Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.

Was it in the public interest to stitch up Lord Triesman?

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

From the ashes

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

The real political fight was Boulton v Campbell

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

Surely this’ll kill the Lib Dems

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?

Nail a cretin – the winner(s)!!!!

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

After all the fuss, will anything actually change?

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

Nail a Cretin and Win Some Bubbly – final chance

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 crumb of comfort for Gordon

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.

The Asbo swan of Cambridge: a fable for our time

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 would you like me to ask David Miliband?

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

Labour’s contempt for the white working class

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

Delaying gratification

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,

Maladroit Mandy

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

Rod Liddle

The elevation of Nick Clegg shows we’ve reached a new low

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 —

Our cross to bear

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

Taking on the Dear Leader of Stoke Newington

I notice that the journalist Suzanne Moore is standing against Diane Abbott in Hackney North and Stoke Newington. Good for her. I know some of you may consider an Abbott-Moore contest to be on a par with, say, Gaddafy versus Assad, but Suzanne is at least not a hypocrite. She’s got a fight on her

Eh? Support for the BNP has nothing to do with immigration?

A quite bizarre report from the IPPR which attempts to prove that it is not immigration which tempts people to vote BNP, but a lack of “resilience”. This fatuous word, resilience, is used more and more by government and quangos and local councils, usually to transfer blame to ordinary people for the crimes of those

The contempt that the two main parties are held in

Anyone seen any political posters up in windows and gardens etc? I’ve been around a few constituencies and have seen one placard – for the Tory candidate for Redditch – in a field on the edge of her territory, and that’s it. The general lack of enthusiasm for this election at least in part explains