Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
My flight to Italy a couple of weeks back was held on the runway for a while because of some altercation back at the departure gate. After a while the pilot appeared at the front of the cabin and, full of self-righteous anger, explained that ‘two Italians’ had been rude to the gate staff. He
I am in southern Italy and there has been thunder and lightning pretty much continuously since Tuesday. I am quite scared of lightning. I need to buy some comestibles; especially wine and cigarettes. But the tiny apartment I have rented is connected to the outside world only by 72 metal steps affixed to the side
Given that David Cameron, rightly, seems to believe Lord Leveson’s recommendations are a crock of shit, what was the point of the inquiry in the first place? To show that something was being done? To give people like the hilarious Coogan a day in the sun, and that smug prolix lawyer who thought he was
OMG to Catalonia! (Geddit?; I’m quite proud of that. Pathetic, I know). A congenial centre-right and far left alliance in Catalonia should see Spain cease to exist as an entity within the next four years. Separatists now control the majority of seats in the Catalan parliament and public sentiment is broadly behind secession from the
Remarkable story in today’s Daily Telegraph. A couple from Rotherham who fostered children have had the kids taken away from them by social workers – because they were members of UKIP. The adults, not the kids. Having been previously considered ‘exemplary’ carers, the couple – who do not wish to be named – were allegedly
My friend woke me up this morning. I am in a tiny apartment in Italy, finishing a book. I mean writing one, not reading one. Anyway, he rang as I was dozing — dreaming, bizarrely, that I had just been shortlisted for the Turner Prize – and delivered this torrent of violence down the phone.
I understand entirely why Lord McAlpine would wish to sue individuals such as George Monbiot for having wrongly tweeted, or re-tweeted, his name in regard to allegations of child sex abuse. Life is too short and we need to find pleasure where we can, and the whole country has indeed enjoyed watching the Moonbat squirm.
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
