Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
I hope you enjoyed the new post-Paxman Newsnight last night, if you still watch the programme. It was bad on a whole new level of badness (watch it here). Presented by an Afghan-Australian woman called Yalda Hakim, of whom I had never heard. Yalda was hampered in her presentational debut by being unable to string a
I see the veteran Labour MP Austin Mitchell is in trouble for having used the word rape in a ‘deeply offensive’ context. He had castigated the government for having failed to prevent Pfizer’s attempted acquisition of AstraZeneca, and added: ‘Roll up rapists.’ The woman who described Mitchell’s use of the word as ‘deeply offensive’ was
To: Karen Moran, HR Director, BBC Dear Ms Moran, I have decided to give up on the gardening this year, after a number of dispiriting setbacks. Last year I invested a fairly large amount of money, and about four hours per week, in trying to grow vegetables. But despite the fence and the pellets and
I enjoyed Fraser’s preview of the Eurovision Song Contest; I had not known that he was such a fan. You work with someone for years, oblivious to their dark secrets, their strange peccadilloes. It was typically brave of him to come out, in public. I watched the thing, again. I thought the entry from The
Oh dear, I don’t suppose I’ll get much support in these parts for what follows. But I’m sorta with Jenny Willott, the Liberal Democrat MP and Business Minister. She has stated that she hates Prime Minister’s Question Time “with a passion” and goes out of her way to avoid attending it. Her implication is that
In a double blow for the beleaguered BBC, the corporation has lost three of its most compelling attractions in little more than a month: the Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman, and Susanna Reid’s legs. Paxman has said he has had enough and announced his retirement from the thinly viewed current affairs programme. Susanna Reid’s legs have
My colleague Hugo Rifkind has been bien-pensanting around the issue of racism, to interesting effect. His thesis, in last week’s mag, seems to be that Ukip is a racist party because it says it isn’t a racist party. I suspect Hugo could show you racism in a handful dust. He also refers to the case
On location for The Sunday Times in the exciting by-election town of Newark-upon-Trent, I asked a nice local woman about her voting intentions. What way do you think you’ll be voting, I asked. This is what she said. “Um, yes, the poll. Well, I will turn right out of my house and walk down the
Apparently, mice think that women are useless. I don’t mean that they think women mice are useless — they’re keen enough on them, all right. I mean women women, like Rachel Reeves, the shadow secretary of state for work and pensions, and the R&B singer Rihanna, and the European Union’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs
It used to take one hour and forty five minutes to get by train from where I live in Canterbury to central London. Now, as a consequence of HS1 and the rather annoyingly named “Javelin”, it takes a little over fifty minutes. There is not the remotest doubt that the new service has greatly improved
How can we stop Australian politicians from touching up members of our Royal Family, in the manner of a libidinous BBC Radio disc jockey? If you remember, the former Prime Minister Paul Keating once groped the Queen, without even having first invited her out for a drink. Now the current PM, a man called Tony
Praise where it’s due. This opening to Russell Brand’s Guardian column about David Moyes is very good: “(His) face has now experienced the fate for which it looks like it was designed. The deep grooves of grief in his brow, his sunken, woeful eyes and dry parched lips, a perspicacious sculpture carved in anticipation of
I took my youngest son to a football match on Easter Monday. It used to be something I wryly called a ‘treat’ when the kids were younger, but we usually lost in such depressing circumstances each time that I would then feel the need to give them another treat immediately afterwards, to alleviate the misery.
A week’s holiday in the perfect seaside town of Staithes was intended to be recuperative and restful, a time to clear the mind, even if the kids were with me. But I return no less confused about the events in Ukraine and, in particular, our reaction to them. I left for the north already in
You may remember this little gem of a story from a month or so back. Justifiably worried at the ramping up of rhetoric by western politicians over the crisis in Ukraine, Blackpool ‘beauty technician’ Gemma Worrall took to a social media site to ask the — presumably rhetorical — question: ‘Why is our President Barraco
So, in the second debate between Nigel Farage and Nick Clegg the UKIP leader won by 69% to 31%, according to the post-debate polls. That, you would think, should be the top line of the story, but it was not the way in which the BBC News reported events. The corporation’s “package” of the debate
What attitude should we take towards women who wish to breastfeed their babies in public? Older, more conservative readers may feel a little squeamish about this sort of thing and would prefer mothers to do their breastfeeding in private; it is as much the hideous slurping noise as the sight of a female breast which
It is of course shocking that the Justice Secretary Chris Grayling should ban prisoners from receiving books sent by their friends and relatives. We might all agree with author Philip Pullman who said that the ban is worthy of Hitler and Pol Pot and entirely typical of a government whose most senior members regularly eat
We live in a recriminatory age, one in which we are only ever a step away from the cringing, self-abnegating apology. Take the case of BBC Newsnight’s latest appointee, as economics editor, a chap called Duncan Weldon. Duncan is doing the tail between the legs thing right now, desperately attempting to excise part of his
How should the western powers react when part of a friendly nation holds an illegal referendum and votes to secede from the country in which hitherto it was located? Sanctions? Military reprisals? We’d better send the gunships to the watery redoubt of Venice, then, which has just voted overwhelmingly to leave Italy. The Venetians, part
