Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.

Monday

Rod Liddle

In celebration of Gordo

From our UK edition

I know most of you are very glad to see the back of him, but as we watch the EU crumble before our eyes, we all have reason to be grateful to Gordon Brown. Joining the Euro was Tony Blair’s supposed “big project” of his second term but he was thwarted at every step of the way by his chancellor. Not least by Brown’s invention of those “five economic tests” which set the conditions for joining the single currency and which were, as we knew at the time, a lengthy synonym for “when hells freezes over”. It may well be that the main motivation for keeping Britain out was pure and untrammelled spite on Gordon’s part, but hell, whatever it takes.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

The Twitter martyrs are true subversives

From our UK edition

‘Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high.’ — Paul Chambers, on Twitter. ‘Can someone please stone Yasmin Alibhai-Brown to death. I shan’t tell Amnesty if you don’t. It would be a blessing.’ — Gareth Compton, on Twitter. ‘Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high.’ — Paul Chambers, on Twitter. ‘Can someone please stone Yasmin Alibhai-Brown to death. I shan’t tell Amnesty if you don’t. It would be a blessing.’ — Gareth Compton, on Twitter. First, the context.

Wednesday

Rod Liddle

Months of vapid, pointless shit

From our UK edition

I had just got to the stage where I quite like the Royal Family. Especially Phil. It’s been a gradual thing, over the last fifteen years or so. I sort of ideologically don’t approve but they annoy so many awful people that it seems churlish not to give them one’s support. And it is true that if it were not for them, we would have some time serving over-promoted humourless bore like Baroness Ashton as President. But this conversion to monarchism is now under threat: we are about to have a Royal Wedding. I saw my wife last night watching an hour of the most vapid, pointless shit imaginable about Wills and Kate, or whatever they are called. Geordie Greig (who he, ed) explaining that Kate helped William to relax. Howja know that, you Bagpuss faced scullion?

Tuesday

Rod Liddle

I think they meant well…

From our UK edition

Remembrance Sunday was observed scrupulously at football grounds across Britain, except of course at horrible Celtic, where the fans did their usual anti-British spite and venom and held aloft banners saying that we “shamed devils in hell,” etc. And then there’s Airdrie. A mate spotted their programme for the weekend’s home fixture against Livingston. I THINK they meant well.

Monday

Rod Liddle

At last, a new approach to international aid

From our UK edition

Did the government pay money for the release of the poor Chandlers, that elderly couple who decided to do a spot of yachting off the coast of Somalia? Indirectly, without question. What passes for a government over there, the Somali Federal Republic, has confirmed that some of the £30m aid we bunged the country recently had been passed on to Mr and Mrs Chandler’s kidnappers, in the form of a ransom payment. I suppose they thought they were helping matters by making this admission, and that we’d be pleased that some of the money we give them actually produces tangible results for two British people.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

The stupidity of Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

From our UK edition

The Yasmin Alibhai-Brown business is quite remarkable, isn’t it? She takes herself on to Radio Five Live to make her usual sententious and ill-thought out views on the stoning of Muslim women. Western politicians are not morally qualified to condemn such stonings, she said, because they’ve killed lots of Muslim women with bombs etc. Now, this is a typically stupid assessment, for all the obvious reasons. It implies that the allies were not morally qualified to condemn Nazi atrocities because they killed some of the very same people, largely inadvertently, with bombs and so on. It is, like the rest of YA-B’s journalism, an Aunt Sally argument scarcely worth the effort of rebutting.

Rod Liddle

Why not make the children of the unemployed work, too?

From our UK edition

I suppose I am past the point in life where, as Gore Vidal put it, litigation takes the place of sex. I have consulted lawyers at least 12 times so far this year, which easily exceeds the amount of times I have engaged in mutual sexual activity. Even on my birthday I rang a lawyer and did not have sex. As it happens sex was on offer, as a special treat — along with the cake with its 50 bloody candles, each one lit with malevolent glee by my wife — but I had somehow wrenched my knee out of joint and any form of movement caused excruciating pain and a sinister, strangely synthetic popping noise from within the wrecked joint. You cannot have sex under those conditions; you cannot have sex while hopping. Or at least you can, but only with a kangaroo.

Friday

Rod Liddle

The revolution will not be banned

From our UK edition

If you fancy a laugh, and have the time to spare, check out the website for REVOLUTION, aka Permanent Revolution, the Trot group some of whose members smashed up Conservative Central Office this week. You might also check out Workers' Power, the Trot group from which REVOLUTION split a year or two back for the usual Pythonesque ideological reasons. Both are, I think, members of the Fifth International, unless they’ve already split from that too. Of course they are committed to overthrowing the oppressive capitalist system by force and handing power to the worrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrkkkkiing classs. Their members are called Laura and Emily and James and and Giles and they have never ever met anyone from the working class.

Wednesday

Rod Liddle

Endemic human rights abuse 

From our UK edition

Of course China is not the only country in the world to which we apply duplicitous standards when it comes to human rights. Saudi Arabia springs to mind, for example. And then there is Pakistan. Yesterday in Lahore a 45 year old Christian mother of five was sentenced to death for the supposed crime of “blasphemy”. It is alleged that Asia Bibi said rude things about the prophet Mohammed, something she fervently denies. Christians are routinely vilified, persecuted and beaten up in the country and while the major Pakistani political parties sometimes offer measured condemnations of such behaviour the perpetrators are almost never brought to justice.

Monday

Rod Liddle

Reconnecting with a left hook

From our UK edition

At last the Labour Party is reconnecting with its core working class vote, and this time in an engagingly direct manner. Paul Farrelly, the MP for Newcastle-under-Lyme punched a newspaper seller in the sports and social club of the House of Commons, leaving him with blood pouring down his face. They also grappled on the floor. It is not recorded, but I hope Harriet Harman or Tessa Jowell were also standing by screaming: “Leave ‘im Paul, jus’ leave ‘im – he ain’t bleedin’ worf it.” The victim, Bjorn Hurrell, has said that he will press charges. Over the weekend Mr Farrelly was telling anyone who would listen that he had been “provoked” and had acted in self defence “just like John Prescott did that time”.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

My sympathies are with the Meedhuffushi One

From our UK edition

It is time we started a campaign to free the Meedhuffushi One, a victim of government persecution. Hussein Didi was arrested and faces prosecution for the crime of having officiated at a hotel ‘wedding’ ceremony on the tiny island of Meedhuffushi in the Maldives. You may have read about his unorthodox benediction to the Swiss couple who paid £830 to have their right to fornicate endorsed fraudulently while they sipped cocktails out of a coconut shell in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Or you may have watched the video online. Either way, it is worth reacquainting ourselves with some of the details, especially those not reported in the press.

Friday

Rod Liddle

Harriet redux – for Mr Nonvexatious

From our UK edition

Sorry – been away, up in Middlesbrough working on a feature and haven’t had time for the usual bloggin’, scurrying between dole office and lovely North York Moors. A brief return to last week’s story about Harman and the gingers. Nonvexatious, in the thread below, insists that there have been no reported cases of red or ginger-haired people successfully claiming discrimination on account of reaction to their unfortunate colouring. Well, of course, there have. One of them is Sarah Primmer who, back in 2007, successfully screwed £17,618 out of an employment tribunal because her colleagues and bosses kept making remarks about her ginger hair.

Monday

Rod Liddle

Harriet – bang ‘er up

From our UK edition

Has Harman not fallen foul of her own legislation, the Equality Act 2010 which this government cravenly enacted almost in full? She has disparaged a colleague on account of his appearance and parentage. This certainly contravenes the section of her fabulously fatuous legislation which outlaws discrimination against colleagues through “association or perception”. Danny Alexander is a colleague even if he is also an opponent. Charge her. Sue her. In The Guardian today Jackie Ashley wonders why it is not ok for Hattie to make a joke about ginger people but perfectly fine for everybody else. She gropes towards the position that it might be because Harman is perceived as being “pious”, but adds that she can be “salty” in real life.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

Harriet the hypocrite

From our UK edition

Harriet Harman has been forced to apologise for having called Danny Alexander a “ginger rodent”. Her “quip” came as the highlight of a speech to the Scottish Labour Party Conference; we in Labour are conservationists, we love the red squirrel, but there’s one ginger rodent we never want to see in Scotland and that’s Danny Alexander. Absolutely fucking hilarious, isn’t it? You deconstruct the painful, laborious joke and look for something funny, or meaningful about it, and there is nothing. Alexander – who may well be an utter arse, I’m sure, and certainly does a passable imitation of one – does not look like a rodent, still less a squirrel.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

Biased BBC?

From our UK edition

Should northerners, with their interminable pies and poverty, be allowed on to the BBC political discussion programme, Question Time? The corporation is being accused of “bias” because last week’s show came from Middlesbrough, a town with high unemployment and a large proportion of public sector jobs due for the axe. The Transport Minister, Philip Hammond, was reportedly “shocked” at the level of hostility towards the government’s programme of cuts. This is either a staggering lack of political awareness or a geographical misapprehension – Philip may have thought that Middlesbrough was somewhere on the South Downs and full of BMWs and Labradors, with a nice pub in the centre where you can get a lovely roast on a Sunday.

Rod Liddle

Sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll is a thoroughly conservative philosophy

From our UK edition

The guitarist Keith Richards is perhaps most famous for having constructed a short and very simple rhythmic musical phrase, over the top of which his colleague Mick Jagger expressed an increasing irritation at being unable to acquire, in both general and specific terms, any kind of ‘satisfaction’ — despite, as he proceeded to explain, repeatedly attempting to do so. The guitarist Keith Richards is perhaps most famous for having constructed a short and very simple rhythmic musical phrase, over the top of which his colleague Mick Jagger expressed an increasing irritation at being unable to acquire, in both general and specific terms, any kind of ‘satisfaction’ — despite, as he proceeded to explain, repeatedly attempting to do so.

Friday

Rod Liddle

Parental guidance for Rod ‘Seacole’ Liddle’s blog

From our UK edition

I just wondered if, henceforth, there should be a parental advisory label at the top of this blog, so that incredibly angry and maybe homicidal Welsh people whose names are almost devoid of vowels can follow it only if they have their parents with them to help. Or better, maybe, I could underscore stuff which is not necessarily meant as a literal truth but is just satire, or irony, or taking the mickey, or a joke, or a confection. Like the people who believed I’d actually killed a cat because I said I’d hanged it from a gibbet in the garden while a bunch of woodmice cheered from a seat, some of them knitting. That didn’t actually happen, odd to say - it was a joke, cat-lovers.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Nice to know our money is being well-spent

From our UK edition

I hope you are as delighted as me at the fact that our financial commitment to overseas aid will increase by more than 30 percent over the next few years. I suspect they’re all leaping up and down with delight in Middlesbrough, Liverpool, Stoke, Cardiff and so on, too, as the dole queues grow longer. I know we don’t have hypothecated taxes, but I like to think that the money I pay will go straight towards the Indian space programme. I’m very interested in space exploration and, as we can’t afford a space programme of our own, it cheers me up to know that we’re helping to fund someone else’s. Last year we gave £300m to India.

Wednesday

Rod Liddle

Sosban fach yn berwi ana tan

From our UK edition

I see that the BBC has been told there will be no increase in its license fee plus it must look after the World Service and S4C. Good.  It should increase the funding to the World Service, which is one of the few things foreigners like about Britain and which pitches its journalism on a comparatively high intellectual level. What to do about S4C, meanwhile, is simple: close it down. Virtually nobody watches it – well, actually, LITERALLY nobody watches it. A recent survey showed that almost 200 of its programmes had zero viewers. What an epic waste of money just to assuage the sensibilities of some of those miserable, seaweed munching, sheep-bothering pinch-faced hill tribes who are perpetually bitter about having England as a next door neighbour.

Rod Liddle

Apologies to Wily Seacole Trout and others. But……

From our UK edition

Delingpole Redux. James has responded to my post in his blog to all those true and fervent non-believers at the Telegraph. The headline reads “Rod Liddle Knows Less About Climate Change Than I know About Millwall”. And there, just about, we have it – as I said, the political correctness of the right, mirroring the political correctness of the left. I don’t know how much JD knows about Millwall. But clearly, having spent more than a year blogging about global warming being a hoax, JD seems to believe he is in receipt of an honorary Phd in non-climate change, presumably a starred first. He is, without question, an unchallengeable expert.