Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.

Should the Schonrock kids be allowed to cycle to school?

It’s odd, says Rod Liddle, that we mollycoddle our children while insisting that they can decide what’s right or wrong When I was six years old and on holiday at my grandparents’ house I would spend every day, with a lunch box of egg and cress sandwiches, up at Darlington railway station, watching the trains.

Hope this helps, Dan

I read Dan Hannan’s blog about the recent Spectator debate in which we argued about whether or not Britain was so completely knackered that we all ought to leave the place right now. I thought we should, Dan thought we should hang around for a bit longer. Anyway, on his blog Dan made reference to

The BBC needs to understand why it’s here

I bumped into Alan Yentob at The Spectator party last week. A good man who has both produced and presented some of the BBC’s best programmes over the last few decades. If there wasn’t a BBC, we wouldn’t have those programmes, or anything like them; the BBC exists through a sort of moral cross-subsidisation –

We should all be free to call each other ‘coconut’

I asked my local greengrocer for a couple of blood oranges last weekend. They were to go with an orange cake I’d baked for some left-wing friends who were coming over — a nice left-wing cake, I thought. No flour or butter in it (both right-wing ingredients, historically), just ground almonds, eggs, sugar and oranges.

<style type="text/css"><!-- .hmmessage P { margin:0px; padding:0px } body.hmmessage { font-size: 10pt; font-family:Verdana } --></style>Guardian says blacks are thicker than whites

An interesting piece in The Guardian which suggests that people in warmer, hotter, more southerly countries (they mean Africa but dare not say it) might have lower IQs than people in the north, on account of some mysterious process by which the body devotes too much energy and resources to fighting infectious diseases and not

A vindication?

The Telegraph ran a piece which virtually repeated my blog about young black men and crime figures in London. Here it is. I’ll be writing more about this later in the week, when I’ve tied down a few more details about the original complaint, supposedly from a “private individual” to the PCC about my blog.

Rod Liddle

The blame game | 28 June 2010

The general public seems split in two over who to blame for England’s latest abject failure at the world cup and our consequent exit. People who support one of the big six or seven teams in the Premier League blame the England manager, Fabio Capello. The rest of us blame the players. The division reinforces

Huhne should’ve come out as gay

I’m not quite sure where I stand on the subject of Chris Huhne and his new weird-looking quasi-lesbo missus, Carina Trimingham. I don’t entirely understand why Huhne has copped so much flak for having left his wife, divorce – as I know – being a sort of occupational hazard of the modern middle classes. Huhne

Rod Liddle

Fabio the fall guy

How quickly they’ve all turned, the supposed football experts who, three months ago, were proclaiming Fabio Capello as the greatest manager since Sir Alf. Praising the discipline he imposed upon his team, praising his “flexible” 4-4-2 formation. Two adverse results against crap teams is all it took. Now he was wrong to have been strict

Well done, Stephen Fry

The comedian Stephen Fry has apparently “outraged” millions of people by describing Dr Who as a “kid’s show”. What do these outraged people think it is, then? Wittgenstein’s bleedin’ Tractatus? I suppose there should be no law against adults wallowing in such cheery sub-teen confections (Fry was slightly wrong – it’s a YOUNG kids show.

Rod Liddle

Our kids should be learning Arabic not French

Even the French know the game is up, says Rod Liddle. What’s the point in us teaching their language when, in the end, it will be as obsolete as Cornish It’s a strange thing. Once they have been relieved of office, they start talking a modicum of sense. First we have Ed Balls suggesting that

The case for criminal proceedings

There is something weak and craven in the statements from the half- apologists for the Bloody Sunday killings. In the assertion from Sir Michael Rose that it was British soldiers who brought peace in Northern Ireland, not Tony Blair. In the right wing press showing photographs of British soldiers serving in Afghanistan and insisting look,

Not a pretty spectacle

I suppose it’s a good job we don’t have capital punishment. Having spent the last two days speculating upon ways of executing England’s goalkeeper, Robert Green, I’ve now conceded that it really wasn’t his fault. Every goalkeeper is having trouble holding the ball; invariably shots are spilled and gathered at the second attempt. It is

Monty Hall will change the way you think

Here’s a game to play this evening with your wife or your catamite. It is an incredibly boring game, but it will help you understand the world better than a bunch of Nobel prize-winners and more than 100 mathematical geniuses, who we will come to in good time. Take three cards — an ace and

Immigrants making Germany dumber

I can understand why one might not want to be associated with these comments. I can also understand why, for the same reasons, one would wish to condemn them, with great fervour, to the press. All for pragmatic reasons, of course. But has anyone yet been able to argue against these comments from a position

Abbott wields the knife

When she’s not breaking into her constituents homes and biting their children in the dead of night, Diane Abbott has been busy stabbing her fellow left wing Labour MP, John McDonnell, in the back. It was Abbott who brought to the world’s slightly nonplussed attention the “quip” made by McDonnell about wishing to assassinate Margaret

What to do if a fox attacks your children

I wonder what sort of animal it was that attacked the twin baby daughters of Nick and Pauline Koupparis in Hackney, East London? The Koupparis’s are insistent that it was a fox, but its behaviour sounds more like a wolf or even, perhaps, a basilisk, although there are no previous reports of basilisks in that

Breaking Laws

Have to admit I’m increasingly at a loss over the reaction to the resignation of David Laws by people with whom I usually agree. Matthew Parris, Simon Hoggart, Hugo Rifkind and so on. I can accept that it is sad for Mr Laws, that he is an undoubtedly talented man and so on. Also –