Rod Liddle

The case of Ben Collett, the footballer awarded £4.5 million for a tackle that ended his career, bodes ill for the game, says Rod Liddle. Blame the zeitgeist, not the judge If you went rock-climbing in the Andes and, halfway up a vertical cliff face, the surface beneath your feet crumbled away and you slipped and fell — condors and local Indian tribesmen laughing in the background, air whistling past your ears and then bang, bang, bang as you clatter into the ground, sustaining disfiguring but not fatal injuries — well, would you sue the mountain for negligence? Get your lawyers on to it double quick, shove in a claim for a million quid or so?

The measures on ‘gas-guzzling’ cars, policing of wheelie bins and surcharges on plastic bags are based on scientific fads and, often, the government’s greed for taxpayers’ money, says Rod Liddle. The Third World won’t pay the price, and nor will big business — but we will For one weekend each year every beach in this peaceful part of the world is taken over by gypsies, and the locals (and the handful of Western tourists) steer well clear and lock up their possessions, daughters, etc. I wandered along the shoreline of one previously idyllic cove just as the pikeys were packing up to leave on Sunday evening.

An apology to all readers: a couple of weeks ago, in a public-spirited sort of way, I offered advice as to how to go about getting stabbed. Although I hope you will accept that I was well intentioned, the article was clearly deficient and even offensive in two important respects. First, I neglected to explain how one might go about getting stabbed twice — and, since I wrote, the window for that particular opportunity seems to have been closed. Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, unveiled an exciting plan to let stabbers loose in hospital accident and emergency wards, where they might joyfully run around stabbing people who are recovering from having already been stabbed by someone else, as part of a rehabilitative process for the stabber.

Been stabbed yet? Give it time. The latest weapon of choice for our go-getting and imaginative young people, apparently, is the ‘cat skinner’, a thin and very sharp device properly used for removing the plastic jackets from electrical cables. But also for skinning cats, I assume. And — increasingly — stabbing, or more likely slashing, people. From the pictures I’ve seen, if you’ve bought a cat skinner with which to stab somebody, you’ve bought the wrong tool for the job. No use complaining later. In the last year for which figures are available there were 64,000 knife crimes committed in Britain — the figures have been rising with great vigour over the last eight or nine years.

Rod Liddle looks back at the case of the British Council employee who dared to speak the truth about Islamic ideology — and notes that what was heretical in 2004 is now almost orthodox A madman has been bombarding Fleet Street journalists with extremely long emails, asking for redress, for a hearing. He feels traduced. Nothing new there, then. Lunatics write to me every day, long handwritten scrawls of bitter psychosis — and it really is true that the maddest are written in green ink, or a similarly unnatural hue. I imagine these woebegone people wandering into WH Smith’s and saying to some babe at the counter: ‘Excuse me, I would like to buy a pen, for I need to write a long letter.’ And the girl narrowing her eyes and saying: ‘Certainly, sir.

Rod Liddle on the case of Bushra Noah, the headscarf-wearing Muslim who has just won £4,000 from the Wedge hair salon I used to dye my hair — Midnight Auburn, from Clairol. Yes, because I’m worth it. I did it myself, once every three or four months or so, always ruining several perfectly good towels in the process. I don’t dye it any more because my girlfriend says that if I do, she’ll bin me. This is because a man dyeing his hair is both undignified and vain, she says: however, I think her opposition stems from the fact that if I got rid of all the grey, I would be irresistible to all women. She would suddenly have intense competition.

A week or so back, my two-year-old daughter said to me, apropos of nothing: ‘You have been sad since you lost Jesus.’ I didn’t really know what to do, so I looked at her open-mouthed for a bit and then fixed myself a stiff drink. Best not to get involved, I reckon. Later — again, out of the blue — she told me with great happiness that she was ‘covered with the blood of Jesus’, at which point I wondered if I should have a quiet word with her Sunday school teacher, or maybe her Gran, who is a fairly muscular born-again evangelical monkey and from whom this whacko stuff may have emanated. Sad since I lost Jesus? I’ve been sad since Douglas Alexander was made a Cabinet minister and even sadder since the pubs closed.

Rod Liddle says the Commons vote securing the 24-week limit is no more than a craven politician’s fudge, designed to postpone the day when the law of the land finally catches up with the indisputable findings of science An awful lot of people we know are being laid off at the moment, or finding their incomes substantially decreased. This is the credit crunch, the cusp of a recession and its impact was felt first and most onerously upon those hard-working and resourceful young men in the City’s banking institutions. Many are looking to ship out and find jobs elsewhere; some, suddenly stricken with the need to feel socially useful, are downsizing into strange occupations such as teaching.

Josef Fritzl’s unspeakable crimes against his daughter not only sicken us, says Rod Liddle. They sharpen our confusion about day-to-day parenting in the modern world You may, by now, be losing track of Austrian nutters who lock women in basements. The latest is Josef Fritzl, who kept his daughter Elisabeth imprisoned in a dungeon for more than 20 years and fathered a total of seven children with her. The last nutter you read about, meanwhile, was Wolfgang Priklopil, who abducted a young woman, Natascha Kampusch, and kept her beneath a manhole cover in his garage for eight years. Both crimes are, of course, beyond appalling: it takes a lot to get Austria on to our front pages, usually either something with Nazi overtones or, failing that, paedophilia.

If you take that excellent map showing negative equity ‘hot-spots’ produced by George Bridges for The Spectator a couple of weeks back, and overlay it across a map of cancer ‘hot-spots’ for the UK, you will find that those baleful dark areas, the bad places on each map, tally almost exactly. You might have expected as much: falling house prices cause cancer. Or maybe cancer causes house prices to fall — one of the two. Anyway, those areas where hundreds of tumours pop up like jack-in-the-boxes throughout your body while you are eating your breakfast are also the areas where your house is now worth less than a month’s chemotherapy. I’d move, if I were you, get the hell out.