A course in Rod Liddle studies

As someone who has always had a grotesquely inflated sense of his own importance, my experience speaking at Durham University again last week almost tipped me into fully blown, delusional megalomania. On the way to the venue a student informed me that in the big hall nearby several hundred people were crammed into a debate about whether Rod Liddle should be allowed to speak at Durham. Yes, only a matter of yards from another building where Rod Liddle was actually speaking. I had, for a moment, a wonderful daydream about an entire university given over to studying Myself, or listening to Myself, three-year courses on the subject of Rod Liddle and what one might learn from Him, or how one should deal with Him, earnest young readers debating His latest utterances, emeritus professors pontificating affectionately on His early works, His juvenilia. My ego was already pretty monstrously priapic before I arrived, as I had been sent photographs of stickers placed in strategic locations on the campus reading ‘I love Rod Liddle’ and adorned with a big pink heart. Nope, not kidding. Weird, isn’t it?

A sense of proportion returned later when I realised I was merely a cipher for the student body’s love of and commitment to freedom of speech. Last year, when I spoke at the place, students had staged a protest and screamed blue murder about how they didn’t feel safe, the little poppets. The craven and pusillanimous university authorities took it out on the chap who had invited me, Professor Tim Luckhurst, and he was effectively suspended until Toby Young’s excellent Free Speech Union got in on the act.

This, then, was the kickback – and it was rather glorious. First the invitation itself, from the Durham Union Society (which is different from the students’ union), despite a certain amount of pressure from the feeble academics to rescind the invitation and warnings of all manner of trouble.