Rod Liddle

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 on that big bridge over the Tweed. No need to post any photos or film. I’ve written about this latest internet craze for the mag this week: it is the usual carefully and copiously researched investigation, devoid of bigotry and offensiveness. At least five people have died so far taking part in Neknominations and there will surely be more to follow. Is this trend to be encouraged, or should we try to stamp it out?

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 to be the messiah, the Prophet Mohammed. Really bad move, Mo. He has subsequently been convicted of blasphemy in that ghastly, benighted country and thus now faces the death sentence. Such is the response of the Religion of Peace © to mental illness. Mo was apparently born in Edinburgh, which makes him a British citizen, I should guess. You can add your name to the rest here.

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 the trust shown in us by the dog. She thought she was just going for a quick ride in the car and clearly didn’t understand why everyone was being so nice to her, so solicitous. Seven months old and, before her first season, she is being deprived of the undoubted pleasures of being on heat. It is surely the right of every bitch to behave, once a year, like Sally Bercow.

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 back. Or the front, I suppose. I don’t know anyone who does this anyway, frankly. The British Lung Foundation, a pressure group which campaigns for equal rights for all lungs, regardless of colour, creed or gender, has stated that 430,000 children aged between 11-15 are subjected to cigarette smoke in cars every week. Where did they get that figure from? I have not seen the slightest evidence to suggest that it is true.

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. Not enough, mind – I could have done with some real weeping and tearing at the hair: how could this brilliant and exciting woman be so traduced? The Tories are trying to take over everything! You’d have thought they’d won an election, or something. How dare they. I wonder which public institution will be the next grateful harbour for Baroness Morgan?

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 constituents of that list I quoted above are almost nonexistent. But I am thinking now of moving back to the city — it’s possible that I could afford a flat in somewhere such as Brockley, or perhaps Catford — to take advantage of a radical new development in our capital. Because rumbling along the streets of London quite soon will be homophobic buses.

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 you could do as a deputy editor, he told me, that you couldn’t do as an editor. But he didn’t tell me what those things were, those things which I now couldn’t do. I just sat and nodded wisely. Only later did I realise that this was his ‘Don’t shag the staff’ speech. That was the thing you couldn’t do — the staff. I hadn’t been aware that as a deputy editor I could do the staff. I wish I had known.

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 never hear of any trouble because the community deals with that on its own.’ Entire cities in which the police are totally absent! Which ones does he mean? Birmingham? And who are these communities? Tom refers to them mysteriously as people born ‘under different skies’? Venusians, then, perhaps, or ethereal creatures from Betelgeuse. I assume it’s something like that. Because otherwise he would spell it out, wouldn’t he?

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 on earth at which creatures almost as brilliant as Alain, i.e. human beings, have been kicking around. He wanted his tower to have majesty and mystery, ‘like you get from looking at Ely Cathedral’, and added: ‘You should feel small, but not in an intimidated way.

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 bafflement is because you weren’t inside the court room for three months listening to the evidence, were you, you idiot?  Does she think her tweet was helpful? Why does she not devote herself to tackling gun crime within the young black male community – or does she think that it is not a problem, a disproportionate problem, and that the reason we hear about it so often is because we’re all racists?

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 watching politicians talk rubbish. We went for a curry afterwards and he seemed on good form, if frail from the punishing bouts of chemotherapy. He was a hugely gifted writer; certainly, the only writer in the English language who could tempt me to read anything about wine, other than the words ‘half price £4.99’.

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. Now, though, a couple of scientists have used algorithms and quantitative analysis to prove that Jesus Christ was the most significant and important human being ever to have lived, while poor old Muhammad managed to slink in at number four: Champions League spot, sure, but no cigar.