Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
From our UK edition
Rod Liddle says that Gordon Brown’s contrition about the British children tragically deported to Australia is a very Noughties phenomenon — the perfectly pointless non-apology I never knew it was Gordon Brown who sent all those kids off to Australia, packed them off and waved goodbye from the quayside, and now feels terribly bad about the whole thing.
From our UK edition
Here’s a story from today’s Daily Mail, with a cut-out-keep picture, of Somali Muslim savages stoning to a twenty year old woman for the crime of adultery. Last year they killed a thirteen year old girl in a similar fashion; seven Muslim states stone women to death for adultery, and they will even provide the stones for you, which is thoughtful. Eleven will chop your head off if you renounce the Muslim faith. The overwhelming majority of Islamic states will either kill you, send you to work in a labour camp, put you in prison or fine you if you are gay. Bugger someone adulterously in Somalia while calling a Mohammed a gimp and you’re REALLY in trouble, I suppose. I know you know all this, but it is worth reminding ourselves of it from time to time.
From our UK edition
There’s a piece by my friend Dominic Lawson in the Independent yesterday, eulogizing the comedian Michael MacIntyre. At last, Dominic suggests, here is a comic who is not afraid to be middle class and nor is he coarse or cruel. Perhaps; but he is not terribly funny, either, whatever class he belongs to. You sometimes smile in recognition of his observations – as Dominic puts it – “of the everyday domestic engagements of bourgeois life.” But you are rarely arrested by what he has to say; pulled up short, gasping with incredulity at the sharpness of the observation, of what it uncovers and what it says about us. And still less are you offered the release of a belly-laugh.
From our UK edition
Much as I hate to provoke, you have to say it’s been a very good couple of weeks for both the Prime Minister and the Labour Party. It is probably true that Labour SHOULD have won the by-election in Glasgow North East, but that is not what tends to happen with extremely unpopular governments these days, not even in Scotland. And Labour won with a certain comfort. Ah, but Scotland is different, you might console yourself (forgetting your glee when the government, for the first time in 50 years, ceased to be the controlling party north of the border.) Well, sure; but in the weeks leading up to the poll, the average of a bunch of opinion polls showed the Tory lead nationwide down to 10 per cent, which I would have thought Labour strategists would consider a manageable lead.
From our UK edition
The former Tory whip, Tristan Garel-Jones, now Lord Garel-Jones, was searching for a cashpoint while in his car recently. He found one but there were no parking spaces available, so he approached a traffic warden by the side of the road and with some trepidation asked if he might double park for just a few seconds while he withdrew some money. The warden replied: “Yes of course, sir. I’ll keep an eye on your car while you use the cash machine.” That was in Spain. Can you imagine such a thing happening in England? Can you imagine even asking the traffic warden in England? How did we end up so officious?
From our UK edition
There’s been a rather wonderful debate bubbling along at the Guardian, about the French minister Pierre Lellouche’s use of the word ‘autistic’ to describe the English Tories. Well, in fact that’s not quite what the debate has been about; everyone is agreed that Lellouche is beyond the pale. The debate has been about whether or not the Guardian was right to report what was said by the chap in a headline. Quite a lot of readers thought that it wasn’t. Elsa and John Wingad, for example, wrote: ‘We know that the use of “autistic” in your headline was a quote, however by choosing to repeat it in such prominence [sic] reinforces negative attitudes towards autism.’ Do you know Elsa and John Wingad?
From our UK edition
Never meet your enemies; you might end up liking them. I’ve just got back from The Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year awards and the buggers had sat me next to James Purnell, about whom I was a bit snippy in print not so long ago. It was the usual measured, level-headed stuff about him being an agent of Satan, whore of the anti-christ etc. The problem I have with Purnell is not just his Blairite politics, but his former incarnation as a wonk for John Birt at the BBC, working in the fabulously hopeless corporate centre. I think I may have spewed all this out a while back in the mag; certainly I remember feeling that I might have made a wrong call when he resigned his office in an annoyingly dignified and selfless manner.
From our UK edition
Just returned from Cambourne, in Cambridgeshire – a town you may have heard of on account of its extraordinary (if you believe the press) birthrate, which is 100 times the national average, or something. It’s a new town, part of the government’s strategy to pave over all of western Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire and those remaining bits of Essex which aren’t paved over already. There is the air of David Lynch about Cambourne, or even John Wyndham; pristine, desolate and soulless. Almost no local shops, just a giant Morrisons and a petrol station, one or two blank-faced pubs. Almost everybody in it is roughly the same age and enjoys roughly the same income level (which explains the birthrate); there is a stillness and vapidity about the place.
From our UK edition
Celtic supporters sung Irish “rebel” songs during the one minute’s Remembrance Day silence before the kick off of their game at Falkirk. Even more Celtic fans waited outside the turnstiles so that they would not have to take part in the commemoration. What an unspeakably foul club it is, bigoted and filled with sectarian hatred. And yet the only Glasgow club which ever gets punished for fuelling sectarian hatred is its rival, Rangers. It is not so long ago that FIFA decided that Rangers supporters were racist bigots for singing their fatuous, hate-filled tales about the Battle of the Boyne etc, while Celtic’s supporters were merely reveling in a noble folk song tradition while singing their fatuous hate filled tales about how good the IRA are.
From our UK edition
Did you know that February in our schools has been designated Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans (sic) History Month? I’d get with it, if I were you, and send your 11-year-old child to school in a gimp mask, with some lube. Good parents make sure their kid is ahead of the curve. You can bet that there will be exercises on exploring multifaceted sexual preferences and maybe practical tests too. So tell your daughter to bin the Mary Seacole face mask she spent ages knocking up for Black History Month and get her dressed up as a boy, with a strap-on. They need those extra marks, the kids. I only know about this because of Jeanie.
From our UK edition
We are apparently incapable of fighting a war, these days, unless a quick and bloodless victory is pre-ordained. Labour (and especially John Reid) deserves some criticism for having pretended, initially, that Afghanistan would be so. But the fact that it has not been so is not the government’s fault, nor the fault of the troops, nor for that matter the fault of the US. Nor does it mean that the war was not worth fighting in the first place: it was, clearly it was, and there were few arguments to the contrary at the time. The Taliban was possibly the most vile regime to have taken office on earth and, more to the point, it was a regime which directly threatened our security – that was why we went in.
From our UK edition
A judge has decided that belief in climate change is precisely the same as a belief in religion; a conviction impervious to the “present state of information available”. Mr Justice Michael Burton was adjudicating in the case of a hugely irritating chap called Tim Nicholson, who wishes to have his case that he was discriminated against because of his beliefs heard at an employment tribunal. You can read the full story here. This is good and bad, of course.
From our UK edition
A fine piece by Fiona Millar in The Guardian about parents cheating the system in order to get their kids into supposedly better comprehensive schools. The key paragraph, I think, is this: 'Successive governments have preferred to present schools as a market, dressed them up as a hierarchy and then urged parents to ‘do the best for their child’ and not give a stuff about anyone else’s.' Well, quite – but whose fault is that? Who was it that referred to “bog standard” comprehensives? Her husband, Alastair Campbell, I think it was. Instead of telling us now, couldn’t you have told him at the time? Maybe she did, maybe she did. The mantra of consumer choice was co-opted by New Labour and applied to all sorts of perfectly unsuitable things.
From our UK edition
Here’s where your money goes. Read it and seethe. Or maybe just sigh a little and fix yourself a stiff drink. I suppose you might hope that things will change, now that Devon is under the control of the Conservative Party. But if you think that you’ve probably had one stiff drink too many; this stuff is so ingrained, irremovable and yet so loathed by the majority of voters. Oh, I dunno. Maybe it’s a bit unfair to take it out on Jeanie, who seems such a cheerful and well-meaning soul. That’s the problem, of course – most of them are well-meaning and full of the milk of human kindness.
From our UK edition
You have to admire the magnificent, brazen, blank-faced nerve of Jacqui Smith - the former Home Secretary who could not be entirely sure where her home was. Appearing on Question Time on Thursday, her demeanour flitted between confected contrition and self-righteous indignation – always, at the end of every sentence, coming to rest on the latter. Jacqui, you will recall, claimed that her second home was her proper four-bedroomed family home in her constituency, Redditch, and that her main home was a room rented in her sister’s house.
From our UK edition
Try to take your child to a public playground in Watford and you will be denied entry on the grounds that you may well be a kiddie-fiddler. I don’t know why you’d want to take your child to a playground in Watford, even if you live there - but that’s another issue, I suppose. Parents aren’t allowed to supervise their children in Watford playgrounds unless they have been CRB checked; instead a bunch of “play rangers” supervise the kids. Play rangers? Who’d want a job as a play ranger? They might have been checked by the police but I still suspect they’re wrong ‘uns, underneath. It’s time to take militant action against these fucking local council idiots, although I’m not quite sure what exactly we should do.
From our UK edition
But don’t worry, says Rod Liddle, they’re not going to. The bee holocaust myth is just another example of our strange yearning for catastrophe The world is going to end in 2012, apparently — hopefully just before the start of the Olympic Games. Armageddon may come about as a consequence of those monkeys firing up the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, where they have al-Qa’eda operatives attempting to create black holes which will swallow the earth whole, or reduce it to the size of an extremely dense tennis ball. Imagine seven billion of us trying to stand on a tennis ball. You just hope personal hygiene standards won’t be sacrificed.
From our UK edition
A few notes and observations on the English Defence League, which has gained a bit of prominence recently and is mentioned in Mel’s latest article in The Spectator. This is the organisation which turns up to Muslim demonstrations and does a bit of vigorous counter-demonstrating for itself; they then are in turn picketed by the witless, bedraggled red fascists of the UAF. (Perhaps we should form another group which pickets meetings and demos of the UAF). The EDL is in alliance with, or is comprised of, or perhaps actually is, two previously formed predominantly anti-Muslim groups, The United British Alliance and Casuals United. Both of these groups are noteworthy in one respect: they are organized bands of football supporters.
From our UK edition
There’s no need for Jan Moir to apologise for speculating about the death of the boy-band singer Stephen Gately says Rod Liddle. Why have we become so censorious and hysterical? I have to say that I don’t particularly like newspaper and magazine columnists, as people. Smug, not terribly bright, usually cowardly, lazy, always self-obsessed, self-important and narcissistic — forever brimming with themselves, a collection of mass-produced ornamental thimbles overflowing with foaming vomit. I don’t excuse myself from most of these character traits, by the way, so I suppose you can add self-loathing to the list as well.
From our UK edition
Ah, hell, it’s the curse of Liddle. No sooner have I sat down and written a stirring defence of the Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir, who had been vilified for suggesting there was something “sleazy” about the death of Stephen Gateley, than the bloody woman apologises. Or, at least, sort of apologises. I don’t see why she should have even genuflected in the general direction of an apology; her article was not homophobic. I suppose she could have watched her back by putting in some qualifying adjectives here or there – but then, hell, I’m hardly one to lecture on that issue. Anyway, my piece is in this week’s Spectator.
