Rod Liddle

I got a text message the other day, inviting me to a party. This is a nice thing to happen, and not an everyday event. I have become used to all modern forms of communication bringing nothing but trouble; the more modern they are, the more unpleasant will be the message. If it arrives via Twitter, it will usually be a condensed ball of noisome vomit, perhaps containing within it the vestige of a threat. In a sense, we are all Mary Beard these days. The nastiness rains down upon all of our heads, the nastiness from other people. Never mind.

There’s another one of those fatuous “studies” in the papers today, based upon that favourite newspaper device, the false correlation. This time it’s about marriage; if you want to make your marriage work, move to Dorset, because part of it has the highest number of married couples in the country and they are more likely to stay married. The implication is that there must be something magical about Dorset, and that if you moved to, say, Wimborne, or Curry Rivel, any marital problems you might have had would immediately evaporate. Of course the reason more people are married in Dorset is that the average age of the population there is greater, and the older you are the more likely you are a) to be married and b) not to get divorced.

Now here’s something to warm the heart. A bunch of medics from Liverpool have set up an organisation called 'Street Doctors', where they go out and teach gang members how to staunch and sew up stab wounds. The obvious downside to this pioneering initiative is that we will probably, as a consequence, be left with more living gang members than would otherwise have been the case. They do not seem to have thought about that. Unless they also plan to teach them the most efficacious places to stab someone, perhaps with a cut-out-and-keep diagrammatical aid. Hopefully the NHS will intervene and instead of sewing up stab victims, the gang members will be taught how to put their injured bros on an economically viable care pathway, with professional counselling all the way to the crematorium.

Ah, at last the scales have fallen from Jemima Khan’s lovely fluttery little doe eyes. Having forked out £20,000 towards Julian Assange’s bail, the pouting metro-lefty socialite has come to the conclusion that the bloke is a bit of a rum chap, all things considered. She has even compared him to the barking charlatan who founded Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard and described Assange as demanding from his followers ‘blinkered, cultish, devotion.’ Well, sure – we tried to tell you that at the time, poppet. But you’re still not getting your money back. I wonder if the Ecuadoreans are sick of Assange yet, sitting in the basement of their embassy, referring to himself in the third person and tapping away at his laptop with a messianic look in his eyes?

If Chris Huhne hadn’t copped off with that woman who looks remarkably like the late comedian Jack Douglas, I suppose we would have been deprived of all the tumultuous glee which has attended both his utter collapse, as a man, and his likely incarceration. We would never have known about that small crime, committed years before he had become an MP. It was not the act of asking his wife to take those speeding penalty points which did for him, it was swanning off with his assistant, Carina -Trimingham. Wives sacrifice themselves for their husbands in all manner of ways; it is part of the deal of marriage, I suppose. The compact breaks down irretrievably when the husband transgresses — as, it seems inevitably these days, he does.

Important work from Latanya Sweeney of Harvard University into the inherent racism of internet search engines. She carried out a study which demonstrated a clear difference between the sort of ads that appear on the page if you’re searching for either a “black” name or a “white” name. She used a bunch of names which had previously been identified as being associated with one race or another. For “black” names she used DeShawn, Darnell and Jermaine; for “white”, stuff like James, Emily and The Rt Hon Nicholas Soames or something. When the white names were tapped in, up came adverts for nice sofas and dating agencies and holidays in agreeable places. When the black names were tapped in up came adverts for criminal record searches.

It’s time to panic. I read at the weekend that sophisticated hackers have burrowed their way into no less than 250,000 Twitter accounts. What shall we do? Henceforth, when we read that Stephen Fry has just eaten a sandwich, we cannot be absolutely certain that it is the real Stephen Fry who has eaten the sandwich or a shadowy interloper masquerading as Stephen Fry. Or Joey Barton, when he tells us that he wants to stamp on someone’s throat – well, it might not be Joey at all. Fascinating and incisive Tweets about matters of the day from non-celebrities – Camron u r a f****** joke lol #shinyfacedrichboy – will suddenly lose their power to persuade when we cannot be absolutely certain as to their authenticity.

I see that Will Self is being lined up as a “writer in residence” at BBC Radio Four. I think this is very good news. Self is an excellent writer and while obviously of the left, is not doctrinaire or predictable in his views. He has wit, he is well-read and very clever. Good luck to him. I commissioned Will to do an essay every week for the Today programme back when I was editor (1998-2003). They were invariably funny, provocative and beautifully expressed; he takes such a pleasure in using our language. But I alternated Will with Freddy Forsyth, who I fancied was a similarly iconoclastic voice, but from the Right. The essays came to an end because the top brass couldn’t abide Freddy, banging on about the EU or immigration or taxes every other week.

It’s an odd thing. I had been a little nervous of writing (subscribe here) about the Suzanne Moore twitter business because, much though I like and respect Moore and Burchill and the excellent Julie Bindel, it seemed to me to be a Crouch End dispute of negligible wider importance. And here we were with Algeria on fire, our Prime Minister poised to make some historic fudge on the EU and northerners freezing their balls off in ten feet of snow, and benefits being cut a bit and horses being devoured by the untermensch and so on and so on. Hugely important stuff. And yet online at least, the Moore stuff provoked an overwhelming response, both pro and anti.

 ‘Women ... are angry with ourselves for not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape — that of a Brazilian transsexual.’ — Suzanne Moore   One of these days, not too far away, the entire bourgeois bien-pensant left will self-immolate entirely leaving behind nothing but a thin skein of smoke smelling slightly of goji berries. Please let that day come quickly. In the meantime let us simply enjoy ourselves watching them tear each other to pieces, mired in their competing victimhoods, seething with acquired sensitivity, with inchoate rage and fury, inventing more and more hate crimes with which they might punish people who are not themselves. That quote above comes from the very talented feminist writer Suzanne Moore.

Anyone remember Mary Fitzpatrick? She was the BBC’s ‘Diversity Czar’ back in the middle of the last decade, paid £90,000 p.a by the licence payer to spout egregious pc bollocks. From a quick Google she now appears to be coining it for doing precisely the same job for the UK Film Council. Nice work, etc. Her most infamous pronouncement, when she was at the Beeb, was that the BBC had too many white foreign correspondents. People reporting from Muslim countries should be Muslim, from Chinese countries Chinese and so on. The audience, this berserk woman suggested, needed ‘valid and culturally accurate’ reportage, which meant far fewer honkeys. Everybody, at the time, said that this was offensive gibberish and the BBC sort of disowned her comments.

A very good article indeed by Charles Moore in today’s Torygraph, regarding Operation Yewtree and the astonishing news that Jimmy Savile nonced the entire country. You can read it here. There is a middle way, surely, between not believing anyone who says that they were sexually abused 40 years ago by Savile and believing, utterly, everyone who makes such an allegation. As Charles points out, the Savile report contains very little — if anything – in the way of evidence. But anyone who makes the sort of point Charles is making here will be howled down with the accusation 'abuse DENIER!' by the absolutist liberal left.