Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
As you are no doubt aware, I am an intensely private person, and for this reason I hope that you can understand my decision not to have declared a very large amount of income tax to the Inland Revenue over the last seven years. This was money I earned writing for publications which I would
I became a monarchist in the late afternoon of 19 November 2009; a dark and chilly day, damp brown leaves blowing balefully along the gutters, the smell in the air of a hard winter to come. This ended more than 30 years of what I considered principled soft-leftish republicanism; the notion that however practically effective
So, three weeks in and Vince Cable has resigned his position of deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats – ostensibly because he will be “too busy” to undertake the non-duties demanded by the post. Do you swallow that? I’m not sure that I do. Meanwhile, David Davis has emerged with guns blazing over the proposed
Hello – a pleasure to be back, having spent a week in Italy, a country which believes itself to be a part of the European Union. Charming people, very pleasant place, you must try it, if only to enjoy the spectacle of grown men pottering around on scooters eating ice-cream. I think I mildly prefer
No, says Rod Liddle, in fact it was against it — but you won’t see the Press Complaints Commission punishing the Mail on Sunday for breaching its own code You know as soon as you see the posed photograph of some sweetly smiling young and hitherto unknown bint on the front page of your morning
I’m due to fly to Italy with British Airways tomorrow morning for a wedding later in the week. The flight is in some doubt because of that bloody ash cloud from Iceland. So I did as BA want its customers to do and checked the “volcanic ash update” at BA.com. This told me that the
Why can’t Alastair Campbell understand that proper journalists aren’t partisan and malevolent, asks Rod Liddle. Most of them just genuinely want to uncover the truth Who were you rooting for in the real political battle of the week, Adam Boulton of Sky News versus Alastair Campbell? It didn’t quite come to a ruck, which is
Fixed term election? Five years? Can anyone, aside from Clegg, see this arrangement lasting longer than, say, next Friday afternoon at about four o clock? Can you really imagine inner city Lib Dem MPs, and those in the former north west cotton belt, supporting the sorts of cuts we will see in the emergency budget?
Many thanks for all those of you who have submitted hilarious examples of the most ludicrous, stomach-churning balls spoke during that bizarre election campaign. I know I promised to have a result by Friday morning but I was still drunk as a consequence of celebrating the result in Redditch, so many apologies. It was a
Did you vote for change, then? Or did you, as David Cameron put it during the second of those frigid televised leaders’ debates, vote for ‘hope, not fear’? I decided in the end to vote for fear, as I’ve never been very keen on hope. I think hope is overrated, if we’re honest, whereas there
So much epic bilge has been talked in these last four weeks that it will take me a long time to sort through the posts to find the most spastically stupid contribution. But expect a decision by nine o clock Friday morning. Obviously there have been some important entries since my last post on the
One small piece of cheer for Gordon Brown as he heads towards annihilation is that he no longer has the support of The Guardian. That leaves it slightly easier for others of us to vote Labour. The Guardian has never been a party of the left, but instead one of the metro liberal faux left.
A swan won’t take your eye out, says Rod Liddle. So why the health and safety paranoia? Never mind hung parliaments and the ending of the two-party dominance of British politics (a notion I seem to remember being mooted in about 1982) — here’s the important question of the week: was the BBC right to
What question should I ask David Miliband on tomorrow’s (Friday) edition of the Campaign Show on BBC News? All contributions gratefully received, even those which are not obscene or make references to the Liebore Party, etc etc. There may be another politician on the show who will keep you amused for a while. In the
I suppose it is the perfect expression of how and why the Labour Party has lost the white working class vote in the last fifteen years; it has only contempt for them. Opposition to immigration – as we know from Neathergate, well before Bigotgate – is seen by Labour has being rooted in a stupid
I’m a bit late to this, so apologies, but there’s a very good piece in the current issue of the magazine by Andrew M Brown, about why almost everybody is fat. Andrew suggests that as a consequence of the class system breaking down, we no longer know when we are supposed to eat and so,
What should we do about Steven Mulvain, the young civil servant who suggested that the Pope, when he arrives for his visit here, should be asked to open an abortion clinic, or sponsor a new brand of “Benedict” condoms? If you haven’t already read about the case, here it is. Mulvain’s email is certainly typical
I find the way the Prime Ministerial debates have been spun by the media and commentators more interesting than the debates themselves. It seemed clear to me that Gordon Brown was the real loser of the first debate, as all the post-event polls suggested, and yet the media – even the Tory papers – stuck
It doesn’t matter what the Lib Dem leader stands for, says Rod Liddle. In the era of X Factor politics, people can decide, on a whim, that he should be Prime Minister Is Nick Clegg better than Winston Churchill, as a recent opinion poll seemed to suggest? The obvious answer is yes, of course —
Terrific stuff from Nick Clegg, reported in the Daily Mail here. Nick suggests Britain has a misplaced sense of superiority as a consequence of winning the second world war, should recognize that Germany has become a “vastly” more prosperous country and that we have a “greater cross to bear” than the Germans for the events
