Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

A pie in the face for the police from the dark side of public opinion

At time of writing I do not know the name of the lumpen oaf who tried to rub an ersatz custard pie in Rupert Murdoch’s face during his testimony to the Culture, Media and Sport select committee.

At time of writing I do not know the name of the lumpen oaf who tried to rub an ersatz custard pie in Rupert Murdoch’s face during his testimony to the Culture, Media and Sport select committee.

At time of writing I do not know the name of the lumpen oaf who tried to rub an ersatz custard pie in Rupert Murdoch’s face during his testimony to the Culture, Media and Sport select committee. It is possible that it was not a person at all, but a phantasm, a creature from the dark side spontaneously brought into being by the national outpouring of hysteria and hyperbole, much as the chupacabras, or goat-sucker, will manifest himself in the peasant villages of South America when the locals are gripped by a grave but irrational fear of something.

Our own version was a typically blubbery piece of self-righteous ectoplasm who will not, I suspect, be banished back to his netherworld until the national mood has abated, until those who loathe News Corp — the London left, the MPs, news organisations who are its commercial rivals and so on — have their vengeance. It may be that even then people will only be happy when they have joined my Facebook group ‘Everyone Should Be Sacked Or Killed’, which I set up in response to some previous (now forgotten) outpouring of hysteria a short while back. These atavistic jolts of mass hatred are becoming an almost monthly occurrence, whipped up by the social networking sites, the politicians turning this way and that in order to fall in step with what they believe to be the national mood.

Anyway, the fat phantasm with the custard pie was scarcely less supernatural and other-worldly than the appearance, the day before, of Paul Dacre, the editor of the Daily Mail, telling MPs that he had never countenanced hacking or ‘blagging’ on his paper — part of a group which had employed private investigators 1,387 times — rather more than any other news organisation on the planet.

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