Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
From our UK edition
It’s not just death and taxes you can depend upon – you can also be absolutely certain that the Labour Party will, at every opportunity, take precisely the wrong decision about the BNP. You may have seen Fraser’s blog about Labour MPs voting not to allow democratically elected BNP MEPs into the House of Commons.
From our UK edition
How will you be celebrating the birth of Guru Nanak this year? I thought we might get together for a party, bring a bottle, play a few games. The founder of the Sikh religion’s birthday is celebrated in November, although he was actually born in April: that’s just one of the mystifying things about religion,
From our UK edition
I have actually cried with laughter six times in my life. Once, when I was 14, watching the famous “Germans” episode of Fawlty Towers; a few years later at the Ku Klux Klan scene from Blazing Saddles. More recently I shed a shaky tear when the politician Ron Davies explained to police that he’d been
From our UK edition
Rod Liddle is appalled that, after knowingly swindling the taxpayer, the former home secretary faced no punishment at all. It seems unbelievable after all their grandstanding — but MPs really don’t think they have done anything wrong ‘We have got to clean up politics, we have got to consign the old, discredited system to the
From our UK edition
People are getting themselves worked up into a terrible lather over the BNP’s appearance on BBC Question Time next week. Even in this neck of the woods, Melanie Phillips has criticized the Conservative Party for having selected Baroness Warsi to sit alongside fat Nick on the panel. Her argument, briefly put, is that it would
From our UK edition
During the feisty game between Swindon and Millwall on Saturday, there was a bit of a bust up between Swindon’s Kevin Amankwaah and Millwall’s veteran striker, Neil “Bomber” Harris. I cannot recall seeing Harris so infuriated in ten years of watching him play. Afterwards, all became clear. Harris fought a long and well-reported battle against
From our UK edition
I’ve been so tied up with my financial advisers, getting my bid together for the Dartford river crossing (my plan is to prevent people from Essex visiting Kent, because I don’t like them), that I missed this letter from one of the country’s more thoughtful and free thinking Labour MPs, Denis MacShane. It’s been causing
From our UK edition
It is wonderful news that both golf and rugby sevens have been accepted as Olympic sports. It gives us the chance of winning many more medals than if the games were simply a test of brute strength, speed, agility or skill. Now the authorities have accepted that the games should also reward GDP, raw levels
From our UK edition
Another year of bitter disappointment – I have once again failed to win the Nobel Prize for Peace. My pitch – that I deserve to win it because I am not George W Bush – had a lot going for it, I thought. But instead the honour went to Barack Obama, whose pitch was identical.
From our UK edition
We all know the truth about the wealth and privilege of the future Tory front bench, says Rod Liddle, but it’s better to brazen it out like Boris than try to seem apologetic The Labour party’s cynical attempt to target the opposition as a party of champagne-guzzling toffs, preening and loaded Hooray-Henrys and chinless, mewing,
From our UK edition
Sir Richard Dannatt’s usefulness to the Conservative Party has just reduced by about ninety per cent as a consequence of his decision to accept an advisory post with the party. Henceforth, all criticisms he makes of the conduct of the war in Afghanistan will be taken with a pinch of salt, because he is now
From our UK edition
I am still not sure quite why the Conservative Party is determined to ally itself in Europe with the Waffen SS and Poland’s vigorous and exciting “No Yids or Queers” party. It has no need to do so. I assume Mr Cameron is at least mildly anti-SS and, while he might not in general like
From our UK edition
Scouring the Sunday newspapers for any vestige of sentience, I find none whatsoever – but instead chance upon this whining, chippy, neo-Socialist drivel from Rod Liddle in the Sunday Times blaming the bankers for the economic mess from which, it’s said, we are emerging. (Incidentally, linking to oneself in a blog is narcissism on an inter-planetary
From our UK edition
I do hope you can forgive this diversion from the usual subject matter of my blog, but just for today I would like to deal with a personal matter. That is not to say it does not have wider implications – I believe it does; in a very real sense it has implications for all
From our UK edition
Who would you like to see succeed Gordon Brown as leader of the Labour Party? Still deluded by the continuation of power and the hopeless yearning that it all might come right next summer, Labour has been strangely united at its conference. Certainly compared to those conferences I well remember in 1979, 1983 and even
From our UK edition
Rod Liddle says the furore surrounding Andrew Marr’s questions to Gordon Brown is academic. These rumours are rife in the blogosphere Is our Prime Minister perpetually out of his brainbox on powerful psychotropic substances, as everybody now seems to believe? Dilaudid, crystal meth, that sort of thing? Does he stagger out of bed and say:
From our UK edition
There is a thoughtful blog on these pages from Fraser, about the BNP’s now confirmed appearance on Question Time. I agree with most of it, although not the point that Nick Griffin is a good debater: at best, you might argue that the jury is out on his debating abilities, as he has never before
From our UK edition
There was a very good piece by my colleague Martin Ivens in last week’s Sunday Times which asked how the BBC had come to estrange politicians of every party, along with most of the country. Ever willing to help, the BBC provided a partial explanation last week with two decisions of particular stupidity and crassness.
From our UK edition
I would like Britain to keep its independent nuclear deterrent, largely because I don’t trust the French. I would also like the USA to have a very large amount of brand new and extremely efficient nuclear weapons – those really big ones that can destroy the earth – and China, Pakistan, North Korea and Iran
From our UK edition
We need to guard against childish gloating when we read about the arrest of Patricia Hewitt’s son for possessing cocaine, says Rod Liddle. But first, a quick recap of her record There is something rotten with this country when people can take such base, spiteful pleasure from the arrest of a young lad simply because