Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.

Stop the sabre-rattling

I have been wondering these last few weeks whether it would be cheaper to excavate a basement and buy a Geiger counter and iodine tablets, or emigrate to New Zealand. Call me frit, but I don’t like the way things are heading. Probably the second option is easier: Armageddon outta here, etc. I can re-enact

Theresa May is Blue Labour at heart

I never really agreed with the central-thesis of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — that ‘42’ is the answer to life, the universe and everything. I have no great animus against the number — it does its job, filling that yawning gap between 41 and 43. But I had never thought it actually-special until

Tory Theresa is Blue Labour at heart

I never really agreed with the central-thesis of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — that ‘42’ is the answer to life, the universe and everything. I have no great animus against the number — it does its job, filling that yawning gap between 41 and 43. But I had never thought it actually-special until

Shami Chakrabarti joins the ranks of lefty hypocrites

Congratulations to Shami – sorry Baroness! – Chakrabarti for joining the exciting, ever-growing pantheon of ultra-left wing metropolitan Labour hypocrites. Her dameship was appearing on the Godawful Peston on Sunday show. Asked why she opposed selection and grammar schools while at the same time sending her brat to the selective, £18,000 per year, Dulwich College, she

The new reality on immigration

The good people of Hungary went to the polls on Sunday and voted by more than 98 per cent against accepting even a few hundred migrants, as per the European Union’s insistence. That poll result must have been gravid with nostalgia for Magyars over the age of about 35. They will remember that sort of

Why does Justin Welby want us to understand jihadis?

Hallelujah, everybody. The Archbishop of Canterbury has been pontificating again. Justin Welby says we must try to understand radical Islam a little better. He explained last week, with great patience, that the jihadis think they’re in an end-time war against Christians and Jews, so killing them is exactly what they expect to happen. It sort

Let’s bring the wolves back into Britain

A year ago there was a confirmed sighting, and even film, of a wild wolf in the Netherlands for the first time in perhaps 150 years. It was hanging out near a farm, a few kilometres from the German border in the north-east of the country, looking bored. A couple of years previously a dead

Labour is dying. Time to move on

Still enveloped in their bubble of iridescent adolescent phlegm, the Labour Party now stands at 26 per cent in the latest opinion polls. Below the figure achieved under Michael Foot’s leadership in the 1983 general election, usually regarded as the lowest of all low points for the party. And Foot was battling against a Prime

Haunted by an honourable member

I was awoken late on Monday night by a horrible nightmare, one of those dreams where you cannot be entirely sure if you are asleep or not. I dreamed I was lying exactly where I was, in my bed, and this torpedo-shaped, phantasmagorical thing was zipping about around the bedroom, diving behind the wardrobe, reappearing

From now on, we must all be equally stupid

A lecturer at a reasonably well-respected northern plate-glass university was somewhat perplexed by a student who complained about her poor marks for an essay. She had a statement of Special Educational Needs. She insisted that this had not been taken into account in the marking of her paper. My acquaintance was hauled before the university

Why Anjem Choudary should not be in prison

It was impossible not to feel rather sorry for the radical Muslim ‘cleric’ Anjem Choudary and his imbecilic henchman Mohammed Rahman as they were each sentenced to five and a half years in prison by a British court. ‘Allahu Akbar!’ his supporters chanted as the sentence was delivered, an invigorating, all-purpose phrase used during decapitations,

Rod Liddle

Blair witch project

I had been wondering where Gorgeous George Galloway might pop up next. Defenestrated from his seat in Bradford West, humiliated in the London mayoral elections — where he received 1.4 per cent of the vote — and no longer apparently an attractive proposition to the reality TV producers, his public life seemed sadly to be

Rod Liddle

Why don’t black lives matter at the carnival?

I do not get out very much these days, but the glorious weekend weather persuaded me that I should spend a pleasant afternoon watching people stabbing each other at our annual celebration of stabbing, the Notting Hill Carnival. I go most years and enjoy the street food, the music and the sight of white police

The Olympics proves it: we are not all equal

An almost worldwide survey on penis length — the sort of thing I always read with a sense of trepidation and inadequacy — suggested that the countries boasting the largest of these flawed and devious appendages are all located in Africa. Especially West Africa, from the DRC down to the humid and still pristine jungles

Why I’ll keep cheering for Caster Semenya

An almost worldwide survey on penis length — the sort of thing I always read with a sense of trepidation and inadequacy — suggested that the countries boasting the largest of these flawed and devious appendages are all located in Africa. Especially West Africa, from the DRC down to the humid and still pristine jungles