Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
During that rather strange summer of 2020 I used the phrase ‘the gentle armed robber George Floyd’ in several articles for various publications, but the phrase was often taken out. I had thought it a mild corrective to the seeming beatification of a man who, while having been wrongly killed, was not, to my mind,
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In this week’s episode:Can Rishi catch up?Katy Balls and Kate Andrews discuss Rishi Sunak’s mad dash to catch up with his rival, Liz Truss in the polls (0.55)Also this week:Is it time the UK severed ties with Chinese-made tech?Charles Parton argues this in the magazine this week. He is joined by Dr Alexi Drew, a
Grade: A+ The difficult question with Black Midi was always: are you listening to them in order to admire them, or because you actually enjoy the music they make? By which I mean when you’ve finished listening to them is it a sense of admiration which lingers in the mind, or are you captivated by
I see that Cricket Scotland is an appalling institution riven with racism. It has just been subjected to ‘the most devastating verdict to be delivered on any sporting institution in the UK’, having treated a whole bunch of players of Asian heritage to prejudice, discrimination and racial abuse. As a consequence there will be inquiries
I was listening to a rich bastard on the radio explaining why he was feeling disinclined to give any more of his money to the Conservative party. The term ‘rich bastard’ is the one which I was habituated to use when I was a member of the Labour party and which I have disinterred now
Have you considered a career in whoring? It can be very rewarding, apparently – especially financially. World’s oldest profession and all that, a job which offers the potential for travel but which can also be done without leaving one’s bed. A chap who teaches children about sex, Justin Hancock, thinks the kids should not write
Grade: B There has always been a seriousness and intelligence about Nick Cave quite at odds with that which usually attends to the rancid, tottering, old tart that is rock music, so there should be no surprise that he’s left it completely behind. This is a collection of seven spoken word prayers to that entity
Boris, your leader, hasn’t gone because he handled ineptly the fall-out from deputy chief whip Chris Pincher’s well-lubricated non-consensual bum-fun. Nor even because he lied about all that stuff as well. He has gone because Conservative MPs no longer believe he could win a general election. Who will come next? I don’t much care: none
The radical feminist publishing house Verso has begun, in its tweets, to refer to a section of the population as ‘womb-carriers’. This conjures up for me a number of distressing images. The first is of a rather sinisterly cheerful woman in late middle age dispensing wombs, which she keeps in a large and battered holdall,
When I awoke the other morning and switched on my radio, the airwaves were alive with the sound of furious, transgressed women. Nobody else got a look in. What have we done to get their goat this time, I wondered, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes. Nothing, it transpired. It was all in the
There’s a left-wing internet advocacy group called 38 Degrees which suggests to its followers that all they have to do is click a button and all the bad things in the world will be outlawed. It is a pleasant conceit. Its name derives from the angle at which snowflakes come together to form an avalanche,
The former comedian Sir Lenny Henry has questioned why there seem to be so few black people at rock festivals such as Glastonbury. He might equally have asked why there are so few young people. Or just concluded that the festival was a convocation of smug airheaded middle-aged white liberal kidults and that black people
I may have broken the law this week, without having intended to, so great was my rush to return home. I forgot to put on my seat belt and may have exceeded the speed limit on more than one occasion. The cause of my intemperate haste was, of course, a desire to be back at
The repeated injunction that we should all ‘move on’ from worrying our silly heads about partygate is as otiose as it is arrogant. It is also, of course, a case of wishful thinking at its most extreme. And yet I hear it every day, on TalkRadio, on GB News, from pro-Conservative friends on Facebook and
I have just posted a score of 1,625,000 on Bubbleshooter, my best yet. Bubbleshooter is a game where you fire different coloured bubbles at other different coloured bubbles in order, in the end, to make all the different coloured bubbles disappear. It is an elderly game, in its uplifting nihilism, and almost certainly dates me
Twice during the Eurovision Song Contest our television lost the signal and the set went blank – once, mercifully, during the performance of a hirsute, gurning, cod-operatic bellend from that patently European country Azerbaijan. ‘Putin’, my wife and I both reckoned, seeing as Russian hacker groups favourably disposed towards their country’s leader had promised that
At long last the state of Oregon has got around to installing tampon machines in the male lavatories of its many schools. I have campaigned long and hard on this issue. It has always seemed to me grossly unfair that girls should be provided with this facility but the poor boys utterly ignored. The sense
Meanwhile, there IS an alternative to the two wretched main parties: a socially conservative alternative. Wayne Dixon won by a landslide in the vast Middleton Park ward in Leeds, the first SDP gain since the 1980s and the first time Labour has lost the seat. The SDP picked up 2680 votes to Labour’s 1900. One (non-SDP)
A ghastly tragedy Ukraine may well be, but it is coming to the rescue of a number of British Conservative politicians. Most notably Boris Johnson, of course, who would surely be out of a job by now if Vladimir Putin had not rolled those tanks across the border on 24 February, just as Sue Gray
In those gentle days before internet pornography there was a book you could buy which listed the precise moment in each Hollywood film when the sex scene began, or when the leading lady – very often Greta Scacchi – got her kit off, thus enabling one to buy the video, or rent it from Blockbuster,
