Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
Apologies for the prolonged absence. This was due to a holiday in which I stayed away from all forms of communication for two and a half weeks. I cannot recommend this policy too highly. During my break, incidentally, I discovered another reason to physically assault the hawkers who festoon the central square in Marrakech, the
Do you share the very real pain of the disability lobby groups about George Galloway MP referring to someone with whom he was arguing as a window-licker? Maybe you do. I have never heard the term used except as a mild admonition to someone who had just done or said something stupid. For others, it
Listen, this story is moving so quickly stuff will almost certainly have happened in between me writing it and you reading it. I hate the idea that you might be left behind the curve, but I just don’t know how to get around that. An outrage occurs and of course we try faithfully to report
Let’s hear it for Nigeria, which has just joined the space race. The country plans to launch a rocket by 2028, although nobody has explained where the rocket will be heading. It is a legal requirement, I suspect, for all countries which receive vast amounts of aid from Britain to start pinging rockets around the
Hell, it’s been tough, but I think I’ve pulled through. I went out this morning to buy some cigarettes and there were plenty of people about, doing stuff — so the world has not changed beyond recognition these last couple of days. Everyone else seems to have made it. I hope you made it OK,
Peter Hain, I see, has suggested that we come to a negotiated settlement with the Spanish government over Gibraltar, in order to stop them being spiteful by taxing those who move in and out of the territory, and harassing the locals. The remarkable thing about Hain is that he is wrong about almost everything; the
The British embassy in Yemen is to be closed for a couple of days because the Americans have got wind of a terrorist threat. The Foreign Office has gone so far as to urge all Britons to leave the fractious, arid, maniac-bedevilled wasteland right now. I think they should stay where they are. Any Britons
I watched this thinking it would be hilariously bad, but ended up quite liking it; especially the line, near the end, ‘it’s not British, it’s brutish’. Ok it ain’t T S Eliot. But then the wizened old chap would sit oddly at the Guardian. (‘In the room the women come and go, talking of George Monbiot’).
I have tried very hard to become an afficianado of pornography, seeing as it is by far the most popular pastime in the world. Also, it annoys a lot of people that I don’t like, so I feel I should put my money where my mouth is, so to speak. But the trouble is, the
My best mate revealed to me that his bicycle was wrecked. I asked if he would be buying a new one. He said yes, via the government’s Cycle To Work scheme. What the hell’s wrong with Halfords, I thought silently to myself. Apparently the government will let you pay for a bike tax and NI
Was Jane Austen really the best idea the women could come up with? Furious campaigning from feminists has resulted in the rather mimsy authoress being chosen to adorn the back of our new ten quid notes. There’s another woman, of course, on the other side – the Queen. But as she’s an inbred fascist agent
I wonder how many illegal immigrants who’ve seen the government’s imprecations for them to leave the country have done exactly that? Seen the van driving around with its placard and thought: ‘That’s really tugged at my conscience, that has. I shall take myself, and family, to Gatwick Airport immediately. I am sorry to have been
Driving along in the car on a pleasant evening earlier this week, I was happily humming along to the toe-tapping sounds of the sadly defunct deathcore stalwarts Anal Prolapse, when my wife leaned over and turned the CD player off and the radio on. Those smug and portentous pips sounded. ‘What the hell are you
Harriet Harperson has written to the editors of seventeen national newspapers with a vast list of questions intended to discover how many women they employ, and how many are women over the age of 50. You can’t get a balanced picture of the world if women are not equally represented, she asserts in this letter.
Snoring in the sunshine down Park Lane, in London, last week was the latest gift to Britain from the Great God of Multicultural Diversity, sixty-odd snaggle toothed Romanian gypsies. I went to speak to them for a film I was doing for the Sunday Times. The only English the vast majority knew was ‘grwnka’, which
I wonder what possessed the jury in the Trayvon Martin case to return two not guilty verdicts when they knew the trouble it would cause. One never ceases to wonder at the self-importance, the narcissism, of those people who always believe they know better than the rest. An important section of the American population — perpetually
Was it right for the middle aged part-Hispanic male George Zimmerman to shoot the young black male Trayvon Martin, regardless of whether or not he had just had his head kicked in by him? The ‘not guilty’ verdict has granted the USA another Rodney King moment, although race may not have been a crucial factor
As if the poor Egyptians didn’t have enough on their plate, into the arena marches the man to sort it all out, the world’s ‘Middle East Envoy’, Tony Blair. Lucky world. Give the man his due, the Middle East is a monumentally fractious, fissiparous, disputatious neck of the woods and they all seem to hate
This all looks terribly good fun, don’t you think? Spectacular towers which will make wonderful bonfires: it must have taken them ages. My only caveat is that they are all in Northern Ireland. Is there no enterprising alliance over here which might do something similar to celebrate the glorious military success of King William of
I think it was the arrival into the debate of those Blairite ghosts Mandelson and Reid which helped me make my mind up. Somehow, Ed Miliband has been coerced into taking on the Unite union on the grounds that they are doing shady business on the matter of selecting candidates. Mandelson and Reid are both
