The ‘c’ word used to be the one thing you could never say. How times change

The kids are all asleep, the wife is in bed reading feminist propaganda, from outside in the darkness I hear the shocked keewick of a Little Owl. Otherwise, all is silent and at rest. This is the time of evening when I make my way very quietly to my study with a glass of wine ‘to do some work’. I don’t want anyone to catch me at it, so I put my hand over the computer’s little loudspeaker when that annoying Windows ident music comes on. She caught me at it, once, my wife. Came downstairs for a glass of water and saw me hunched and furtive over the laptop, tapping away and making gutteral noises. She just looked disappointed and went back to bed, but it was a bit embarrassing.

Anyway, it’s the same procedure every night. Open the computer, bring up the internet and tap into Google those three crucial words… ‘Rod Liddle c***’. How many will it be tonight? The anticipation, let me tell you, is intense. Tonight it’s only 831. That’s pretty poor. I need to write something nasty about the Welsh, or cats, pretty quickly or I’ll be down at the level of someone on the New Statesman. As it is, even my best scores pale before someone famous like John Humphrys (3,800). And journalists, as a group, don’t do as well as you might imagine. Unpleasant world leaders get quite a few — Kim Jong-il had 17,600 just after he’d shelled that South Korean island. But even that pales before your mega celebs — Simon Cowell, for example, who is one of the judges on that awful programme X Factor, scored 93,000 c***s on Google last Saturday evening, which is hugely impressive.

But who, exactly, is the most c***ed man alive in the world, I can hear you ask? Who is it that provokes more people to call him a c*** than anyone else on God’s earth? This never changes, it is always the same answer, a man in a c***-class of his own.