Rod Liddle | The Spectator columnists & writers

More mimsy soft rock from Cat Stevens: Tea for the Tillerman 2 reviewed

Grade: B– Time has been kind to Cat Stevens’s reputation — his estrangement from the music business and rad BAME credentials bestowing upon him an edginess which his mimsy fragile-voiced soft rock never really deserved. It’s the kind of retrospective benediction usually only death from some bad skag at the age of 27 can provide. Never mind anything else, I’d have barred him entry to the US just for calling an album Teaser and the Firecat. This one, meanwhile, is described as ‘his 1970 masterpiece’. Really? I don’t think so, although in its original incarnation it was pleasant enough on the ears, tinkling away on the turntable in the infant school staffroom. This is the album ‘reimagined’ by Yusuf. That means a drenching of strings and some rap, natch.

Rod Liddle

Time for me to be more assertive

Rod Liddle

Time for me to be more assertive

Rod Liddle

Virtuosic but slight – always prog’s problem: The Pineapple Thief’s latest reviewed

Rod Liddle

Virtuosic but slight – always prog’s problem: The Pineapple Thief’s latest reviewed

Grade: B– Of all the various subdivisions in that wheezing and crippled phenomenon that we call rock music, prog has fared better than most, spawning its own devilish offspring in math rock and post-rock. Why? Maybe we are more amenable to bombast and pretension these days. Or perhaps new studio technology lends itself to the genre — hell, you can hear prog time signatures in top ten hits. Maybe more to the point, prog offers a broader avenue than, say, heavy metal or punk. Prog is often what bands end up doing even if that’s not what they think they’re doing: Radiohead, Muse — even Arcade Fire or the National. This is the 14th album from Somerset band the Pineapple Thief (prog is very much a West Country thing).

Rod Liddle

JK Rowling’s fundamental mistake

Rod Liddle

JK Rowling’s fundamental mistake

Rod Liddle

The BBC’s ‘stuff the elderly’ campaign continues

Rod Liddle

The BBC’s ‘stuff the elderly’ campaign continues

Why does the BBC do it? Needlessly antagonise that rapidly diminishing section of the population which still has a vaguely nice memory of the organisation? The latest move in their 'stuff the elderly' campaign is to drop Sue Barker from A Question of Sport – an enormously admired presenter and easily the best host the programme has had. Why? 'The BBC want to take the show in a new direction,' according to Barker. I bet they do. As far away from their audience as possible. The new presenter will tick at least one diversity box, and people will assume, perhaps rightly, that that is why they were hired. Barker should sue on grounds of ageism and sexism. Meanwhile, Tim Davie’s first act as Director General was to restore singing to the Last Night of the Proms.

Rod Liddle

Falsehoods are running amok

Rod Liddle

Falsehoods are running amok

I don’t know how much of a shock this will come to you as — perhaps none, because you are deeply prejudiced people, subconsciously guided by your inner fascist. So, an ‘activist’ called Vicky Osterweil has caused a bit of a stir in the USA with a book advocating the looting of private property as a means of redistributing wealth and dismantling capitalism. Violence and pillaging enables well-informed, politically aware activists like Vicky to acquire worldly possessions without recourse to the reactionary and frankly tiresome notion of working for a living. No shock or surprise in any of that to me: you can probably do a degree in Radical Looting these days. The revelation instead is that Vicky was writing the same sort of stuff some years ago under the name Willie Osterweil.

Rod Liddle

How a lie becomes truth

Rod Liddle

How a lie becomes truth

Teachers were told to exclude children who made ‘inappropriate’ jokes about Covid when they returned to school this week. These days every joke is inappropriate in one way or another: someone, somewhere will find it transgressive. I cannot imagine being a schoolchild and not making a joke about Covid, and a sense of humour is about the only thing these kids have got left. But for the officials who dreamed up these edicts, humour is the last refuge of the bourgeois, as Herbert Marcuse or one of those Frankfurt School monkeys put it. (I forget exactly which one. Maybe it was Jürgen Habermas. What a fun night you’d have out on the town with those boys.) But the poor children: masked up in the corridors, separated from their mates, held in ‘bubbles’, at school one week, at home the next, denied the human right to make jokes about their predicament — all to preserve them from an illness which, if they caught it, they would not even notice.

Rod Liddle

The woke revolution is devouring its children

Rod Liddle

The woke revolution is devouring its children

I would have more sympathy for Suzanne Moore if the road upon which she is gleefully mown down by the juggernauts of the woke left were not one which she eagerly participated in constructing: putting out the cones, levelling the tarmac etc. Almost all she writes about these days is her terrible struggles against ‘progressives’ who call her a terf (trans exclusionary radical feminist) and wish to stop her writing what she is writing. But she will not stop! Because she is brave! How wonderfully noble. She fails to understand two important points. First, that for many people within her milieu, including a good number of her colleagues at the Guardian, what she writes about transgendered men is hateful, transphobic and antediluvian.

Rod Liddle

The West doesn’t know best

Rod Liddle

The West doesn’t know best

I’d always rather liked the Finns, until I came across the conductor Dalia Stasevska. When I asked my mother what they were like, back when I was five or six and enjoyed staring at a globe of the world, she described them as ‘drunken and stupid, but very brave’. This was, by Mother’s standards, an extremely kindly benediction. Most of her descriptions of the world’s various people did not contain commendations. There were a few exceptions — Trinidadians were ‘drunken and stupid, but very cheerful’, for example. But by and large, to her the world comprised people who were drunken and stupid, apart from the Muslim world, where people were merely ‘stupid’. Anyway, it was apparently at the behest of Ms Stasevska that the BBC decided there would be no singing ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ or ‘Rule, Britannia’ at the Last Night of the Proms this year.

Rod Liddle

Brits aren’t idiotic – but our institutions are

Rod Liddle

Brits aren’t idiotic – but our institutions are

Two headlines from the same news-paper, less than three weeks apart. So, the Guardian on 31 July: ‘The Guardian view on delaying elections: it’s what autocrats do.’ This was in response to a suggestion from the US President that the elections might need to be delayed on account of Covid. And then on 17 August: ‘By delaying the New Zealand election, Jacinda Ardern appears magnanimous and conciliatory.’ This was in response to the New Zealand Prime Minister postponing the elections on account of Covid. The only rational response to this fairly typical piece of doublethink is that the Guardian likes Jacinda Ardern whereas it does not like Donald Trump. I am not sure why they like Ardern: she seems to me a simpering fraud and almost as irritating as the Canadian black-facer Justin Trudeau, but each to their own, I suppose.

Rod Liddle

My pronouncement on the BBC

Rod Liddle

My pronouncement on the BBC

Radio 4 recently ran an adaptation of Albert Camus’s The Plague in which the protagonist, Dr Bernard Rieux, was transformed into a woman. A woman who was enjoying a lesbian ‘marriage’. Of course they did, you will be muttering to yourself. If the BBC can transgender a rabbit in Watership Down they can certainly put a lesbian in The Plague. The boss of BBC audio drama, Alison Hindell, explained that the masterpiece had been altered to provide ‘contemporary resonance’. Does it resonate with you? Drama invites us to suspend our sense of disbelief for a while but needs to have at least a slender connection to reality. The original story is set in Oran, Algeria. Yet nobody thought it a bit rum that this well-to-do doctor batted for the other side.

Rod Liddle

There’s scarcely a dull track: Deep Purple’s Whoosh! reviewed

Rod Liddle

There’s scarcely a dull track: Deep Purple’s Whoosh! reviewed

Rod Liddle

We are living in a post-truth society

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’.

Rod Liddle

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

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.

Rod Liddle

Fat-shaming didn’t do me any harm

Rod Liddle

Fat-shaming didn’t do me any harm

Rod Liddle

What went wrong with our coronavirus response?

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.

Rod Liddle

Young people have never paid attention to the BBC

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.

Rod Liddle

Why I will wear a face mask

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).

Rod Liddle

The ineptitude of despots

Rod Liddle

The ineptitude of despots

Displaying the pristine neutrality that has made her such a popular figure, Newsnight’s Emily Maitlis apparently tweeted the following last week: ‘No. 10 is trying to control the media, and everyone in our democracy should be afraid.’ Sadly, this typically sane and measured observation was later deleted. Was she told to delete it? Or did she think better of it but was not quite up to tweeting: ‘No. 10 isn’t trying to control the media and we should probably all rest easy.’ I wonder how many other tweets she’s deleted before I got around to seeing them? ‘The schools are closed not on account of Covid but because giant Tory goblins are devouring our children. And nobody says anything.’ In Emily’s milieu — the Newsnight office, the BBC in general, her Twitterati acolytes and scullions — the question of bias does not occur because they mistake what they believe for the facts and have no mechanism for separating these two very different things.

Rod Liddle

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

Rod Liddle

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

Rod Liddle

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

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.

Rod Liddle

The police have become too politicised to function

Rod Liddle

The police have become too politicised to function

Of the many admirable demands made by supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement, such as dismantling capitalism and making white people pay for centuries of vile oppression, none commended themselves to me more than the demand that we should defund the police. This is a hugely attractive proposition, I thought, as I watched the chief constable of Kent, Alan Pughsley, ‘take the knee’ in solidarity with people who want him abolished. I felt much the same upon hearing the words of Superintendent Andrew ‘Andy’ Bennett of Avon and Somerset Police, who watched as BLM protestors threw a statue of Edward Colston into the river. ‘Andy’ instructed his men to do nothing at all — because, as he explained, guarding the statue may have led to problems, and the last thing the police want is problems.

Rod Liddle

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

Rod Liddle

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

Rod Liddle

Does anyone think Boris has handled this well?

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.

Rod Liddle

A rabbi stabbed, but no hate crime?

Rod Liddle

A rabbi stabbed, but no hate crime?

A mystery has occurred. In The Affluent People’s Republic of North London, a rabbi was stabbed on the street multiple times by a knifeman. Rabbi Alter Yaakov Schlesinger was rescued by two builders and a Deliveroo driver and is now in hospital, where hopefully he will recover. Apparently no robbery was attempted. The police, however, have said that this was not a terrorist incident, thus suggesting – by extension – it was also not a hate crime. A crime of love, or indifference, then? Who knows? All a mystery. A familiar mystery.

Rod Liddle

The closing down of debate worries me most

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.

Rod Liddle

The real problem with Newsnight

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.

Rod Liddle

Skates on the edge of parody: The 1975’s Notes on a Conditional Form reviewed

Rod Liddle

Skates on the edge of parody: The 1975’s Notes on a Conditional Form reviewed

Rod Liddle

We can’t see the wood for the trees

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.