Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
From our UK edition
Did you enjoy the BBC Today programme this morning, guest edited by the, uh, comedian Lenny Henry and featuring interviewees and journos who were exclusively from ethnic minority backgrounds? I meant to, but some weird narcosis kept me in bed and stopped me turning the radio on. So I can’t judge the content. There have
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More excellent news for Team UK. Apparently we are now the second fattest people in Europe – and are rapidly catching up on the humongous, goulash-obsessed Hungarians, who currently hold the coveted number one spot. However – the news gets better. The survey was undertaken before Christmas Day: the morbidly obese Magyars tend to eat
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Should enormously fat women be allowed into nightclubs? The obvious answer is ‘no, of course not, are you out of your f****** mind?’ But door policies which discriminate against the morbidly obese can undoubtedly be hurtful. Amy Pitcher and an un-named friend were denied entry to a club in Ashford, Kent; the bouncer didn’t actually
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I’ve been away in Oslo. Not the world’s most exciting destination, I have to say. And the locals really do talk and smile exactly like Frances McDormand does in Fargo. Anyway, as there’s still a few days left before Christmas I thought I’d mention a couple of my favourite books of the year, just in
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Were you aware that the famous actor Andy Garcia was born with a foetus growing out of his left shoulder? It was removed from him when he was a toddler. I had not known this and I am unhappy that some sort of conspiracy, some wall of silence, was constructed to keep this news from
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It’s a good name, Roger Bird, isn’t it? The story, or non-story, develops apace. Read Steerpike here for the details of the text messages sent by Natasha Bolter to Mr Bird and which suggest to me a degree of, um, complicity, y’know? Newsnight carried it as their second story last night: Yoda was wreathed in
From our UK edition
The Natasha Bolter story is a little peculiar, no? Ms Bolter, formerly of the Labour Party and more latterly a rising star in Ukip, has been telling the press how she was ‘sexually harassed’ by the party’s general secretary, Roger Bird. This seems to have amounted to Mr Bird asking her out a couple of
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The latest half-witted United Nations official to stick the boot into the United Kingdom is one Francois Crepeau, UN ‘Special Rapperteur’ (nope, sorry, don’t recognise the term), on the Rights of Human Migrants. Crepeau, who comes from the useless part of Canada, said that British fears about immigration were ‘utter bullshit’. He added that if
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Thoroughly cheering news emerged this week that left-handed people are likely to earn between 10 and 12 per cent less than their right-handed colleagues. (So 11 per cent less, then). Good. I have never cared for left-handed people, considering them arrogant and possessed of unsavoury personal habits — and were I an employer I would not
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Would you find it difficult to remain friends with someone if he or she suddenly revealed that they intended to vote Ukip in the next election? Or perhaps it is the case that you yourself have told friends that you intend to vote Ukip and have seen those dinner-party invitations drying up, or have been
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I wonder how long it will be before we actually crawl back into the womb? The average mental age of our population stands at about four. A decade or so back it was surely higher — maybe six or seven, I would guess. But we have regressed with great rapidity, as if we were characters in
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The news is always grim, isn’t it? Doom and gloom everywhere. And even the news which appears to be good has a dark cloud hovering behind it. For example, we frequently hear reports of British-born jihadis being killed in Syria, either by blowing themselves up in the familiar, traditional manner or being bombed by the
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So – the Rochester and Strood by-election next Thursday. Who will win? I’ve been there a few times recently and my guess, from a feeling in my water, is that it will be Ukip by about ten thou. Good, I suppose. That will shake them all up a bit more, no? Last night, I watched the
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The latest instalment of what is becoming a regular feature: admiring the work of academics at places which, these days, we must call universities. This week let’s hear it for Professor Eric ‘Gumby’ Anderson, who lectures in Sports Sociology at the King Alfred Teacher Training College, or Winchester University as it is now known. One
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Today I went on the Daily Politics, presented by Andrew Neil. Talked about a bunch of stuff and then debated the issue of political correctness with Zoe Williams, from The Guardian. Look, I like Zoe. She’s ok. But she tried to argue that all the recent revelations about the sexual abuse of young white girls by
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It is interesting that neither Scotland nor Wales have been much bitten by the Ukip bug. The supposedly sensible view is that both of these countries are more kindly disposed towards the European Union than are the English — and that Ukip’s contempt for the European Parliament and its politicians is seen as another example
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Channel 4 has commissioned a docu-drama that will imagine what life will be like for poor and oppressed ordinary British people under the first few months of a Ukip government. As you can imagine with Channel 4, this will undoubtedly be an exercise in the very quintessence of impartiality and fair-mindedness. They plan to run it just
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An apology. A few weeks back, in my blog, I promised a regular series called ‘Fatuous Phrase of the Week’. Like so many publicly uttered promises, this one has failed to materialise. There has been no update to the Fatuous Phrase of the Week. This is because for the past two weeks I have been
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The issue is not that Russell Brand seems to believe that 9/11 was some sort of joint effort between George W Bush and the bin Laden family – that’s sort of a given, no? The man is a drug-addled idiot with the geopolitical knowledge and awareness of a tub of ‘I Can’t Believe It’s Not
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What sort of clothing do you wear when you go to the opera? I assume some of you do go to the opera, otherwise the Royal Opera House could be turned into a giant Wetherspoon’s pub. I have never been. Given a choice I would rather browse through a collection of photographs of Brooks Newmark
