Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
A teacher once told me that he couldn’t stand Pakistanis ‘because of the smell’. I was 13 at the time and it was during a classroom debate about immigration: he was very much agin, I was for. It struck me, suddenly, that he was very stupid – an astonishing realisation, as I was accustomed to
‘No one has the right to judge you’ was one of the last posts made on Facebook by Staffordshire ‘mum’ (as the papers are calling her) Carla Foster shortly before discovering that, strictly speaking, this wasn’t quite true. It may well be the mantra by which everybody lives their lives these days, used to justify
The recreational use of psychedelic drugs, such as LSD or peyote, declined with some rapidity from the 1980s onwards as drug-users instead snorted up cocaine’s great gift of untrammelled narcissism. And yet the desire to live in a weird fantasy land did not quite disappear – far from it. Today, if you tell people that
Exciting news arrives. The Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, has let it be known that he wants more northerners nominated for honours, as part of the ‘levelling up’ programme to which this government is so deeply committed. This will change every-thing and I foresee a Conservative majority at the next election of at least 200. I
Iam on the horns of a dilemma, I am in a moral quandary. I had intended to spend this morning reporting a hate crime to the Metropolitan Police regarding the Theatre Royal Stratford East and the forthcoming appearance by a duo called Tambo & Bones. According to the blurb, this performance invites the audience to
I had the sudden suspicion, at about ten o’clock on Saturday night, that I was the only straight male in the United Kingdom watching the Eurovision Song Contest. Or perhaps the only one watching it voluntarily. A little later a Dutch presenter, when reporting her country’s scores, said: ‘Hello girls and gays.’ It wasn’t a
Three years ago this week marked my first misgivings about the government’s Covid lockdown. Sure, I was late to that particular party – my wife, for example, had been carping viciously for the previous two months. But my rational assessment of lockdown was perhaps tilted by the gentle, bucolic magic of the thing itself. I
Marooned in London for a day between meetings, I walked for miles in an attempt to find something good to say about the city. This was not a wholly unsuccessful expedition – those Nash terraces have an allure, Regent’s Park has been cutely de-manicured to encourage the wildlife and it was possible to buy a
Grade: B– Chugga-chugga, grawch, chugga-chugga. Never mind 72 seasons, it’s actually been a little over 500 seasons since Metallica first started bestowing their peculiarly Los Angeles brand of heavy metal – shiny, taut and smooth – on a grateful audience of dispossessed lower-middle-class white incels. And nothing very much has changed. They have got better,
I thought I had forgotten about Diane Abbott, but in fact there has been a Diane-sized hole in my life and I only properly realised this when she came back, gloriously, to fill it again. Hitherto I had been going about my business, writing columns, cooking for my family and so on, and perhaps to
For people who take politics seriously and very earnestly, such as myself, the present debacle within the Scottish National party is surely a time of great sadness and disappointment, rather than of jumping up in the air, screaming ‘Ha ha ha, suck it up, you malevolent ginger dwarf!’ and breaking open the champers. Gloating in
The journos weren’t very impressed with Nicola Sturgeon’s house. Never mind the plod staring like morons at her barbecue or heaving out sacks of half-completed pools coupons to their summer marquee on the front lawn – the southern hacks were more interested in the paucity of this real estate. Her house was, we were assured,
It is with great sadness that I must report the departure of the world’s only female head of state who is as fit as a butcher’s dog, Sanna Marin of Finland. Sanna’s Social Democrats – plus her allies in various awful left-wing parties – have seen their votes slump as the Finns turn to the
Grade: A– No, Lana, I didn’t, thank you – all cleared up. The most extravagantly talented of that lachrymose, self-harming genre, miserycore, returns with an album described by critics as ‘heavy’, as if we might have expected Mungo Jerry or the Venga Boys. The difference between Del Rey and the rest of those dispossessed chicks
Have you had your fourth Covid booster jab yet? They are being very quiet about it these days. I used to be bombarded with injunctions to attend my local clinic, but not any more. This is a shame because a new study suggests that unless I am properly up to date with my injections, I
Wyndham Lewis once said that ‘the ideas of a time are like the clothes of a season’ – but that, of course, is not how they are seen by liberals today. They are regarded immutable, inviolable, permanent and not up for argument. This is especially the case when they are demonstrably counter-factual, such as in
There was a kind of peak BBC Radio 4 moment last week when the network put on a play called Bess Loves Porgy. As you might have guessed, this was a rewrite of Porgy and Bess, the twist being that Porgy was a black, disabled grime rap artist in south London. I hope it went
I am at a bit of a loss to understand the hoo-ha about the civil servant Sue Gray. She has been offered the role of Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, and many Tories suggest this implies that her investigation into those Downing Street parties may not have been wholly neutral. Where have these Tories
You want some tomatoes? Come up here, we’re inundated. We’ve got a tomato mountain. That’s because nobody in the north of England eats salad vegetables, yet the government keeps sending up vast lorry-loads of the stuff to stop us dying of diabetes. So much of what we were forbidden to say about Covid has turned
A little late in the day, perhaps, it has been pointed out to the intellectual colossi of South Tyneside Council that the Vikings may have been a bit right-of-centre and therefore ripe for a spot of cancelling. There is a statue, you see, of a couple of these marauding Norsemen outside a shopping centre in
