Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
Usually at this time of the year I’m busy at home compiling entrants for the Ronnie Hutton Memorial Prize, a prestigious award which goes to whatever police force has made the most fatuous arrest under the new and superfluous ‘race hate’ legislation. You may not remember, but Ronnie Hutton was the Scottish motorist who, several
I do not entirely understand why the Tory right is demanding a referendum over the latest plans to allow Germany to dictate the economic policies of all countries within the eurozone. I can see why we should have had a referendum over the EU ‘Constitution’ — which did fundamentally change our relationship with the EU
I’ve always found it a little hard to put into words why I don’t like London. It’s an inchoate thing, really, and something which is difficult to express. But I don’t like the place and resent having to go there every so often. I suppose, at root, it’s because there are very few people like
So, Jeremy Clarkson then – or Jimmy Carr Redux. In that thread below quite a few of you fair-minded folk came to the supposedly sensible conclusion that Carr should be allowed to make his jokes and the lobbyists castigate him for it. Well, yes, but that’s to miss the point. If it were simple castigation,
Is it important to know your next-door neighbour’s name if you’re about to send him death threats, hate mail or just post unpleasant allegations about him on a social networking site? My guess is that your campaign of vilification will carry more weight if you can actually give the victim’s full name, rather than just
Your views, please, on the government’s new-found interest in Boris Johnson’s stupid idea of a huge new airport built on the Isle of Grain, in Kent. Johnson, with his recently acquired catamite, Sir Norman Foster, has been agitating for a new airport to be built for half a decade or more. The favoured scheme right
Ah, so this time Jimmy Carr has fallen foul of the increasingly vociferous Down’s Syndrome lobby. A few weeks back it was Gervais, who used the word ‘mong’, provoking fury among the god-awful bien pensant and the pressure groups. Now Carr has told a joke about those Variety Club Sunshine Coaches used to take Down’s
This week I thought I would offer advice on the sort of things one can and cannot say in public without fear of censure. I realise that I may not be the most obvious person, at this moment in time, to offer such a service. Maybe even the last person. But one has to plough
The Guardian has retracted one of the allegations it made about me in its strangely humour-free Pass Notes section on Monday. They said that I had described a footballer as a ‘spearchucking African’, whereas I was quoting what had allegedly been said about the footballer by somebody else and using that quote to justify the
People sometimes ask me, about the stuff I write: ‘Do you ever think that you get it wrong?’ The answer of course is a fervent ‘Yes!’ And even when I don’t actually KNOW that I’ve got something wrong, I’m always plagued with doubt about it. One thing I got wrong recently was the riots. Or
I’ve had a sense of humour failure, in that I find something funny which nobody else does, apparently. I’ve been watching Ricky Gervais’s new comedy, Life’s Too Short, and thought the first episode, in particular, was hilarious. But people really hate Gervais, don’t they? I haven’t yet read a decent review of the programme and
The Sepp Blatter business is interesting, an example of a very modern, very ‘now’ process. That is, the comeuppance arriving for the wrong reason, but the politically correct reason. The most obvious example in the last ten years or so was the shooting of Jean Charles De Menenez on the tube at Stockwell station. The
The typical cowardice of French journalists has prevented us from knowing the full details of that off-the-record chat between Nicolas Sarkozy and President Barack Obama — until now. Hitherto we had to make do with Sarkozy’s rather boring attack upon the Israeli leader Benyamin Netanyahu: ‘I cannot bear Netanyahu, he is a liar.’ To which
That’s it for Theresa May, isn’t it? I realise that Cameron is loathe to lose the woman, especially so recently after having (with rather less anguish) lost Dr Fox. But it seems to me, from what I’ve read, that the case against her seems fairly watertight. Brodie Clark will go to court and sooner or
I see the poor bloke who organised the rugby club firework display near the M5 is being pilloried. The Daily Mail, in particular, was anxious to fling the blame at someone for the appalling pile-up on the motorway which left seven people dead. It immediately alighted upon the fact that there had been a firework
I see that the UK Border Agency has “lost” 124,000 asylum seekers and immigrants. It has done this in exactly the same way in which I deal with begging letters from Cancer Research and that charity that wants you to help the little foreign girl with no lips. Unwilling, out of embarrassment and shame, to
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has at last spoken on the issue of the great St Paul’s Cathedral controversy, which has so far seen the departure of both the Dean of the cathedral and its canon. Dr Williams lamented the loss to the church of both men but added that the ‘issues’ raised by
Wow — two pieces in the mag this week from journalists whining about people being beastly to them on social networking sites. The first, from James Delingpole, correctly identifies Twitter as being characterised by “suppurating vileness”. Yes, that would be right. So why do it? James is a good mate and while we have certain
What is the appropriate sort of language, do you suppose, for the captain of the England football team to use in respect of his colleagues? This is an important issue and I, for one, will not sleep until a sort of resolution — a closure, if you will — has been arrived at. Because we
I think my favourite story of the day concerned the theatre-goers at Stratford-upon-Avon who were outraged that the play they had just seen contained considerable amounts of sex, violence and depravity. The play was Marat/Sade. You’d think the “Sade” bit might have given them a bit of a clue, wouldn’t you? It’s a bit like
