Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
From our UK edition
One of the genuine seasonal pleasures to be enjoyed as 2013 slipped around the U-bend was Enoch Powell making his familiar comeback as the Evil Ghost of Christmases Past. Enoch was disinterred by the producers of the hitherto un-noticed Murnaghan Show — presumably in order to frighten the viewers and put a spanner in the wheel
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Terribly saddened to hear of the death of Simon Hoggart, a lovely writer and to my mind the finest and funniest purveyor of the House of Commons sketch that we have seen. I saw Simon, surprisingly, in concert in Canterbury, around about this time last year, delighting the audience with anecdotes from his many years
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At last, it has been scientifically proved that Jesus Christ is better than Muhammad. We’d always known that our lad with the beard and the holes in his hands was far superior to that arriviste Arabian chap who hung around in caves. But tell that to a Muslim and they become unaccountably frosty and defensive.
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It’s right, isn’t it, that the storm we’ve just had was far, far, worse than the Worst Storm In A Million Years © we had a month back and which was trailed in advance by the Met Office and all the news programmes? And as others have pointed out, while there was far more damage
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After bullying from the government, our major internet providers are now ‘filtering’ pornographic websites, so that children don’t get to see them. However, a BBC Newsnight study revealed, with great alarm, that this filtering often blocks access to sexual advice sites aimed at children. Such as, for example, BishUK, which contains helpful advice on how
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I’d just like to take this opportunity to say a big thank you to our heir to the throne, Prince Charles, for, as he put it, spending ‘twenty years’ trying to ‘build bridges between Islam and Christianity and (to) dispel ignorance and misunderstanding.’ Sadly, he has concluded that this noble endeavour was in vain and
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I think this following quote, from the Romanian ambassador Ion Jinga, may go down as my favourite of the year: ‘In their overwhelming majority, Romanians in the UK are well integrated and, as Prime Minister David Cameron has acknowledged, ‘work hard, pay taxes and are valued by their employers.’ New figures just out from the
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It may come as a grave surprise to you that, when it was offered as a prize in a charity auction, the opportunity to attend a dinner lecture by the former prime minister Gordon Brown failed to reach anywhere near the sum the organisers had expected. Particularly so as the prize promised, as a special
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Good luck to Trenton Oldfield, his wife Deepa Naik and their newborn baby today: it’s Oldfield’s day of judgement. He will find out if he is to be kicked out of the country, as Theresa May apparently wants. The tribunal hearing is at 1400. Oldfield, if you remember, disrupted the Oxford-Cambridge boat race a couple
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Look; I’m sorry Nelson Mandela is dead. It happens quite often to people in their 90s who have been very ill, even famous people, but I’m sure that doesn’t lessen the sadness for many of us. I never met the man but, on balance, I came to the conclusion that he was a force for
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A very useful feature in the Daily Telegraph informs me of the best 20 towns in Britain ‘for Christmas’. Number one on the list is the Cotswold village of Chipping Campden, to which we must surely all decamp immediately. People moan all the time that despite the profusion of new technology and our comparative affluence
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A minor observation on the BBC’s coverage from Cameron’s visit to Beijing (which has been, for the most part, of very high quality.) Nick Robinson closed his piece yesterday with a reference to the authoritarian and censorious nature of Chinese society and government heavy-handedness. To illustrate this, he revealed that he and his crew had
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Absolutely fascinating double page spread in The Observer yesterday which suggests that the UK is ‘sleepwalking’ towards an exit from the European Union. My only quibble with the piece is that the source of this narcolepsy was not explained: is it drug induced, or have we perhaps become zombified? Either way, we don’t know what
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I see that Russell Brand has morphed into Mehdi Hassan. Mehdi, if you remember, excoriated The Daily Mail and then the paper published the cringe-worthy paean of praise Hassan had written to the paper’s editor in chief, Paul Dacre, when he was after a job. Brand, meanwhile, has bravely stuck it to The Sun newspaper
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My memory gets addled sometimes, so maybe I’m wrong about this. But didn’t it used to be the case that when politicians were caught out lying, they made some sort of shame-faced apology to the nation and begged for our forgiveness? I’m sure that was it, you know. So if I’m right, to judge by
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Much though I like and respect Douglas Murray, I reckon he and other Ayatollohaphobes* are wrong about the deal struck with Iran. If Iran’s willingness to negotiate was evidence that sanctions were working, rather than a sudden flowering of the ‘let us all now be frenz’ spirit in Tehran – then the sanctions have surely
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The head-teacher of a primary school in East Sussex has written to parents asking them not to swear in front of their children, although reading between the lines I think swearing at them might be ok. Maybe if your kid is at this particular school you could ring up and clarify the matter. Anyway, according
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Unfortunate timing. In the Sunday Telegraph today is an article by Gyles Brandreth eulogising the crossword; we are approaching its 100th anniversary. Yes, all well and good. But travel to The Telegraph crossword site and this is what you will see: Sorry we’re experiencing some technical problems and we’re working to try and fix them.
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I am still trying to get some sort of closure. For almost three weeks now I have been tormented by memories of Newsnight’s Kirsty Wark dancing to the song ‘Thriller’ at the close of her programme, something presumably intended as a light-hearted Halloween treat for the eight or nine remaining viewers. It was not a
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Another interesting contribution to the great debate from Nicholas Boles, the MP for Grantham and Stamford and someone who is considered ‘influential’. Nick has explained away the Conservative Party’s unpopularity in the polls, and its likely defeat at the next General Election, on a failure to proclaim loudly enough on liberal issues. The party should
