Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
Are you happy that the former Labour MP Margaret Moran, who swindled more than £50,000 from the taxpayer in rogue expenses, will escape a custodial sentence because she is ‘depressed’? It is a sort of reverse catch-22 for miscreants who have held some sort of high public office (which an MP still is, I suppose).
The new Archbishop of Canterbury has the cleanest-shaven chin I think I have ever seen on an adult male human. It is as if, in an attempt to rid himself of even the vestigial suspicion of facial growth, he has shaved twice with a Gillette Mach 3 Turbo™ razor, and then applied those molten wax
Have to say, I wish I’d got a year’s salary plus pension when I made an, er, dignified resignation from the BBC. The outgoing DG, George Entwistle, will receive an entire year’s salary plus various other stipends, amounting to more than a million quid. He’s had a horrible time of it recently, for sure –
Oddly enough, re the latest Newsnight/BBC debacle, Esther Rantzen got it right. She was talking on Newsnight. She made the point that her old programme That’s Life regularly did investigative stuff, but that there was always a lawyer involved, all the way along, right from the off. Absolutely. I did the same thing at the
It was good to see parliamentary expenses back at the top of the news agenda over last weekend. I think we were all getting a little nonced out, so to speak. To judge from the number of lawsuits now filed against the BBC, and also the supposed list of people due to be picked up
Anyone know a good method of trapping mice humanely? I’ve got lots of them scurrying around. I bought two humane traps and have so far caught ten of the creatures. But there’s a design flaw; the mice get trapped inside a narrow black box for far too long. The manufacturers say the mice shouldn’t be
For years I have kept this to myself; a damaged individual, bottling it all up inside. But now that others have spoken out I’ve found an inner strength, a sort of resolve. Several times during the 1970s I was the victim of serial sexual assaults by BBC stars who are now dead. On one occasion
If you didn’t watch Derren Brown’s Apocalypse, then the following will be meaningless… I suppose all television is a kind of charlatanism, a usually agreeable deception to which the rest of us more or less willingly sign up. We know, at the back of our minds, that TV is fake. Which is why Derren Brown’s
Yowser! It’s the mid-1990s all over again. I half expect to hear Ace of Base blaring out of a thousand Ford Cosworths. The Tories are split down the middle on the EU and Heseltine is stamping around, flogging his dirigiste interventionist stuff (which these days commends itself only to Labour, doesn’t it?). What next? Antonia
What I really wanted to do for you this week was uncover a totally new story about a racist paedophile banker — a perfect storm of a story which through the sheer magnitude of the mass national hysteria it engendered actually brought about a lethal fracturing of the earth’s crust, volcanic eruptions, rivers of sulphurous
And still it goes on and on. Apparently Jimmy Savile was banned from Children In Need because it was thought he was a bit creepy. Did he try to touch up Pudsey, or something? I think we are getting ourselves into a self-righteous frenzy here. Savile was unspeakably ghastly. He was unspeakably ghastly before these
Yet more exciting news from my favourite city, Brighton. Maybe I should do a weekly Brighton update. Or maybe we should just leave them alone and ignore them; it is not a bad thing to have a large proportion of Britain’s most irritating people corralled in one ghastly laager. I don’t mean the poftahs, by
Ring, ring, goes the telephone, every hour that God sends. And it’s always some producer from the BBC, ringing me up to ask me on to some programme to stick the boot in to the BBC. Newsnight, The World at One, This Week, BBC Good Morning Biddulph, BBC Top o’The Mornin’ Paddy. It is not
And so the Savile stuff rumbles on with George Entwistle’s singularly unimpressive performance before the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee. It still seems to me that the bosses are being evasive over the issue of pressure applied, or otherwise, to the Newsnight editor Peter Rippon. Someone is hiding something, I think. But
The BBC management cannot have it both ways. They cannot simultaneously insist that the decision to drop the Newsnight investigation into Jimmy Savile was made by the editor of the programme, Peter Rippon, and Peter Rippon alone without pressure from above – and then announce that Peter Rippon’s blog which explained why he had made
It has to be another example of The Mandelson Mephistopheles Effect. One by one, all of Peter’s friends have cosmic awfulness visited upon them – the latest being the millionaire Nat Rothschild. His mining company is in trouble and he’s been forced to resign from its board; one unnamed city broker said he would never
‘(1) A person is guilty of an offence if he: (a) uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour, or (b) displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting.’ —Section 5, Public Order Act 1986 Do you ever growl at dogs? It’s something I’ve been
Ah – so those miserable traders who everyone told to shut up were dead right, back in August. Britain received its smallest number of foreign tourists for almost a decade this summer, largely as a consequence of the Olympic Games, it is thought. The only recent year which saw fewer people visit our country was
I may sue for plagiarism. In my failed bid to become Director General of the BBC I suggested that the corporation should henceforth cover no news stories, nor commission any drama or comedy and instead simply occupy itself by debating, in public, its manifest incompetencies. I thought that this would be an entertaining and cheap
A very good point made by Peter Hitchens in an interview with the Evening Standard yesterday. It was this: ‘A particular problem of the Left is that they believe their personal goodness is entangled with their opinions. Therefore, it is hard for them to have friendships with — or even like — conservative people. It’s
