Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.

Coalition of the wilfully blind

I thought it would take at least three days for these new allies – France, UK, US – to lose the support of the Arab League, upon whose agreement this latest fatuous adventure was predicated. But it took rather less than that; about five minutes after the first Tomahawk had been fired, in fact. Tomorrow,

Has David Dimbleby killed the BNP?

Is this the end for the British National Party? I know that sentence reads like one of those headlines in the Daily Mail to which the answer is always no, like ‘Do tramps give you cancer?’ But things are nonetheless looking a little grim for that doughty and loveable band of white supremacists who, the

Much ado about Midsomer

An interesting case, the issue of Midsomer Murders and the producer (and creator) of the show, Brian True-May, who has been suspended for saying he deliberately kept ethnic minorities out of it to preserve its sense of “Englishness”. I wonder if the real reason he kept them out is that the point of the programme

What am I to do?

Any suggestions as to what I can do about my mother-in-law? She’s an “End-Time” Christian and with the advent of 24 hour news and social networking sites telling us stuff we would never have heard about before or not got too worked up about – shoals of dead fish in Alabama, frogs raining from the

Nuclear alert

I hope the Japanese authorities are telling the truth about the nuclear reactor building which exploded as a consequence of the earthquake. We are told that while the outer shell at the Fukushima plant did indeed explode (as seen on YouTube), the inner core, within its steel cradle, remained apparently unimpaired. In which case, why

Rod Liddle

Whatever your celebrity sins, spare us the false apology

What a pleasure to welcome back into our newspapers that grasping porcine ginger trollop, Sarah Ferguson. It is money, of course, which has seen her return to media prominence; perpetually skint as a consequence of her fabulously extravagant lifestyle and sense of entitlement, she allowed her incalculably thick ex-husband, Prince Andrew, to fix up a

Populus reports an unutterable truth

Some interesting statistics buried away in the excellent Populus survey carried out for the Searchlight Educational Trust (and which received a lot of press attention last week). The headline figure was that 60 per cent of British people (including first, second and third generation immigrants) think that immigration has been a “bad thing” for the

FAO Hexhamgeezer and other Northerners

I was up in your neck of the woods last week – frankly, I expected you to put a bit of a spread on, but there we are. This was a brief break designed to convince the missus that we should move to Northumberland and that, contrary to what she believes, you really can buy

I have little sympathy for expats in Libya

I hate to sound mean-spirited, but does anyone else feel as bereft of sympathy for the British ex pats whining about how ghastly it was in Libya and how useless was our government in getting them out of the place? One hugely annoying woman, a teacher, explained to the news crews how she had suddenly

The curse of bureaucratic self-importance

Good stuff from Ross Clark in last week’s magazine about the extraordinary amounts of money wasted by our local councils, largely – as every newspaper has subsequently reported – on themselves. In a sense while the humungous salaries of the chief executives are indeed infuriating, it is the massive increase in salaries lower down the

Double standards | 13 February 2011

Do Hindus drink cow piss? I know one or two and I’ve never seen them do it, but I suppose it could be the sort of thing they do in private so as to avoid attracting opprobrium. The Channel Four film Dispatches sent an undercover reporter into a Muslim school in Birmingham where it was

Introducing DJ Naughtie and MC Filth. Represent.

Great news  – Radio Four is to employ a bunch of young black working class presenters, to replace all those old middle class white ones. Or at least I assume it is. The BBC Trust has decided that Radio Four is not adequately representing the population as a whole; it is too elderly, and too

Is Baroness Warsi a muscular liberal?

So, does the chairman of the Conservative Party, Baroness Warsi, agree with David Cameron’s statement that British Muslims should do more to weed out extremists from their midst (and therefore with the direct implication that they are not doing enough at the moment)?  And does she agree that multiculturalism is a failed experiment and that

Keep your distance in the Middle East

There was a fabulously daft and self regarding woman called Marina something or other talking about Egypt on Question Time last night. In a prize for the Most Useless Woman Ever to Appear On Question Time she would certainly be in the top five, although probably below Katie Hopkins. I was supposed to be on