round, of course – but
Grade: A+ The kids with their synths and hip producers, dragging the 1980s back: I wish they would stop. It was, in the main, an awful decade for music, the bands trite yet portentous, the stupid burbling bass guitars, hubris-stricken vocals and tinny drums. The kids retread all the dross. Yet if you were actually
It was at about this time, five years ago, that the workers at my (then) local farm shop began wearing plastic bags on their feet, over their trainers. This was because of a report somewhere that said the Covid virus hung about on the ground and then leapt, with great agility and cunning, on to
Let us create a hypothetical situation in which we have a state funded broadcaster in perpetuity. Who would you wish to run this goliath? I know some of you are sullenly answering “Lee Westwood”, but let us move on from the politics of the issue. I thought about this question when listening to Tony Hall
