Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
So, two years in prison for the members of Pussy Riot as a consequence of their foul and insulting behaviour inside a church. The western world is outraged and takes the severity of the sentence as evidence that Russia is a totalitarian state where everyone does as Putin wants. Thank God we’re not like that over here, huh?
There are some things to be said in favour of the planet Mars. Its atmosphere contains almost no oxygen, the temperature in winter reaches minus 143˚C, it is exceptionally arid and dusty, and any human travelling to the place would receive sufficient solar radiation to be lit up like a Russian dissident. My problem with
If you get a chance, try to pick up the latest Civitas book: Mind Forg’d Manacles. By Jon Gower Davies, it’s an analysis of the effect of the Macpherson report into the death of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence and the aftermath. Davies is rightly tough on Macpherson and swats away the charge of “institutional
I have hugely enjoyed the French verdict on London 2012: the whole thing was botched and all our athletes cheated. They really are the most ghastly people. The only positive thing about France, on a personal note, is that if the country did not exist I would have been more likely to have been in
The Grauniad is running an Olympic medal table to show where all the countries would be if it was weighted for GDP. Needless to say, we do not figure, nor less the yanks. It is a reminder that we are rich scum and our victories have been achieved on the backs of the poor, the
The London 2012 Olympics, seen from a distance of more than a thousand miles, is a peculiar, shimmering thing. Our capital city dominates the news every night but, for reasons which I cannot explain, the Croatians are not exultant about the fact that we have won lots of gold medals at rowing and stuff. It
Sorry I haven’t been blogging much recently – I’m on the annual family holiday. We’re in Croatia, on one of those islands they’re terribly proud of, roasting like pigs on a spit. Truth is I’ve regularly surfed the papers online to find something interesting to write about, but the only thing that seems to be
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
