Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
I would like to begin my article this week with a minute’s silence, please, which I would enjoin you to observe respectfully and without feeling the need to chant obscenities. This particular minute’s silence is in respect of the minute’s silence which was not observed appropriately by some football supporters last weekend. That minute’s silence,
Excellent news arrives that Britain’s cats are going mental. Apparently, increasing numbers of them are being struck down by some contagion which renders them robot-like, stiff and deranged in the head. When I say ‘increasing numbers’ that could mean, of course, just two cats. According to the Daily Mail it’s actually ‘a staggering 21 cases’,
Boris Johnson has set an excellent precedent. The mayor of London has banned an advert from appearing on London buses because it is both offensive to some people and its claims are of dubious provenance. The ad in question is the poster from a mentalist Christian group who believe people can be cured of homosexuality.
There was a sort of interesting documentary on BBC4 last night about a genre of popular music called ‘Southern Rock’ — ie what we, back in the 1970s, called Southern Boogie — Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Allman Bros, Charlie Daniels, and so on. It was interesting for mainly two reasons. First it reminded me of how
‘Theoretical perspectives on contemporary cities, with a specific focus on the global nature of urban social and political change and development. The course will consider classic and recent theory and analysis emanating from ‘Northern’ academic and policy contexts, while also challenging western-centric views of the city… The course will equip students interested in urban change
The idiotic Mehdi Hasan has just written a lengthy piece in The Guardian demanding that all Londoners vote for Ken Livingstone in the forthcoming mayoral election. After dismissing Livingstone’s tax avoidance in a few words (yeah, he probably shudda paid more tax), Hasan posits that people have to vote for Ken because if they’re not
I see that the rightish writer John Derbyshire has been sacked by the US conservative magazine for which he wrote, National Review. This is because of a piece he wrote for a different conduit, Taki’s Mag — an online publication run by The Spectator’s own Taki Theodoracopulos. Mr Derbyshire’s article was a response to ‘The
Apologies for my absence from this area: I took my two boys away for an uplifting week of cycling on a windswept and pretty Dutch island. I suppose they might have burned off a few more calories if I’d let them loose in the Rossebuurt for a few hours, but I’m getting respectable and middle
Was the Home Secretary Theresa May half-cut when she started ranting about alcohol in the House of Commons last week? The haste and suddenness of her intervention had the whiff of addled self-disgust about it, the self-pitying fervour of the alcoholic who is determined to get clean. As if she had been bingeing all morning
Interesting stuff on The Guardian’s front page about the newspapers which have made potentially illegal requests to private investigators to track down phone numbers and addresses of people they were stalking. The Daily Mail used a private investigator 1,728 times between 2000 and 2003, which is close to the total amount for every other newspaper
Excellent blog by James Delingpole in the Torygraph on the vexed question What Has Happened To The Archers? Under the aegis of someone called Vanessa Whitburn, the long running Radio Four serial has been turned from an amiable soap about rural people and the gentle inconveniencies with which they battle, into a vision of the
I suppose in time we will all come to terms with our grief over the removal of Dame Liz Forgan as boss of Arts Council England. Although, of course, it will be a great struggle. The Culture Minister Jeremy Hunt has said Dame Liz’s tenure will not be renewed because he wants the council ‘to
Three jobs only a madman would covet, and all of them up for grabs this spring: manager of the England football team, Archbishop of Canterbury and director general of the BBC. Wouldn’t the world be a much happier place if, by May, something weird happened to all the applications and we ended up with John
Fabulous stuff from Ken Livingstone, as reported in the Daily Telegraph. Labour’s mayoral candidate wishes to make London a ‘beacon for Islam’. He was speaking at the Finsbury Park mosque, once the redoubt of Islamist mentalists. According to Andrew Gilligan’s report, the idiot also pledged to ‘educate the mass of Londoners’ in Islam, saying: ‘That
In the magazine last week I wrote about an illiterate Muslim idiot in the north of England who posted on his Facebook site nasty things about the British soldiers killed in Afghanistan, to the effect that they would ‘go to hell.’ For this, he was arrested and charged with some imaginary crime the last government
And so, farewell Rowan — the only Archbishop of Canterbury ever to have suggested that Sharia Law might be a good thing for England. His flailing, his ability to be wrong-footed at every turn, his inconsistency, could not have been better summarised than by his response to the ‘can Christians wear crosses?’ controversy of the
I find myself at a bit of a loss this week, for which apologies. I had hoped to write something inappropriate and threatening about Iran. Or, if not that, then contrasted in a less than sensitive manner the amount of press coverage afforded to that appalling murder of Afghan civilians by a soldier with the
A few weeks ago, in a cover piece for the magazine, Rod Liddle backed John Sentamu as the next Archbishop of Canterbury. Given that Rowan Williams announced his resignation today, here’s that article again: Who shall be the next Archbishop of Canterbury, do you suppose? They are jockeying for position at the moment, suffused with
It’s lasted a lot longer than I had thought, this coalition. I gave it a year, assuming that either the AV referendum would do for it entirely or the Lib Dems would tire of playing grown-ups and revert to type. There is certainly plenty of evidence of the latter. Almost every time Lynne Featherstone opens
I’ve been to West Sussex a number of times and on each occasion have been struck by how stupid the local people are. I don’t mean this unkindly — it’s just how it is. Everywhere you go there are small puddles of drool where the local citizens have stood, wreathed in puzzlement over the simplest
