Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
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‘The more Ukrainians that play in the national league, the more examples for the young generation — let them learn from Shevchenko or Blokhin and not some Zumba-Bumba they took off a tree, gave him two bananas and now he plays in the Ukrainian league.’ — Ukraine coach Oleg Blokhin, 2006 There you are, you
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The great thing about the Leveson inquiry is that every so often it offers us the opportunity for that most lovely and undervalued of sensations, nostalgia. I hope that you, like me, revelled in that strange Scottish man’s performance yesterday — the man who, incredibly, used to be in charge of us all. It took
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Sad to hear of the death of Ray Bradbury, although he enjoyed a good long life. He was a wonderful writer. Rather better, I think, than the more fashionable Philip K. Dick — certainly Bradbury was the superior story teller, and his fiction was as much about what it is to be human as the
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Was the BBC’s coverage of the Jubilee celebrations really as awful as all the papers seem to say it was? I’ve always rather liked Sophie Raworth, yet she and her colleagues come in for a terrible pasting — especially from the Mail of course. But I’d be interested to hear your views. Also on the
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Can you explain, briefly, why some people are prejudiced against Jews? It’s an interesting question. My late mum was a bit anti-Semitic, and I always found her mild animus incomprehensible and indeed weird, as did my father. It surfaced during the Yom Kippur War, when I was 13: my dad and I were urging on
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The economy’s not looking terribly good, is it? Manufacturing has sunk to a three year low, rather worse than anyone expected — and the Eurozone crisis is only partly to blame. I note that our manufacturing sector now constitutes just ten per cent of the economy. One reason for this is that it has been
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Good piece by Mark Lawson in The Guardian today about the ghastly Eurovision song contest, which I trust you enjoyed as much as I did. These were, by some margin, the worst songs I have heard in a contest which is renowned for its awful songs. Ours was worse than most, and delivered badly by
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It’s not looking terribly good for Baroness Warsi, the co-chairman of the Conservative Party, is it? She has apparently claimed £165 per night subsistence allowance expenses whilst staying rent free in a mate’s house (who also, apparently, lived there rent free). The Baroness has said she made appropriate payments, but the owner of the flat
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At last, BBC Radio 4 has reconciled itself to the great importance of the graffiti artist and music performer Goldie. He has been named as one of the station’s ‘New Elizabethans’, alongside the likes of Sir Edmund Hillary, Graham Greene, Margaret Thatcher and the Queen. The qualification for admission to this gilded list is as
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I wonder if our government will demand more information and threaten reprisals over the case of the two ‘British citizens’ killed by the Syrian Army? Or if, instead, it won’t say very much at all and just deny they are British? This was a story which emerged over the weekend but has not gained very
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For all their cosmetic bluster about bonuses, our national politicians have never really stood up to the banks: it takes a bloody minded local politician to do that — and win. So some sort of award is surely due to Nader Fekri, the mayor of Calderdale. He attempted to withdraw cash from a NatWest ATM
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A young British lady called Rebecca Black is facing charges in Dubai of having ‘naked sex’ in the back of a local taxi cab, with some Irish bloke. Rebecca, for her part, vehemently denies the charges. It’s a tough one to call: on the one hand, this is Dubai, so ‘naked sex’ may well mean
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Was there a ‘racial’ or ‘cultural’ angle to the crimes committed by those nine exclusively Asian men from Rochdale sentenced to between four and 19 years in prison for sexually abusing young white girls? Or was it simply a weird coincidence that we should all promptly forget about? There are plenty of people in the
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The government is being petitioned to get rid of Section Five of the 1986 Public Order Act, which effectively makes it a crime to be rude to anyone. David Davis is one of the MPs who is fighting for a repeal; so too, from other quarters, the Peter Tatchell Foundation, the National Secular Society and
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I met a very interesting chap while doing my weekly video film for the Sunday Times. This was Dr Peter Mullen, Rector of St Michael, Cornhill. He hove into view like a disreputable clergyman from a lateish Graham Greene story, dog collar, strange hat, impish grin. He has just written a book — The Politically
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Is the reality television programme The Only Way Is Essex turning British girls into an army of feckless, drunken, sluts who are perpetually up the duff and care about nothing more than alcohol, drugs and money? Or were they of that disposition anyway? The Girl Guides blame the repulsive TOWIE, having commissioned a survey that
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So, who is to blame for the Conservative party’s supposedly appalling showing in last week’s council elections? The party leaders seem to have concluded that the loss of Birmingham and Southampton councils and more than 400 councillors nationwide is somehow down to the poofs, and their incessant clamouring to be allowed to marry one another.
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My column in the magazine last week was about a PR outfit called Awards Intelligence which helps companies and individuals win various pointless vanity awards — everything from business awards up to OBEs and knighthoods. I asked them if they’d help me get a knighthood, because I’m worth it. Yep, they said, that’ll be £3,900
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Another example of the new and commendable ‘tough love’ approach adopted by health workers. In a sense, the case of nurse Sally Miller epitomises this new movement within the NHS: the old, discredited and soppy notions of care and compassion is jettisoned in favour of an abrupt, no-nonsense vigour. Responding to a patient who, tiresomely,
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Remarkable story about our top civil servants: they are all using the ‘private company’ loopholes to avoid paying the correct rate of tax, and have been doing so for some time. At least two thousand of the monkeys and that’s before you count the same level of management bureaucrats in the NHS and of course
