Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
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
Congratulations to Stephen Glover for writing perhaps the only sensible piece about the Crimean crisis. There is a certain force, too, to Putin’s charge that the West believes itself a chosen people to whom the normal moral rules do not apply. We have meddled, frequently with the help of military might, to spread our own
Just to ring the changes, I’ve written about the BBC and political correctness for the mag this week. Yeah, yeah, I know – you haven’t heard enough about that subject. But one of the writers of the 1970s situation comedy It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum has complained that aunty isn’t showing the series any more
Are there enough black and minority ethnic people on our television screens? The comedian Lenny Henry thinks not and has proposed targets to ensure better representation. Lenny means stuff like Midsomer Murders, I think, which famously avoided using people of colour for a very long time in its absurd but strangely comforting dramas. I think
Is the world now being fed a bit of disinformation from the Malaysians over the fate of that missing jet, flight MH370? We are now told that the pilot, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, was a ‘fanatical’ dissident, a supporter of opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, who has once again been jailed under Malaysia’s homophobic laws for
I suppose you could argue, if you were a conservative, that Tony Benn’s greatest contribution to public life was helping to render Labour unelectable for thirteen years. There’s quite a few within Labour who might wryly argue the same thing, frankly. And plenty more who had grave doubts about the man’s ‘principled’ devotion to Socialism,
There is a beautiful symmetry to all things, I think, and probably related somehow to the concept of karma. Only two weeks ago, a bunch of researchers at Durham University came up with a report which insisted that dyslexia is a meaningless term. You and I know that, of course, but we dare not say
A new National Minimum Wage of £8.80 per hour, both in London and beyond. Plenty of money set aside to police this arrangement. Four per cent stamp duty for all homes over £250,000, two per cent for all those under. We need to dampen down the housing market which has again become absurd. 60 per
Why the surprise? Of course the Prime Minister would employ a nanny from somewhere like Nepal. David Cameron is simply taking part in the familiar upper-middle class game of ‘Exploited Third World Labour Top Trumps’. The more backward, far-flung and desolate the country of origin, the higher your nanny scores. And, incidentally, the cheaper she
Do your children have a bleak and nihilistic view of the world? It’s hard to tell, really, when they spend 30 per cent of the day blamming away at those whores in Grand Theft Auto and the remaining 70 per cent asleep. How should one go about inquiring such a thing? Text them, maybe. ‘R
