Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
In the end, after sniping and carping and moaning for months about how ghastly the Olympics was going to be, I thought the opening ceremony rather wonderful and therefore felt ashamed of myself for having been so aloof. I had not expected such a breadth of vision, nor such beauty, nor indeed the copious room
Anyone know why Shami Chakrabarti was carrying the Olympic flag? The boss of the Olympic Federation said it was because she had “founded” the organisation Liberty. But of course she didn’t. It was founded eighty years ago, by some other people who have never been honoured. Nor was she responsible for the name change from
There is something a little dispiriting about the furore over the Olympic women’s beach volleyball competition. Howls of anguish have greeted the suggestion that if our weather does its usual business in August, and rains, the nubile young women will feel inclined to dress in the manner of the Saudi women’s team, i.e. swathe themselves
Will we soon see Harriet Harman shopping in Iceland while wearing a shell-suit and sporting, just above the cleft of her buttocks, the tattoo of a leaping dolphin? The fragrant one has been assuring journalists of her bona fide blue collar credentials. Well, actually, in fairness, that’s not quite what she said. She merely insisted
It’s always nice when a married couple are able to share a hobby – even if it is, in the case of Shasta and Mohammed Khan, trying to blow up Jewish people. These two imbeciles, from Oldham, have now been convicted of planning terrorist attacks which they intended to effect with hairdressing chemicals and chapatti
John Terry — the gift that keeps on giving. It is not enough that this stoic and rat-faced footballer should have provoked the most absurd and hilarious court case I have yet seen. Now it looks like there’ll be another one, perhaps even funnier, predicated upon a reaction to the fact that he wasn’t convicted of
I shall be ringing the Crown Prosecution Service later today to insist that they bring a prosecution against the footballer Rio Ferdinand for having concurred with a tweeted suggestion that his colleague Ashley Cole was a ‘choc ice’. The term is deeply racist and offensive, given to mean that the person is black on the
It’s easy to be complacent about human rights. We commend ourselves for passing laws that are designed to ensure that, for example, gay people are not discriminated against, or subject to abuse and derision as a consequence of their sexual orientation. We pat ourselves on the back, cheered by our own civility. And yet is
I have been racking my brains to come up with new and imaginative ways of taunting the lower orders about their hilarious lack of wealth recently. Nothing I have come up with, however, quite beats the decision to let Sir Martin Sorrell — one of Britain’s richest people, and a brave and stoic defender of
I’ve just received email notification of a debate I sadly missed at the East London Mosque entitled ‘Was Jesus a Muslim Prophet or a Christian God?’ The email came from a thoughtful chap called Abdullah Al Andalusi who informs me that the speakers tended towards the former, rather than latter proposition. Indeed, there was a
Imbecilic leftie authoritarians are whining again about being called nasty names by people with less power than them. Exhibit A is the fabulously stupid Islamist Mehdi Hasan, once of the New Statesman and now of the Huffington PostUK, whatever that is. Here’s the emetic opening sentence of his article in today’s Guardian (under the headline
A rather wonderful spat in the always mysterious and interesting democratic republic of homosexuals. On one side, the excellent lesbian writer Julie Bindel, on the other side, St Peter Tatchell. The point at dispute is London’s Gay Pride March: Peter likes it a lot and was there this year as usual. Julie thinks it’s become
Who should we get to sort out our venal and cavalier bankers? It’s an interesting question. The Labour party wishes to inflict upon them a plague of lawyers, to use Jeremy Bentham’s apt expression, presided over by some bewigged and self-regarding judge. A judicial inquiry, then, which will end up costing the equivalent of a
The job of George Entwistle, the new Director General of the BBC, will be to manage a gentle decline, rather than hurtling with great enthusiasm towards a state of inexistence. A very ticklish balance needs to be maintained on the issue of the BBC’s moral cross subsidisation – that is, the extent to which the
The opinion on Paul Simon’s famous Graceland album seems finally to have swung 180 degrees from where it once was. Simon recorded the music — which has just bee re-released — with black African performers (mostly) in South Africa in 1986 and was of course castigated by the authoritarian left for ‘breaking’ the cultural boycott
Suddenly, unexpectedly, this is becoming the Summer of the PIGS. The balance of power inside the EU has shifted with Francois Hollande’s election victory. Now the bone idle and impecunious southern nations – Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain – are being spared the German hairshirt and workhouse treatment. Instead, the new mantra seems to be
Have you seen much on the BBC news about the persecution and indeed murder of Syria’s Christian population by the liberal-minded and agreeable rebel forces who are not at all Islamist maniacs allied to al-Qa’eda? Nope, me neither. There was a short report in April about the Christians fearing that they might be ‘caught in
I’ve always rather taken the George Best line on David Beckham’s footballing abilities: ‘He cannot kick with his left foot, he cannot head a ball, he cannot tackle and he doesn’t score many goals. Apart from that he’s all right.’ But you have to say nonetheless – Beckham’s a thoroughly likeable and decent bloke and
What is it, do you suppose, that Tony Blair has learned in the five years since he ceased to be Prime Minister that would make him a better Prime Minister now? That the Brazilians speak Portuguese, perhaps — this was a fact apparently unknown to him hitherto. What else? Blair has done an interview with
If England had won that penalty shoot out against Italy it would have been a travesty. The press has been very kind to the national team this morning, partly because — as we kept being told — ‘expectations were low’ and partly because everyone still likes (with some justification) Roy Hodgson. But from the middle
