Rod Liddle

I’ve been in Scarborough, working on a story. Stayed in a perfectly nice hotel and this morning came down for my breakfast. I was greeted at the entrance to the dining room by a waitress who addressed me thus: “Good morning sir. Have you had breakfast before?” I said well, yes, I’m 52, you know. I’ve had loads of them. This response seemed to satisfy her and nothing more was said on the matter. If I’d said no, I’ve never had breakfast in my life, would she have explained to me what breakfast was, do you suppose? Told me about Kellogs and stuff? Very odd. A few months ago I was in South Shields working on a story, and in another perfectly fine hotel.

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 favour of the EU and the single currency. In the end I thought the whole shebang was rather wonderful, despite having carped and cavilled in the days before it started, and fleeing the country for the first week or so. My only quibble is that the closing ceremony, with a couple of notable exceptions, doused the entire world in some of the worst music that has ever been produced, anywhere.

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 happening is people rowing or running or lifting things up and everybody getting themselves into an awful frenzy about winning things and there’s no other news at all. That’s pretty much why we booked our holidays for these particular weeks; the overkill, the obsession, etc.

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 the National Council for Civil Liberties – that happened 16 years before she arrived on the scene. So why was she there? You know, all in all, I really enjoyed the opening ceremony and thought Danny Boyle did a lovely job. But some of this spineless, witless, political correctness actually makes me feel physically sick. D’you know, I wrote a piece a year or so ago about how the Olympic torch would end up being held by Shami Chakrabarti.

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 that she was ‘not as posh as Samantha Cameron’ and not ‘landed gentry’. Harriet was very expensively educated and is the niece of the 7th Earl of Longford — so gentry, then, if not quite landed.

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 flour. Apparently they would drive to Manchester and look at synagogues, seething with rage. “We must kill of them,” Mo told his loving wife on one of these strange trysts. Previously they had been less than radical, preferring to stay at home and watch Coronation Street and Emmerdale on their widescreen HD infidel television.

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 racially abusing another footballer, Anton Ferdinand, as everybody seemed to wish. Some chap ‘tweeted’ that Ashley Cole, who gave evidence on behalf of Terry, was a ‘choc ice’ — and of course now the police are involved. They had to be: it is deeply racist to liken black people to items of confectionery or popular snacks.

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 outside and white on the inside. Similar terms are, I believe, Oreo and coconut. Rio, perhaps realizing his transgression, has since insisted that he meant that Ashley was a ‘fake’; but I think we should let the courts decide that one, shouldn’t we?

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 it not likely that gay people are still discriminated against, and abused? So, we must forever guard against complacency, against hidden or covert or subconscious homophobia. Because it is all to easy to match ourselves against the sort of behaviour that persists in less developed countries, and feel good about ourselves as a consequence, to feel smug and self righteous.