Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
From our UK edition
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
From our UK edition
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
From our UK edition
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
From our UK edition
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
From our UK edition
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
From our UK edition
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
From our UK edition
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
From our UK edition
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
From our UK edition
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
From our UK edition
‘(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
From our UK edition
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
From our UK edition
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
From our UK edition
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
From our UK edition
I’m writing this waiting for Bob. I’ve been waiting for Bob since 27 August, which was when he first promised he’d turn up. Bob lied. He’s lied lots since 27 August about when he’s going to turn up, but every time he gives me a date I sit here transfixed with puppy-dog hope, glancing out
From our UK edition
Interesting comments from Ruth Davidson, the chairthing of the Scottish Conservative Party, about her fellow countrymen. Only twelve per cent of Scots, she says, contribute more to the exchequer than they take out in the form of benefits. “The rest lie around on filthy sofas in subsidised homes, watching daytime television while farting, mainlining heroin
From our UK edition
I have always wanted to be part of that tranche of voters identified by pollsters as being crucial in general elections. But it never happens. Every few years arseholes in fashionable spectacles coin some new description of a bunch of people who they believe hold the keys to 10 Downing Street – and every time
From our UK edition
I’m a bit late with this, as the book has been out a few days or so. But it’s worth getting hold of Mick Hume’s book about newspapers: There is No Such Thing As A Free Press. It’s very good, a timely defence of freedom of the press at the time of Leveson, but rightly
From our UK edition
The West Coast rail franchise balls up is a remarkable kettle of fish, isn’t it? I remember when the successful tender was announced by the government being surprised at the ferocity of old beardy’s rage, and also astonished at the figures he was quoting. Can this be right, I wondered to myself at the time?
From our UK edition
Some dog-munching old thug from Pyongyang has been addressing the United Nations, warning that his country is the ‘world’s hotspot’ and a spark could trigger a thermonuclear war. It’s quite possible I’m wrong about this, as I am wrong about a lot of things, but North Korea worries me far less than one supposes it
From our UK edition
Every so often a story appears in the newspapers which, while it might seem on the surface sensational and arresting, actually leaves you feeling somewhat less than astonished, all things considered. There have been at least two of these stories recently. The first, in the Daily Telegraph, alleged that Scotland Yard was investigating suspiciously large