Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
Let’s get the following out of the way first: Assad is a brutal authoritarian and Syria is not a democracy. In particular, the shelling of Homs has been an outrage. But. What proportion of the Syrian people are in favour of the uprising and support the rebel army? All of them? Most of them? Or
I don’t know if you watched the show, but there was a bravura performance from the British historian Simon Schama on Newsnight last Thursday evening. He spent much of the time furiously condemning the venality and greed of the bankers in accepting large bonuses. He was, for a while, wracked by a sort of camp
This is a bit of a non-blog really, so apologies for that. Just that if you get a chance to buy the magazine this week, turn to Tanya Gold’s restaurant review first. She’s done The Grand Hotel, Brighton and it’s the best bit of writing I’ve seen for a bit, here, there or anywhere. The
How can we help the talented writer Rachel Cusk to overcome the extraordinary hurt she has suffered as a consequence of losing her family and, far more importantly, her feminist identity? Mrs Cusk has been explaining, at some length, and repeatedly, to like-minded souls at the Guardian the anguish occasioned by the apparent disappearance of
I have been asked, rightly enough, to use obscene language a little less frequently on these pages. This is something which I have strived to do. But there’s a problem, because this morning I read an article written by the actor Sean Penn, about the ‘Malvinas/Falklands’ dispute, and cannot find any way in which I
A short observation on terminologies. You will be aware that whatever is happening to our weather was originally designated as a consequence of ‘global warming’. This then became ‘climate change’ when it was evident that freezing winters did not fit easily into the original thesis. Later, the phrase ‘climate change denier’ was popularised to demonise
A rotten week for Richard Dawkins in his battle against God. He began it by being kebabed on the Today programme by the former Dean of St Paul’s, Giles Fraser and ended it skewered by Camilla Long in an interview (£) for The Sunday Times. Long cannily exposed his shrillness, his monumental arrogance, his tetchiness. It
Metropolitan police officers have been asked to write a poem celebrating the wonderful diversity of our capital. The winning entrant will get to have ‘elevenses’ with the Met’s Head of Diversity, a nice lady called Denise Milani. This is too entrancing a prospect to pass up. So, given that the poem will come from a policeman’s
Hamza Kashgari opted for the wrong stopover; hell, it happens. I don’t know what the flight options are for Riyadh to Wellington but if I’d been in Hamza’s shoes I’d have tried to ensure the plane didn’t touch down in Kuala Lumpur, of all places. A non-stop flight would have been much better — but
The free movement of labour and capital — don’t you just love it? Our unemployment rate is now 8.4 per cent, the worst in sixteen years. But, paradoxically, there isn’t an enormous problem with unemployment — or at least there shouldn’t be. Take the following two figures and you’ll see why: Last year’s total of
For the magazine this week I’ve written about the plight of the young Saudi journalist Hamza Kashgari, who faces a possible death penalty for having ‘tweeted’ something about that bloke Muhammad. His comments were wholly anodyne, but now a sort of maniacal combination of fundamentalist Islam and Twitter has done for him — and he
The filth confiscated hundreds of cut-out-n-keep mock Ku Klux Klan masks which supporters of Manchester United had intended to wear to herald the visit of Liverpool. The implication behind the stunt being that Liverpool is a racist club, as evidenced by its support for the ‘orrible little scrote Luis Suarez. So, now it is not
So RIP Ray Honeyford, the former headmaster of the Drummond Middle School in Bradford. He died on February 5; he had not worked in teaching since the anti-racccccccccisst left forced him out of his job in the middle of the 1980s. His crime was to have insisted that the Asian kids in the school receive
It’s not all doom and gloom, then. A new study suggests that we are turning into aborigines — or Indigenous Australians, to use the more acceptable term. Various anthropological investigations have depicted aborigines as being remarkably cheerful, laid-back and contented, all of which are admirable qualities. They also have a tendency to defecate wherever they
It’s not snowing again. This is the fourth day running it’s not snowing again and I live in one of the most ‘badly affected’ areas south of the Wash. By badly affected I mean that all of the roads, even the single track lanes on top of a hill where I live, are entirely free
The England manager Fabio Capello is both right and wrong about John Terry. Right because it was stupid and, as Terry Venables says, ‘knee-jerk’ of the Football Association to remove the captaincy from the rat-faced little scrote. That’s up to the manager, a man disinclined to give a clamorous press what it wants. Wrong, because
Rowan Williams’s would-be successors have begun jostling for position. One stands out Who shall be the next Archbishop of Canterbury, do you suppose? They are jockeying for position at the moment, suffused with godliness and the distinct suspicion that old beardie has had more than enough and may wish to shuffle off to a warm
Do we have a right to know why the football manager Gary Speed killed himself, if indeed he did kill himself? I’m not convinced. There’s a typically thoughtful and ruminatively controversial article by Stephen Glover in today’s Daily Mail. Stephen is critical of the inquest into Speed’s death, pointing out that the coroner was less
Does anyone, anywhere, understand the Labour Party’s position on the government’s intention to cap welfare benefits? I ask as a member of the Labour Party who is, of course, anxious to spread the message far and wide but is worried by what seem to be certain, um, inconsistencies of approach. So, on Question Time last
I was on a plane once that malfunctioned as it was trying to take off from JFK Airport in New York. There was a horrible screeching noise and some smoke and the thing skidded to a halt with its nose poking out over Long Island sound. Trucks pulled up alongside us and sprayed stuff. I