Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
There is worryingly little time left to make the appropriate preparations for Bridget Phillipson’s official birthday, on 19 December. As far as I am aware, no venue has been booked as yet – and given that the minister for women and incalculable self entitlement has her birthday slap bang in the middle of the festive
Grade: B+ Almost all modern popular music is afflicted by a desperate yearning for importance, and thus – as it translates these days – electronic bombast, which is of course available now at the flick of a switch in the studio. The song is not enough, nowhere near enough. What you need, to elevate your
Ihave spent most of the morning trying to convince people online that Huw Edwards’s conviction does not mean that all, or even a majority, of Welsh people are sexually attracted to children. ‘We thought it was just sheep. It isn’t,’ one furious interlocuter named only as ‘Ned’ posted with what I assume he thought was
In the long and illustrious history of race chancing, there must have been many more egregious examples than that of Noel Deans’s recourse to court because a colleague ‘fist-bumped’ him rather than shaking his hand, but I can’t think of any right now. Certainly not over here in the UK, where we still lag a
I suppose there must be someone somewhere in this nation of ours who was surprised by the news that our fellow citizens have a much lower sense of pride in our country than has ever previously been the case. This apparent fact was reported by the National Centre for Social Research, whose representative did not
Police are hunting a ‘hooded figure’ who sprayed ‘no whites’ on the wall of a primary school in Birmingham. The coppers presumably have racial hatred in mind, but there could be a much more innocent explanation for that which otherwise would be simply a case of vandalism – or even one of laudable graffiti art
Grade: B Country music has become the acceptable route through which American pop stars resuscitate their floundering careers: sales are down, kid – shove a fiddle in the next one. And a pedal steel. And git some of those country dudes to collaborate. Especially Dolly. But also Hank Williams Jnr, if you can. Makes them
Are radical lesbians dictating what we can and cannot eat, through the offices of this very magazine? It would certainly seem to be the case. A year ago this month, Julie Bindel wrote on The Spectator’s website disparaging sourdough bread with even more venom than she reserves for her more usual targets, i.e. those men-lady
Ihad entirely missed the online furore in which my colleague Douglas Murray was engulfed recently and only found out about it through a dubious article on the Guardian website by Kenan Malik. So I was slow off the mark, the reason being that I never read Twitter and have not the slightest interest in what
On a summer’s evening in 1978 I was standing on the platform at Redcar Central station, wondering if I had just missed my train. So I approached the only other person on the platform and asked him: ‘Excuse me, do you know what time the next train is due?’ He replied ‘What if it is?’
While working as a callow speechwriter for the Labour party in the mid-1980s, I suggested to a member of the then shadow cabinet that perhaps we should do something in support of the teachers, who were clamouring for more money. ‘Sod them, they’re all Tories,’ came the response. Well, how times change – and also
Grade: D+ Happenings were interesting, or irritating, events staged from the late 1950s through to the early 1970s by performers who eschewed the corporate and bourgeois restraints placed on artists and veered into surrealism, parody, violence and, of course, situationism. Think Allan Kaprow and John Cage. In rock music, meanwhile, think the Fugs and the
As something of a fan of riots and social unrest I was interested to know who, precisely, had gone doolally in the Harehills area of Leeds last week and started setting fire to buses and so on. The local police announced that it was a ‘serious disorder incident’, but I could find no information at
I detected a degree of surprise among those people who were uncommonly cheered by Sir Keir Starmer’s election victory that England failed to beat Spain in the final of the European Championship. That wasn’t in the script. For those Labour supporters in the press and floating in the shallow trough of luvviedom, an England victory
The principal concerns of the electors vary rather more widely than the pollsters and pundits would suggest. One man in Guisborough – probably middle-aged, short of teeth, a little unkempt – suggested to me that the government needed to clamp down on foreigners importing bees into the country. This was being done covertly, he said.
I have never been a contributor to Twitter, partly because my comments would not be subjected to the intensive hygiene and cleanliness vetting which goes on here, for example. Instead it would all spew out untreated and lumpily noisome, like a Thames Water pipe on to your nearest beach, and I would be toast within
Grade: C I don’t doubt the ingenuity. The mastery of a technology which now exists as a substitute for melody, heart, soul, rhythm and meaning. I get the manifesto, too – a pop music that in a certain shallow sense reflects the modern predilection for meta-fiction: novels which mash up all the genres, so that
Nine days of campaigning to go and I haven’t been milkshaked yet. I’ve hung out near McDonald’s in the hope – anything to get ten seconds on the evening news. It seems that in my constituency, the rank, sanctimonious, narcissistic and dim-witted monomaniacs of the new, kind and gentle left are somewhat thin on the
Scotland 0 Hungary 1: The Guardian called the game ‘a grim slog’, presumably preferring the fare offered by the twinkle-toed Latinos. Me, I loved every deeply flawed second. This was a League One play-off final, full of fury, grit and consummate uselessness. I’d far rather watch that than Spain and Italy – and even more
During the 1983 general election, I campaigned every single day with great zeal and avidity. I knocked on quite literally thousands of doors enquiring of people if we, the Labour party, could count on their support on 9 June. I would start at 9 o’clock and finish 12 hours later, taking a break at about
