The Spectator.co.uk Rod Liddle Blog

Snow? What snow?

Rod Liddle — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 09:34:46 +0000

It’s not snowing again. This is the fourth day running it’s not snowing again and I live in one of the most ‘badly affected’ areas south of the Wash. By badly affected I mean that all of the roads, even the single track lanes on top of a hill where I live, are entirely free from snow. It snowed for one evening only and left five inches or so on the fields; some of this has melted, some is still there. Just about enough to tell yourself that it had definitely snowed.

So where’s this icy chaos? Every BBC news programme for a couple of days had reporters standing in mufflers looking concerned telling us about an icy chaos. There was only a sort of chaos because they – and the Daily Mail’s beyond reproach ‘Kite Mark’ reportage – told us that there WOULD be icy chaos.

So Heathrow ruined thousands of peoples’ plans by cancelling a third of its flights and the railways started cancelling trains in case they couldn’t get back from where they were going. There was almost no snow at Heathrow. The bosses there allowed themselves

Terry shouldn’t be captain, but that should be Capello’s decision to make

Rod Liddle — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 13:22:26 +0000

The England manager Fabio Capello is both right and wrong about John Terry.

Right because it was stupid and, as Terry Venables says, ‘knee-jerk’ of the Football Association to remove the captaincy from the rat-faced little scrote. That’s up to the manager, a man disinclined to give a clamorous press what it wants. Wrong, because Terry should not be captain in the first place, nor indeed on the field of play. These days, Eric Pickles would be a more mobile and nuanced centre half for the national side than Mr Terry.

Capello was also wrong to have reinstated Terry as captain after succumbing to FA and media pressure to remove the honour from him after that business where the defender was accused of shagging Wayne Bridge’s ex girlfriend. Reinstating Terry as captain infuriated one of the few England players whose IQ stretches (just) into double figures — Rio Ferdinand. But then it is doubtful Rio should be on the pitch either.

Do we really need to know more about Gary Speed’s death?

Rod Liddle — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 13:23:34 +0000

Do we have a right to know why the football manager Gary Speed killed himself, if indeed he did kill himself? I’m not convinced.

There’s a typically thoughtful and ruminatively controversial article by Stephen Glover in today’s Daily Mail. Stephen is critical of the inquest into Speed’s death, pointing out that the coroner was less than forensic in his cross-questioning of the various witnesses – particularly Speed’s wife and his close friend Alan Shearer.

Mrs Speed had said that the evening before she discovered her husband hanging from a banister they had ‘exchanged words’, although she could not be sure what about. They were sufficient to provoke her to leave the family home in the early hours of the morning and return somewhat later to find herself locked out. It seems unlikely that she would be unable to recall the reason for their temporary estrangement.

Similarly, Alan Shearer reported that Speed had said there were ‘issues’ with his marriage, and was not asked what these issues were. In the end, the coroner returned a narrative verdict leaving the question unanswered as to whether he topped himself

Does Labour support the benefits cap or not?

Rod Liddle — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 13:03:46 +0000

Does anyone, anywhere, understand the Labour Party’s position on the government’s intention to cap welfare benefits? I ask as a member of the Labour Party who is, of course, anxious to spread the message far and wide but is worried by what seem to be certain, um, inconsistencies of approach.

So, on Question Time last week David Lammy conceded that he agreed wholeheartedly with the idea of a benefits cap but thinks the various dissenting Church of England bishops are absolutely right to criticise the idea of a benefits cap and that the government is penalising the poor. He got quite worked up about it, railing against the injustice while conceding that his party had close to identical plans.

His position on the issue seems to me less a case of having your cake and eating it, as one of having your cake, eating it, vomiting it up into a plastic bucket and then sucking it up through a straw. I realise that this is not a pleasant image and would like to apologise.

Lammy also said that the benefits cap should have a regional element, implying —

Breakfast/coffee/apples update!

Rod Liddle — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:30:02 +0000

Just seen this in the latest copy of Private Eye, from its Pseuds Corner column:

‘I woke up with my wife and baby of six months on the small island of Burano in Venice where we have a lighthouse. We took our breakfast on the terrace of one of the best restaurants in the world, Da Romano. I had one organic apple and fresh pomegranate juice, and a cookie made by the bakery next door. Then I started designing a new, affordable moped.’

- Philippe Starck.

More scumbags? Or more scumbags getting caught?

Rod Liddle — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 16:48:59 +0000

Has Britain become a nation of immoral, lying, cheating, scumbags as the increasingly pious Peter Oborne seems to suggest in his latest article? Peter, who writes for such unblemished upholders of truth and decency as The Daily Mail, suggests that these days, if people found money lying about in the street, they wouldn’t hand it in. Whereas before they would. As in: ‘Gaw, I fahnd a tenner dah the Ol’ Kent Road, officer – make sure it gets back to its rightful owner, me old china, and if not then bung it to a charity for the kiddies. Blow me dahn, though, Jerry did a thorough job last night and no mistakin’’.

Peter suggests that corruption in public life is to blame for our rapidly diminishing moral sense, and I suppose rightly has a go at Blair, Huhne and the RBS boss Stephen Hester. But isn’t it more the case that with greater openness these days, and journalists asking more impertinent questions, we simply know more about the chicanery of public figures? Isn’t it more likely that thirty or forty years ago we would not even have heard about Chris Huhne’s

Leave the Isle of Grain alone

Rod Liddle — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 12:55:58 +0000

It is a fairly horrible thing to find oneself on the same side of the fence as that gabbling imbecilic hag, Janet Street-Porter. The sort of occurrence which makes you question your entire belief system. But her article today about the ludicrous plan to build a vast airport on the Isle of Grain is absolutely correct, in pretty much every respect.

I don’t quite see why the entire south-east of England should be tarmaced over and used as a sort of giant public convenience for London. The Isle of Grain is one of the few areas south of the Wash which is of genuine environmental importance (rather than being one of those mimsy Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, which usually means over-farmed fields and honeystone cottages). It is a bleak, majestic and rather wonderful neck of the woods (and nowhere near where I live, btw, in case you should be reaching for the word ‘Nimby’). If London needs a new airport let them put it in Kensington Palace Gardens, using Notting Hill as the terminal building.

My favourite nighttime diversion

Rod Liddle — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 20:17:02 +0000

Late at night, when my wife is safely tucked up in bed, I sneak into my office and turn on the computer. I spend ages in front of the screen, mesmerised, panting with exertion. To my wife’s disgust — when she checks my browser history — I am almost always sporcling. ‘I married someone who wastes his life away doing THAT,’ she says with utter contempt. ‘I think I would rather it’s porn.’

It’s not porn. I’ve never really been porn-inclined, not even when I was 15 and magazines like Hustler were doing the rounds. Instead, I get my kicks out of nerdish geography quizzes on the US website, Sporcle. That’s why I can name all 196 countries in the world, right off, this minute, if you want. Anyway, I share this information with you because of one quiz which caught my attention here. See if you can do it. It’s not hard. But it’s the position of the UK which frightens me. Why are we so low down? Below South Korea? And, for Christ’s sake, Spain? Is it a conjob? The figures all come from the UN, so

Why I reckon Ken will beat Boris

Rod Liddle — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 08:53:40 +0000

I told Boris early last summer that I thought he would lose his race to be re-elected as Mayor of London. Not out of a wish for him to do so – I like Boris, and Livingstone is almost the living embodiment of everything I dislike about the party of which, god help me, I am a member. Boris huffed and puffed a bit and said ‘Well look, I’m well ahead in the polls’ – and so he was.

But not any more. The latest poll puts the newt-botherer slightly ahead. I do not think that this is a consequence of Boris doing a bad job as mayor, or a sudden disaffection with him. Even though his plans for an airport in Kent are deeply evil.

It is more a case, I reckon, of the London electorate regressing to the mean. That’s what I expected would happen. The horrible truth is that Ken is what they are, really – or a large proportion of them. That’s one of the reasons I don’t live in London.

Livingstone to win by five points, I would guess. More money for

What's wrong with 'Avoid the Ghetto'?

Rod Liddle — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 10:16:58 +0000

Now here’s some good news to cheer you all up. Microsoft has applied for a patent for a Smartphone ‘app’ (I hate that word) called ‘Avoid the Ghetto’. Basically it just tells you the places to stay away from if you’re in an unfamiliar city. You can imagine the areas it tells you stay from. And so, by logical process, you can imagine the sorts of people who are demanding it never be made, be burned on a pyre and its inventors arrested etc.

Yes, the NAACP was first out of the blocks, describing the device as ‘stereotyping’ and ‘discriminatory’. But the app, so far as I can gather, does not tell people to stay away from all black areas, only most of them. And surely they should stick to their point that high localised crime rates are the consequence of economic deprivation, rather than jumping up and down with fury?