Rod Liddle: Enemy Of The People

There’s a few Early Day Motions in the House of Commons, one of which demands that I should not be made editor of the Independent newspaper, based upon a Guardian story that I was about to be. There are two signatories – the self-publicising, hypocritical pantomime dame Diane Abbott, with whom I have crossed swords before, and the Labour MP for Newport, Paul Flynn. Now, there aren’t very many MPs for whom I have enormous respect, but Flynn is one of them – free thinking, leftish, not afraid to say the unpopular thing, fundamentally decent. So I rang him to moan about the EDM and he said that he’d signed it without even reading it, accepted that he’d got one or two things wrong, removed an offensive piece from his blog and asked me out for a drink. Hell, I wish I could be as blithe about early day motions as Paul. Most of my early day motions are problematic, especially if the previous evening I’ve been to the Spice Valley of Lambourn for Chicken Pathia and nan bread. But I would guess that you do not want any more information about that.

There is one current EDM worth supporting, however, which is Harry Cohen’s demand that the Ugandan government drop its legislation to execute homosexuals. And also lock up homosexuals for life if they so much as touch one another in a manner which could be construed as homosexual. This is fundamentalist African savagery, although Harry does not make this point in his EDM. Anyway, it’s number 575 on the order book if you are of a mind to ask your local MP to support it. I’d give you the number of the one to stop me being editor of the Independent as well if I could, but at time of writing it had not got through the Table office, presumably because Abbott was too thick to word it properly.