Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
From our UK edition
So, the IRA terror suspect, John Downey, will now not face a trial for his alleged involvement in the Hyde Park and Regent’s Park bombings of 1982, in which eleven soldiers (as well as seven horses) were murdered by nail bombs. The former Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain seems to be delighted about this and
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Would you buy a used car from the disc jockey Chris Moyles? I’m fairly gullible but even I’d have second thoughts if the gobby lardmountain approached me with a 2004 Nissan Micra, one careful owner mate, sound as a pound. This is what Moyles told the Inland Revenue he did for a living so that
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Wouldn’t it be boring if everyone behaved much as you behave? If everyone expressed themselves similarly? Let a thousand flowers bloom, I say. Take the case of Torz Reynolds. You are almost certainly not called Torz and I would guess, too, that you count few people within your circle of friends who abide under that
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I wonder if we should start our own Spectator Blog NekNominations? Open to bloggers and readers. I nominate Daniel Maris to drink a small glass of Pinot Noir while watching the early evening news. And Alex Massie to drink a flagon of Teachers while standing on the up line somewhere between Edinburgh and Alnmouth. Maybe
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I don’t suppose these petitions do much good, but they may make us all feel a little better about ourselves. Muhammad Asghar is a lunatic living in Pakistan, thus scoring about as low as it’s possible to get on life’s first two throws of the dice. He is a paranoid schizophrenic and recently proclaimed himself
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I’ve called the doggie hospital three times now to find out how Jessie’s getting on. She’s just come round, at the time of writing. I think it’s partly guilt which makes me keep ringing up: we’re paying to have her ovaries ripped out with a small hook-like device, which seems to me a betrayal of
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Richard Milburn, a burglar, broke out of Kirkham Prison near Preston because he was sick to the back teeth of the Scousers in the place. And the Mancs. And the Scallies and the La’s (not my apostrophe; I think it’s a local peculiarity). Richard is a Yorkshireman, even if his surname suggests a still better
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How the hell do we keep the kids quiet in the car now that we can’t subdue them with tobacco smoke? I suppose we’ll have to resort to slipping a tranquiliser into their in-car snacks, somehow. Parliament has now voted to make it illegal to smoke in a car when there are children in the
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Can someone please explain to me why the BBC newsreaders were not wearing black armbands last weekend when reporting the tragic story of Sally Morgan being given the boot from Ofsted? In all other manners the coverage was adequately respectful and the reporters, rightly, allowed their anguish to bleed through the fraying bandage of impartiality.
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Have you ever harboured affection for Tony Blair’s arse? According to reports, you may not be alone. Wendi Deng, Rupert Murdoch’s former missus, apparently yearned for Tony’s piercing blue eyes, sexy legs and, indeed, ‘butt’. I assume that means his arse, rather than some device perhaps situated in his garden and utilised for the capture of
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I don’t know if you’ve seen this letter to this week’s edition of the magazine, from a person called Chris Doyle. He is a member of the ‘Council for Arab-British Understanding’ and has taken exception to last week’s cover cartoon. He objects that the drawing of ‘two bearded, large hooked nose, weapon-wielding men’ was a
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London has long since lost its allure for me — altogether too many cars, foreigners, cyclists, middle-class liberals and people who, like me, work in the media, as they call it. I was born in London but only feel truly at home in the north-east of England, an area of the country within which the
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You just knew Lembit would make an appearance sooner or later, didn’t you? I only noticed this morning, reading back through some of the weekend papers I’d missed. Anyway, as the Rennard scandal spreads ever wider within the Liberal Democrats, step forward minxy Hannah Thompson, a former ’schoolgirl activist’. According to Hannah, when she was
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Much as was the case with Syria, and to a lesser degree Egypt, I wonder if we are getting a true picture of the mood within Ukraine on our excitable daily news programmes. Reporters speak of a ‘revolution’, and certainly there is fury in the capital, Kiev and some other cities in the west of
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When I was promoted to being editor of a programme at the BBC, back in the late 1990s, my line manager came and talked to me in a deeply mysterious manner for a number of troubling minutes. He was wary and elliptical and I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about. There were things
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Well done Lord Rennard for not saying sorry. I thought at first that he should, just to get the whole thing over with, to partially placate those monstrously transgressed women who may once have had their personal space ‘violated’ by the bloke. But that was wrong. Stick to your guns and tell them to get
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People complain that the police sometimes take a terribly long time to turn up to investigate complaints. But then sometimes they do not turn up at all. In fact according to Tom Winsor, the Chief Inspector of Constabulary, ‘there are cities in the Midlands where the police never go because they are never called. They
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Two years ago this week the philosopher Alain de Botton unveiled his proposals for a giant gilded tower in central London at which atheists such as himself could indulge in a spot of self-worship. This edifice was to be 46 metres tall and a line of gold at the top would pick out the years
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There’s a case for saying that the Thatcher government’s sale of council houses was the biggest redistribution of wealth this country has ever seen. I’m not so sure. I am pretty convinced it was a contributory factor in the vaulting property greed which has been with us ever since, and the propensity of people to
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On the evening of the Mark Duggan verdict, Diane Abbott MP tweeted the following: If the #duggan jury believe that he did not have a gun in his hand when he was shot, how can they find it was a lawful killing? #baffled — Diane Abbott MP (@HackneyAbbott) January 8, 2014 Well, Diane, your
