Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
They always manage to pull something special out of the hat at Christmas, over at the Guardian. Last year it was that fantastic woman, an editor at The Ecologist, who agonised over what to buy her son for Christmas that was green, ethical, sustainable and non-materialistic, if you remember, when her son Dimitri just wanted
A merry Christmas to all of you; the sane and the troubled, the humorous and the witless, the rural and the urban, the autodidacts and the monomaniacal, the easy-going and the psychotic, the borderline fascists and the Stalinist libtard bien pensants. And all the others, the many I’ve missed. I wish you all a lovely
I’m thoroughly enjoying the playground spat between the USA and Russia. The Americans have banned Russians with dodgy human rights records from visiting the country, but have no such objection to travellers from Iran, Pakistan or Somalia dropping by, no matter how psychopathic they might be. In retaliation, the Russkies have voted to halt their
Both the former Labour MP Tony McNulty and the present Culture Secretary Maria Miller claimed parliamentary second home expenses for houses in which their respective parents lived. This is in contravention of accepted procedure. McNulty apologised, paid the money back, resigned his cabinet position and his seat. Maria Miller is somehow still the Culture Secretary
These shootings. I think we need J G Ballard back. Looking back through previous such apparently random events, we might observe that: • The perpetrators are almost always white. • They are almost always lower middle class or middle class. • The areas in which the shootings take place are almost always comfortable, although not
Does Santa Claus really exist? I have to say I have become very sceptical in recent years. There is something about this character which simply does not ring true, not to mention his rather sinister retinue of airborne reindeer. I am not saying that he definitely does not exist, simply that we should not be
Hugely exciting Ten O Clock News last night on the Arab Spring – or ‘Arab Uprising’ as the BBC now prefers to call it, the word Spring usually being associated with nice things like lambs and daffodils. They had George Alligator in Egypt and Lyse Doucet in Tunisia and some other bloke somewhere else. I
In a dawn raid today police swooped on children’s legend This Old Man for alleged sexual assault against countless toddlers and took him to a police station. “We have several thousand allegations that Mr This Old Man repeatedly abused children under the guise of a sort of sinister numbers game. We can only praise those
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
