Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.

Today

6 Aug 2020
Rod Liddle
Rod Liddle

We are living in a post-truth society

Activists wish to change the name of a school in north London because it is named after a road which was named after a dairy farmer who had the same name as someone the activists dislike. This is the Rhodes Avenue primary school in Wood Green, named after Thomas Rhodes, a great-uncle of Cecil Rhodes who died when Cecil was three. According to the activists, Thomas cannot be ‘disentangled’ from Cecil despite the fact that they are totally different people separated by two generations. These genii would like the school to be renamed Oliver Tambo school, after the popular South African murderer and politician. It would not hugely surprise me if they got their way, seeing as the Labour leader of the council, a halfwit called Joseph Ejiofor,has said that schools shouldn’t be named after the relatives of ‘white supremacists’.

We are living in a post-truth society

Thursday

30 Jul 2020
Rod Liddle
Rod Liddle

Fine tunes and spacey, quiet grandeur: Taylor Swift’s Folklore reviewed

Grade: A- This is worrying — like listening to a speech by David Lammy and finding yourself, against your better nature, agreeing with it. If there’s one thing worse than your favourite artists making a duff album, it’s artists you can’t stand making a good one. I shall have to tell myself that this isn’t a Taylor Swift album at all, but really the work of The National — a fine band, whose Aaron Dessner is a co-writer on nine of these 16 tracks and producer on 11. That may explain the spacey, quiet grandeur of these songs, the background atmospherics, the gradual rise in many to a gentle anthem. This is Taylor Goes Indie. I suspect that during lockdown she has been listening a little bit to Lana Del Rey and Billie Eilish and grabbed herself a bit of the emo action.

Fine tunes and spacey, quiet grandeur: Taylor Swift’s Folklore reviewed

Monday

27 Jul 2020
Rod Liddle
Rod Liddle

What went wrong with our coronavirus response?

I am trying to work up sympathy for people who book a holiday abroad in the middle of a pandemic and are then surprised to discover they may end up in quarantine. Failing, so far. Still, I would rather we’d had the quarantine back in February and March, when it might genuinely have done some good. Many of you, I know, think the whole thing an insanity, a kind of First World overreaction. I largely disagree. But whatever, I don’t think the government has handled the whole thing with terrific aplomb. Tomorrow at four o’clock in the afternoon I’m hosting a debate about what went wrong. We’ll be hearing from medical experts, epidemiologists, academics etc. – and it would be good if your views were represented. The debate is to mark the launch of a book Pandemic – Where Did We Go Wrong – A Very Public Inquiry.

What went wrong with our coronavirus response?

Thursday

23 Jul 2020
Rod Liddle
Rod Liddle

Young people have never paid attention to the BBC

In January, the director-general of the BBC, Lord Hall of Birkenhead, announced that the corporation intended to shift away from making programmes enjoyed by older members of the public to concentrate on the ‘lives and passions’ of young people, in particular 16- to 30-year-olds. Of course Hall was not the first BBC employee to take an obsessive interest in young people, and nor was his mantra anything other than the norm in a country where older people, who are comparatively well off, pay their taxes, commit little crime, consume like crazy and indeed pay the licence fee, are held in a certain contempt. A month before Hall made his statement, the BBC had devoted considerable airtime to yoof and its wants, needs and aspirations regarding the general election.

Young people have never paid attention to the BBC

Thursday

16 Jul 2020
Rod Liddle
Rod Liddle

Why I will wear a face mask

We are enjoined by certain experts to wear face masks while having sexual intercourse. No change there, then, for me. It’s the only way I’m allowed it. I don’t even get to choose my own mask. My wife keeps several in a cupboard under the stairs. If, when I retire to bed, I see the face of Benito Mussolini or Douglas Murray neatly laid out on my pillow — or, for more exotic excursions, the late President Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Ceylon — I know that fun times are ahead. This usually happens twice a year — on my birthday and on Walpurgisnacht. I don’t know if these largely latex creations protect either me or the recipient of my laboured exertions from Covid. Perhaps they do, perhaps they don’t. They certainly wouldn’t protect me from any of the other vile diseases associated with sins of the flesh (were my partner not chaste and pristine in this regard, obvs).

Why I will wear a face mask

Thursday

9 Jul 2020
Rod Liddle
Rod Liddle

Ranges from the slight to the first-rate: Neil Young’s Homegrown reviewed

Grade: B+ Neil Young has been mining his own past very profitably for a long time now, disinterring a seemingly endless catalogue of stuff which, at the time it was recorded, failed to see the light of day. And people like me fork out each time. I remember looking forward to this album in 1975 — but just before the release date he shelved it in favour of Tonight’s the Night, easily the finest rock album of the 1970s (or, to my mind, since). This doesn’t come close but, as it’s from Young’s most rewarding period, it holds a certain interest. Five songs have been released elsewhere, including the lovely ‘Star of Bethlehem’ (on Young’s underrated American Stars ’n’ Bars). Of the remaining seven, one is a confused spoken-word dream about a glider accident in Florida, to the accompaniment of Young running his finger around a wine glass.

Ranges from the slight to the first-rate: Neil Young’s Homegrown reviewed

Thursday

2 Jul 2020
Rod Liddle
Rod Liddle

To understand the past, you need to inhabit it for a while

‘It’s no go my honey love, it’s no go my poppet; Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit. The glass is falling by the hour, the glass will fall forever, But if you break the bloody glass, you won’t hold up the weather.’ The first poem I ever heard was ‘Eenie, meenie, minie moe, catch a tiger by the toe. If he hollers, let him go’, etc. I found it mystifying. How would one catch a tiger by its toe? And do tigers ‘holler’? ‘There is something about this poem they’re not telling me,’ I thought, full of worry, my nappy beginning to chafe. This was last week, by the way. (Ha. Only kidding.) The second poem concerned the rather humdrum and repetitive activities of a spider attempting to climb up some sort of drain, and its setbacks occasioned by inclement weather.

To understand the past, you need to inhabit it for a while

Thursday

25 Jun 2020
Rod Liddle
Rod Liddle

Contains the loveliest new song I’ve heard in decades: Bob Dylan’s new album reviewed

Grade: A ‘Rough’ in terms of the mostly spoken vocals, but only ‘rowdy’ if you’re approaching your 80th birthday, which of course Dylan is. This is a sometimes playful and often self-deprecating Nobel Laureate at work, the lyrics (like the vocals) carrying a whiff of late Leonard Cohen, the arrangements of some of the slower, if not funereal, songs a nod to Tom Waits. In ‘I Contain Multitudes’, the grizzled old boomer has given us his best song since ‘Idiot Wind’; like many on here, the delicate melody is implied by the chord changes rather than explicitly stated. But what a pleasure to hear wit and articulacy in a pop song, as Dylan tells us he’s ‘just like Anne Frank, like Indiana Jones and them British bad boys, the Rolling Stones’, the song title hewn from Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’.

Contains the loveliest new song I’ve heard in decades: Bob Dylan’s new album reviewed

Thursday

18 Jun 2020
Rod Liddle
Rod Liddle

Does anyone think Boris has handled this well?

I don’t know what’s happened to our football hooligans. The modern malaise, I suppose. A gradual descent into ineffectuality. Back in the day, Harry the Dog of Millwall would take an entire away stand by himself and do a few coppers on the way. He would surely turn in his grave looking at today’s lot. We were warned about their arrival in London last weekend. Told they would be tooled up and ready for action, turning on each other. And what happened? Nobody opened up like a tin of peaches by ‘my little friend, Stanley’; just a few skirmishes here and there. Handbags, as the football commentators would put it. Compare that with the entirely peaceful demonstrations by Black Lives Matter and their allies. Some 27 police officers injured, some hospitalised, and loads of stuff wrecked.

Does anyone think Boris has handled this well?

Saturday

13 Jun 2020

Thursday

11 Jun 2020
Rod Liddle
Rod Liddle

The closing down of debate worries me most

The Eastern Orthodox Church has decided that yoga is incompatible with Christianity. This is an enormous problem for me, as I am a regular practitioner of this interesting meditative calisthenic technique, but also someone who judges the sagacity of a person by the length of his beard and the mournful extravagance of his hat. So I must change my daily regimen somehow. I fretted a while — but then it dawned on me that modern Britain might come to my aid. The other evening I was required to ‘clap for carers’ while simultaneously going down on one knee in apologetic homage to an oppressed person who was walking past my house at the time. I found this a satisfyingly tricky operation to co-ordinate. All we need is a couple more of these agreeable genuflections and I will have a new exercise regime.

The closing down of debate worries me most

Thursday

4 Jun 2020
Rod Liddle
Rod Liddle

The real problem with Newsnight

The Twitter feed of BBC Newsnight editor Esme Wren (remember, I read this stuff so you don’t have to) is full of plaintive whining that no cabinet minister will agree to appear on her benighted programme. The Twitter feed of her chief presenter, Emily Maitlis, is largely a screed of bile and petulance directed at the government, some of which is usefully later recycled into her opening programme monologue. Unless Esme has had her brain scooped out with a soup spoon you might expect her to have found a connection between these two facts. Not a bit of it. ‘Cabinet minister, what is it about Newsnight, with its left-wing presenters, left-wing reporters, left-wing agenda and loathing of the government that makes you reluctant to travel across London for a late-night interview?’ It’s a tough one, isn’t it? The BBC’s commendably swift decision to upbraid both Maitlis and Wren (rather than forcing the thousands of angry viewers to go through the labyrinthine complaints procedure) just might be a sign that even the corporation has grown tired of its overpaid, grandstanding, virtue-signalling presenters and their inability to tell the difference between fact and their own adolescent opinions, as reflected back to them via their social media groupies.

The real problem with Newsnight

Thursday

28 May 2020
Rod Liddle
Rod Liddle

We can’t see the wood for the trees

I was relieved to discover, earlier this week, that the Prime Minister’s special adviser, Dominic Cummings, was a symbol of inequality in modern Britain. Relieved because I have been scouring the country for such a symbol for ages and had hitherto not succeeded in finding one. Cummings is just that symbol, according to Robert Peston, because his father has a garden with some trees in it. Cummings was thus able to walk through these trees, whereas people who do not have fathers with a garden with some trees in it are not able to do so. Privileged bastard. There is, however, one small problem. If Robert were to take a short trip out of London for the first time since 1987 I have the horrible feeling he would discover that several other people also own gardens — indeed, according to the Wildlife Gardening Forum, some 22.

We can’t see the wood for the trees

Tuesday

26 May 2020
Rod Liddle
Rod Liddle

Why does this pro-EU scientist dislike Dominic Cummings so much?

The brilliant, in his own mind, Dr Mike Galsworthy has been one of the louder voices calling for Dominic Cummings to be sacked immediately.  You may remember Dr Mike from the Brexit debate. Affiliated to the Labour party, he set up Scientists For EU, regularly spewing out a screed of tendentious, unscientific, pro-EU bollocks. His Wikipedia entry suggests that he 'persistently seeks clarification and sees it as a central science mission in the era of fake news' and also that he 'opposes what he sees as the debasement of knowledge in populist politics'. Does he indeed.  You might think that he would consider the Cummings story to be largely fake news and be disinclined to resort to hyperbole. Not a bit of it.  In his (almost perpetual) Twitter feed he describes Dominic Cummings as 'a compulsive liar' and 'incredibly dangerous'.

Why does this pro-EU scientist dislike Dominic Cummings so much?

Monday

25 May 2020
Rod Liddle
Rod Liddle

Why couldn’t someone ask Dominic Cummings a decent question?

Is it entirely beyond the wit of our gilded political correspondents to ask a different question to the one asked by the previous interlocutor? One after the other they lined up to ask Dominic Cummings the same question, over and over again. Does Peston think he’s asking it better than Kuenssberg? Does Beth Rigby think that asking it for a fourth time will be more elucidatory because she asked it with open contempt in her voice? And how magnificently puffed up they all were. When they were en route to the press conference did they all think the same thing: that they had the killer question and nobody else would have thought of it? Dimbojournalism.

Why couldn’t someone ask Dominic Cummings a decent question?

Thursday

21 May 2020
Rod Liddle
Rod Liddle

Why schools should stay shut

Has the stock of any politician fallen more sharply, these past three or four years, than that of Shami Chakrabarti? As the leader of Liberty, and an almost weekly performer on the BBC’s Question Time, she was a respected purveyor of leftish sanctimony to the masses, a humourless voice of conscience and, I think, self-regard. The battles she fought then were at least, in the main, on the side of decency — and while we might have found her a little trying and even bumptious, there seemed no doubt that here was a young woman motivated by principle. That notion was swiftly expunged when she accepted a brief from Jeremy Corbyn to whitewash anti-Semitism in the Labour party via an ‘independent inquiry’ headed by herself.

Why schools should stay shut

Thursday

14 May 2020
Rod Liddle
Rod Liddle

In defence of the lockdown

I realised things were getting back to normal when I threw away a third of a tin of chopped tomatoes last week. Back in March you couldn’t get them for love or money. I still remember the appalled look on a woman customer’s face at our local farm shop, in mid-April, when she was told that, while the store was out of tinned tomatoes, she could have real ones instead. ‘That’s not the same,’ she said, with a degree of rancour. ‘Um… if you chopped them up with a knife, I think they’d be pretty similar. You know?’ she was informed, but she wouldn’t have it and stomped off. There was always something a little spurious about those early shortages, with people panic-buying yeast when the shelves were stocked with loaves of bread.

In defence of the lockdown

Thursday

7 May 2020
Rod Liddle
Rod Liddle

Beautiful voice, pretentious album: Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters reviewed

Grade: C+ Where did they all come from, the quirky yet meaningful rock chicks who don’t have a decent song between them yet put out albums by the bucketload? Back in the day it was just Joni Mitchell, who had four good songs, Laura Nyro who had two and Dory Previn who had one. Now there are thousands of these creatures, flaunting their intemperance without showing much brilliance. And all slavered over by the (still male) music press. Years of oppression, of being disregarded, they would argue. But disregarded for very good reasons, in almost all cases. Yeah, Carole King is ten times the songwriter James Taylor ever was. I will give you that. We got that wrong. But that doesn’t mean we have to be tormented for eternity by the likes of Laura flipping Marling, does it? Fiona Apple.

Beautiful voice, pretentious album: Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters reviewed

Thursday

30 Apr 2020
Rod Liddle
Rod Liddle

We crave certainty over Covid-19. There isn’t any

One of the strangest developments to have occurred during this very strange time is that the Prime Minister’s special adviser, Dominic Cummings, may have attended a meeting of some people. Worse, various politicians are suggesting that he may have actually said something at this meeting. Very senior people are insisting that if Mr Cummings did say something at this meeting, even if we have no idea as to what it was he said (‘Can you fetch the Gummy Bears please, Mary, I think this going to be a long one’ or ‘Sorry, Zoom is on the blink again’), then he shouldn’t have done so. The Prime Minister’s special adviser attending a meeting! I think of all the various calumnies which have occurred during this crisis, this is by far the gravest.

We crave certainty over Covid-19. There isn’t any

Saturday

25 Apr 2020
Rod Liddle
Rod Liddle

Our impatience will end the lockdown

At the farm shop this morning there was a chap panic-buying a large metal and plaster flamingo. It was the last one in stock and he looked very pleased with himself. I wondered if he had a few score more at home, hoarded in the attic. And then his long-suffering wife saying, when he arrived home: “Did you get the milk and chopped tomatoes?” And him replying with excitement: “No, but I managed to get another one of THESE, love...” As I mentioned in my column this week, the government will be a fait accompli to the ending of lockdown. The glorious silence of two weeks ago is already a fading memory. Nobody at the farm shop this morning was buying “essentials”: instead garish lawn ornaments, flowers, chocolate cakes and, in my case, clotted cream for some strawberries.

Our impatience will end the lockdown

Thursday

23 Apr 2020
Rod Liddle
Rod Liddle

Would Churchill have worn a face mask?

The problem with face masks is cutting an opening of the right size to accommodate a cigarette, without the hole compromising the safety of the mask itself. A tiresome procedure, especially for someone like me who is not terribly dexterous. I assume that very soon we will all be enjoined to wear face masks everywhere we go. At the outset these contrivances were derided a little for two reasons; first they actually offered no protection to the user, only to people who came into contact with the user, and second they seemed to be not a terribly British way of going about things. Even now I would be embarrassed to wear a face mask — there is something smug and averse about the people who use them when nipping out to the shops.

Would Churchill have worn a face mask?

Thursday

16 Apr 2020
Rod Liddle
Rod Liddle

There’s nothing equal about this virus

Filthy germ-laden townsfolk were out and about on the footpaths near my home on Easter Sunday, dragging with them their awful, mewling children. I got the dog to harass them and occasionally shouted out: ‘These are local paths for local people. Clear off.’ One youngish father — lightly bearded, self-satisfied smirk, probably a sticker on his car window saying ‘-Refugees welcome here’ — even had the nerve to ask me for directions to the nearest train station so that he might return to his squalid Remainer tenement. I directed him and his family through a field which was fecund with manure and full of restive bullocks. The child — four or five years old and already gobby and full of itself — was wearing a bright red T-shirt.

There’s nothing equal about this virus

Thursday

9 Apr 2020
Rod Liddle
Rod Liddle

Haunting and beautiful: Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus’s Songs of Yearning reviewed

Grade: A It has taken 33 years — during which time this decidedly strange Liverpool collective have put out only three albums and done virtually no interviews — for the Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus to become sort of au courant. Which is perhaps why they have suddenly, in a wholly unforeseen bout of activity, put out two in the same week. The other is the limited edition Nocturnes. Given our current predicament, the simple iron church bell that tolls here and there on this album should be resonant enough. But musical fashion has swung around a little to this band, too. Whereas once they would have been filed under minimalist modern classical, of interest only to those who hanker after Gavin Bryars and maybe Arvo Part, now you can see traces of conventional and established bands such as Azure Ray and Arcade Fire in this genuinely haunting and beautiful collection of, er, stuff.

Haunting and beautiful: Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus’s Songs of Yearning reviewed
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