Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
From our UK edition
Game One Turkey 0 Italy 3 The start of the tournament and the first game was overshadowed by the exciting news that Scotland’s players intend to kneel, when they play England next week. They had originally not intended to ‘take a knee’ – thinking it rightly (to judge from their press statements) a pointless and
From our UK edition
Grade: A– Imagine a really disgusting and immoral scientific experiment in which the members of Weather Report, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, King Crimson and Wire were somehow fused together into a giant caterpillar or something. This album is the kind of racket the forlorn creature might make. It sits in that usually arid zone where prog
From our UK edition
This is a difficult issue to raise on the eve of a major football tournament, but as a progressive individual I am deeply disturbed by the England manager Gareth Southgate’s reverence for Sir Winston Churchill. Twice in the past this man who holds English football’s most important position has cited his apparent hero. Once, commenting
From our UK edition
The Big Tech social media giants are having to rethink their policy of censoring anybody who suggests that Covid originated from a lab near Wuhan, rather than through some local chowing down on sweet and sour pangolin testicles. This is because it now seems quite possible, if not probable, that the virus was kindly bestowed
From our UK edition
A terrible thing, to be torn. Last Sunday was International Day to End Obstetric Fistula, a very painful condition affecting the nether regions of women who have just given birth. I very much wished to observe the occasion in some way, but Sunday was also World Turtle Day, which naturally commended itself to me as
From our UK edition
Grade: B– Advancing age has smoothed the edges of Bellshill’s finest lads, once — back in the early 1990s — arguably Britain’s best band. This is like being embalmed for ever in suffocating pleasantness. You doze off during ‘Warm Embrace’ and wake, perhaps hours later, to the same gentle, winsome, minor-key harmonies chugging by at
From our UK edition
The headline ‘Government to allow people to hug’ one might have expected to hear on early evening news bulletins in January 1661, shortly after Oliver Cromwell was posthumously executed and puritanism began its slow and welcome withdrawal from England. It sounds a little odd in 2021. Below the headline came the inevitable caveats from the
From our UK edition
It’s not just the Labour party which is institutionally incapable of understanding why the Conservative party kicked the hell out of them in these elections. It is also, of course, the BBC. The prime offender was — hold your breath in surprise — Emily Maitlis on Newsnight. Furlough and vaccines were the sole reason the
From our UK edition
Experts tell us that we are facing a mental health ‘time bomb’ in the UK, partly as a consequence of Covid restrictions and partly because we have a Conservative government which has as its apparent main priority a malevolent desire to see people go insane and, hopefully, kill themselves. I am paraphrasing the experts here,
From our UK edition
Grade: C Revisionism has been extraordinarily kind to Tom Jones, ever since he barked his way through Prince’s ‘Kiss’ with the kind of subtlety you might expect from someone who is about to nut you in the mouth. That enormous fruity bellow is one part threat, one part music hall. He was repackaged as someone
From our UK edition
Not for the first time, our Prime Minister has executed a very sharp U-turn. Last month, heralding the achievements of AstraZeneca, Boris Johnson professed that the vaccine had been made possible because of greed, echoing the phrase used by Gordon Gekko in Wall Street that ‘greed is good’. Now, though, he seems to be of
From our UK edition
Grade: Z If you wish to experience the full hideousness of Now, of our current age, condensed into one awful hour, then you should invest in this bucket of infected expectorant streaked with blood. It’s all there. The depthless self-absorption and introspection, the me me me. The self-aggrandising, the wallowing in victimhood, the complete lack
From our UK edition
Shortly after the news of Prince Philip’s death was announced by Buckingham Palace, a woman called Karen Geier tweeted the following: ‘Deeply saddened to hear it was peaceful. He deserved so much more (pain).’ Ms Geier is a writer who has been published by, among others, the Guardian and the Huffington Post. That’s the kinder,
From our UK edition
We have a government which is basically libertarian in its instincts, despite its current affection for telling us what we can and can’t do on a daily basis. This seems like a paradox or a non-sequitur, but it isn’t really, because in a sense it is a coalition government between libertarian politicians and a big-statist
From our UK edition
I am having very little success in getting my collection of cartoons of great religious founders published. Perhaps it is because I am not known as a draughtsman and publications are notoriously conservative in hiring new talent. It is all very dispiriting. My drawings are, I think, puckish and yet respectful. For example, there is
From our UK edition
We commemorated one year of lockdown by sacrificing a goat to the Highly Revered Virus Deity on a hastily assembled altar in the back garden, in front of a blazing fire. We then drank a little of the creature’s blood and danced naked around a pentagram, delivering incantations to the Covid Divine — Oh Great
From our UK edition
A woman called Jenny Jones, now elevated to Baroness Moonbeam, or something, in the House of Lords has proposed a 6 p.m. curfew for all men everywhere. This would prevent men from killing women on the streets. Mrs Moonbeam is a member of the Green party and presumably agrees with their manifesto which insists that
From our UK edition
Caroline Rose Giuliani, the daughter of the former mayor of New York, Rudy, has been talking to the press about one of her hobbies. Apparently she likes nothing more than playing the role of a ‘unicorn’ — the third partner in a sexual liaison. She explained: ‘Finding the strength to explore these more complicated, passionate
From our UK edition
23 min listen
This week’s episode features a reading of The Spectator’s leading article, on how devolution has created a democratic deficit in Scotland (00:50); our economics correspondent Kate Andrews on what keeps the Chancellor up at night (7:00); and Rod Liddle on the real cause of food poverty in the UK. (16:35).
From our UK edition
‘We’re idiots, babe, it’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves.’ I listened to The Food Programme on Radio 4 this week, because the channel finder on my car radio wasn’t working and so I was stuck with it. It was, as it almost always is, four left-wing ratbags moaning to one another. As I’ve
