Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.

Monday

Rod Liddle

A vindication?

From our UK edition

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. One quick point – if you read the Telegraph story – is their statement that while I was generally right about most of the stuff, I may have been wrong about knife crime and sexual assault. Well, the figures for knife crime (not quoted by the Telegraph) are 49 per cent, which is not quite a majority to be sure.

Rod Liddle

The blame game | 28 June 2010

From our UK edition

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 my opinion that the Premier League fans are as deluded as the players. That being said, Capello was tactically outwitted with great ease by the sinister looking Joachim Loew. James Milner and Glen Johnson were crowded out, so no crosses came in. We surrendered both flanks to the Germans. And there is something terribly McLarenish in seeing Emile Heskey come onto the pitch when we are 3-1 down. Still, I hope the Germans win the thing. Or Holland or Slovakia.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

Meet the real Diane Abbott — metropolitan, faux-left and middle-class

From our UK edition

Years ago I used to spend one evening a month in some dank and frowzy local authority hall attempting to prevent crazed and scary lesbians from becoming my local MP or councillor. This was during my time as a Labour party activist in south London — and attendance at the staggeringly dull ward meetings was compulsory for a small group of us who hoped that one day the party might select candidates who had not whizzed in from the Kuiper Belt or the Oort Zone, that strange, dark and cold place on the edge of our solar system from which all manner of trouble emanates.

Wednesday

Rod Liddle

Huhne should’ve come out as gay

From our UK edition

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 has been fingered, if you will excuse the phrase, for hypocrisy, in having made various pro-family statements both in the lead up to the last election and years before. But I never heard him say he that he wished to repeal the divorce laws, or that divorce was de facto wrong. I suppose you might question his taste in chicks, but that’s about all. And even then Ms Trimingham might be a warm and loving person, or go like Rommel in the sack.

Monday

Rod Liddle

Address from the Great Leader to Commemorate North Korea’s Latest Stunning Victory

From our UK edition

"Comrades of the North Korean Democratic Republic - extraordinary news! Against all the odds your heroic socialist representatives at the western junket known as The World Cup have vanquished one of the most filthy running dog imperial powers, Portugal. With the Great Leader as their inspiration, and Juche in their hearts, they set about the capitalist usurpers, who ran away like so many black rats. They did not merely win, comrades, but humiliated their opponents by a score of eight goals to nil. This follows their noble victory over the hopeless lackeys of Brazil in game one. It is only due to the hostile and aggressive nature of the imperialist USA and its lickspittle South Korean wage slave accomplices that you are not able to watch this magnificent spectacle on television.

Rod Liddle

Fabio the fall guy

From our UK edition

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 with his pack of overpaid muppets, wrong to have stuck to 4-4-2. The press has joined the whine of complaint coming from the England dressing room; incredibly, it is on the side of the players. As a consequence, Fabio Capello has been publicly humiliated by both the team and the man he demoted from the captaincy, John Terry. Terry and the players demanded a meeting and were determined, during the meeting, to have their way.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

Well done, Stephen Fry

From our UK edition

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. If yours are watching it after the age of 13, you’ve got a retard on your hands), but it’s a bit rich that they should complain when this fact is gently pointed out. Forty years ago nobody would have dreamt of disputing the issue, would they?

Rod Liddle

Our kids should be learning Arabic not French

From our UK edition

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 all foreigners should go home because the River Tiber is beginning to foam with much blood, just like Enoch — a Labour supporter himself for a while, remember — once advised. And now we have the former minister Chris Bryant telling the French that their language is absolutely pointless and that nobody should bother learning it, not even the French. Teach the kids Mandarin, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic instead, he said.

Wednesday

Rod Liddle

The case for criminal proceedings

From our UK edition

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, these are good people and we ought to remember that. In the statements from my old mate Patrick Mercer MP who says that the Saville Inquiry will only make things worse in Ulster. These are pretty cheap and specious arguments, non-sequiturs.

Monday

Rod Liddle

Not a pretty spectacle

From our UK edition

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 making the games a lottery and, further, persuading outfield players to shoot from ridiculous distances. But it’s not just the goalies who suffer; the ball is far harder to control, bounces higher and heads off at speed away from chasing players. Passes are therefore often overhit and teams which rely upon an expansive passing game are disproportionately punished.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

Monty Hall will change the way you think

From our UK edition

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 a couple of jokers. Shuffle them up. Lay the cards face down in front of your partner and tell her that if she picks the ace, you’ll give her a bourbon or maybe a garibaldi biscuit. If she picks one of the jokers, however, she gets nowt. Tell her not to turn over the card of her choice just yet, simply to tap it. When she’s done that, pick up the two other cards.

Friday

Rod Liddle

Immigrants making Germany dumber

From our UK edition

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 of fact and logic? Maybe it’s the time the PCC got involved………… Well said, Herr Bundesbank. Now resign.

Wednesday

Rod Liddle

Abbott wields the knife

From our UK edition

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 Thatcher. She did this in order to force the likeable McDonnell out of the race so that she might pick up the left wing MPs who nominated him. Very fraternal of you, love. But successful, as it turns out, for McDonnell has indeed now withdrawn.

Tuesday

Rod Liddle

What to do if a fox attacks your children

From our UK edition

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 area. Given the location it would not surprise me if it was actually Diane Abbott, dressed up as some sort of beast and stealing into constituents’ homes in the dark of night and biting their children. Whatever it was, it did not budge when Nick Koupparis “lunged” four times at it. I suppose it could have been a mentally ill fox, a fox with grave delusions.

Sunday

Rod Liddle

Breaking Laws

From our UK edition

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 – and I assume that personal sympathy must play a part in a couple of those cases – that he is a genuinely nice chap. I met him once and indeed he seemed very nice. But what I find puzzling is the apparent wish to excuse his actions on account of his sexuality, when his sexuality is really of no relevance whatsoever.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

No one outside England thinks we’ve got a prayer

From our UK edition

Rod Liddle wouldn’t risk more than a tenner on the team getting beyond the group stage in the football World Cup. The truth is, we usually perform more or less exactly as well as might be expected given the size of the country Nobody outside of this country thinks that England stands a cat’s chance in hell of winning the association football World Cup, which is due to kick off in South Africa very shortly — if all the teams are not abducted upon arrival and shot.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

To catch a killer

From our UK edition

Just an idle thought, really – but didn’t it take the police an awfully long time to catch up with that Cumbrian nutter, and by which time he was dead? Derrick Bird was able to continue shooting people for a good three hours, entirely unhindered. According to press reports, the tv news seemed to be aware of the route being taken by the killer and warned local villagers to stay inside. The Cumbria Constabulary is small, sure, by comparison to other forces – but it does have 1,500 officers, plus the usual complement of “Blunkett’s Bobbies”. To find and apprehend one man. I wonder what their orders were.

Wednesday

Rod Liddle

Israel has harmed its standing in the world

From our UK edition

Is there anything Israel could do which would discomfort my colleague, Melanie Phillips (I mean other than behave peaceably towards Palestinians)? She has been defending, without giving so much as an inch, Israel’s attack upon the, uh, “peace flotilla”; all perfectly justifiable, the convoy was actually an Islamist terrorist attack, and so on and so on. I am not absolutely sure that she commends her case to us all by continually insisting that Gaza City is a lovely, comfortably equipped mini-metropolis, overflowing with delicious fresh produce – a little like Sevenoaks on market day, people queuing up to get into Café Rouge and Loch Fyne.

Saturday

Rod Liddle

I Fought The Laws and the Laws Won

From our UK edition

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 rather people did not know I wrote for, such as the magazine “Bouncy Barnyard Fun” and the low circulation periodical “I Love My Goat”. I hope you will appreciate that my intention, in not declaring this source of income to the tax authorities, was solely to protect the privacy of both myself and that of my Valais Blackneck goat, Campbell-Bannerman, and not to maximize the amount of money I trousered as a consequence.

Rod Liddle

Prince Philip is my favourite, but in fact I love all the royals

From our UK edition

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 and traditional the royal family might be — all those tourist dollars, plus a sense of national continuity — it was still sort of wrong. Monarchists would argue with me, saying listen, if we didn’t have the Queen, we’d have Tony Benn or Ken Livingstone or Boris Johnson as an elected president — an idea which rather appealed, frankly.