Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
Greetings from South Africa, where I am in the township of Orania making a film (hence my radio silence for a few days). Orania is a somewhat right-of-centre Afrikaans-only settlement; more about it in the future. One of the interesting wild animals out here in the Karoo is the Bat-Eared Fox, which is – suitably
Do you have any idea what a decision support analyst actually does for a living? This is a controversial topic because the chief operating officer of the BBC, a woman called Caroline Thomson, was unable to answer the question as to what her own decision support analysts did while they were at work. Truth be
I don’t know what source you use for your news from the US. Some will trust the BBC or Fox, two sides of the same coin. The more achingly modern will go for blogs and stuff. I trust none of it and rely entirely upon No Name Gene, who I met in a bar in
Good point made by Charlie Brooker in today’s Guardian. If the BBC wishes to save a bit of money without affecting quality of output —indeed, by improving it — the corporation should stop making vastly expensive trailers for its forthcoming programmes. Brooker says it “turns him silver with rage” when he sees these specially shot
A slightly belated happy birthday to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who was 80 years old on Friday. I can’t think of many prominent figures from Africa to whom one would gladly wish a long and peaceful life, but Tutu is surely one. It is a moot point as to whether he is more of an irritant
Here’s a tip for nowt: if you’re thinking of travelling to Italy, don’t keep a dildo in your washbag. Here’s a tip for nowt: if you’re thinking of travelling to Italy, don’t keep a dildo in your washbag. Put it somewhere that intimates to the authorities a certain discretion and reserve. You don’t want to
An odd definition of what it is to be a Conservative from the Prime Minister in Manchester yesterday: “We’re consulting on legalising gay marriage. To anyone who has reservations, I say: Yes, it’s about equality, but it’s also about something else: commitment. Conservatives believe in the ties that bind us; that society is stronger when
I’m sorry, this isn’t a proper post. I’ll do one of those later. It’s just that this bit of one of the posts on the Dr Liddle’s Casebook thread made me laugh so much I can’t type straight. “Also should have contacted Moorfields Eye Hospital on the different reasons for having to wear glasses.”
I saw a lizard on Monday, by my backdoor, in the pile of mouldering leaves which I’ve left untouched because the young frogs and toads seem to like it so much. I lifted up a log to see how these creatures were getting on, in the manner of a benevolent deity, and a tiny lizard
Was Florence Nightingale, the lady with the lamp, really a mean-tempered and manipulative old hag who killed huge numbers of British soldiers through crass ignorance? And was she, furthermore, “sexually neurotic”? This is the view that has been portrayed of the woman by a number of recent BBC films, provoking a bunch of nursing academics
There is something attractive about Harriet Harman’s proposal that the leader of the Labour party must, by law, be a lesbian. It is only in the last couple of years that I have been able to accept that lesbians exist at all, so it will be doubly exciting for me to watch this sort of
I got an email from the Fibromyalgia Society this week, urging me to write something about this distressing disease. I did a modicum of research and discovered that it is another one of those imaginary afflictions claimed by malingering mentals. I may be wrong about this, I’m simply reading between the lines of the various
So, like squeezing blood from a stone, Labour has at last admitted that unconstrained immigration from what was once called Eastern Europe made life a lot harder for many British people. Ed Miliband said the following: “What I think people were worried about, in relation to Polish immigration in particular, was that they were seeing
I heard my name mentioned on the Today programme yesterday, which is always nice, to be remembered by your old manor. The journalist Peter Oborne was castigating the propagandist forces, as he saw them, which back in 2000 attempted to convince of the need for greater European integration and joining the Euro. These were, he
Apparently, England recently beat Georgia in something rather ambitiously called the Rugby World Cup. The word ‘world’ is used here in much the same way as the Americans deploy it in relation to other vanishingly unpopular sports such as baseball or American football, i.e. sports which nobody else in the world plays except for the
Oh dear: looks like poor ol’ Boris has got to do one of his famous apologies again. The not terribly good American singer Kelis claimed she was racially abused at Heathrow Airport, when, in the manner of primped up little divas, she jumped a queue. Someone in the queue called her a “slave”, allegedly, and
It was in the autumn of 2005 that the Conservative party finally shed its allegedly ‘toxic’ image and embraced modernity and the values of today’s vibrant and inclusive Britain, all through a single photograph on the front page of a tabloid newspaper. The picture showed the future Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, with a
At some media whore shindig early in the summer I bumped into Michael Gove and asked, politely, if he would mind very much making me the boss of Ofsted. After all, I had once employed him as a reporter – it seemed the least that he could do. He was sadly non-committal; I have waited
The Spectator debate next week is about whether or not we should leave the European Union. Luckily, this is one of the very few issues upon which I am undecided and not possessed of an arrogant and fatuous opinion. Luckily, because I am moderating the debate and therefore am required to be neutral. My objection
A Welsh bloke who snorted half of Bolivia up his nostrils has been told he can carry on his chosen profession – that of a teacher. Huw Davies, who is also a Conservative councillor – which one assumes is how he acquired his stash of gak – was sacked by Brynteg Comprehensive School after being
