Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.

Today

22 Oct 2020
Rod Liddle
Rod Liddle

Spare us David Hare

Having not watched television for nine months and already growing bored of the 1,000-piece jigsaw of General Alfredo Stroessner (part of the ‘Vigorous Leaders’ range from Waddingtons), my wife suggested — for a novelty — that maybe we should take in the new political thriller starring Hugh Laurie, called Roadkill. We have fond memories of Laurie from previous dramas and are both mildly interested in politics, so it seemed an agreeable idea. ‘What side is it on?’ I asked, with a note of warning. ‘BBC One,’ replied the missus, and we looked at each other glumly and I said: ‘Oh Christ. It’ll be a woke BAME-athon. Isn’t there an old episode of Midsomer Murders on somewhere, one starring John Nettles and with DS Troy being disparaging about homosexuals and gypsies?’ But there wasn’t — I think they’ve all been purged.

Spare us David Hare

Thursday

15 Oct 2020
Rod Liddle
Rod Liddle

What I got wrong about lockdown

The news that residents of Liverpool are not allowed to visit any other cities in the UK is a hammer blow not just for the Scousers themselves, but even more so for the rest of us, who will be forced for an indefinite period to abide without their famous cheeky wit. I am not sure how I will cope. Covid has impinged horribly on the lives of all of us, but this may be the most grievous development of all. Luckily we can still treat ourselves to the pleasures of hearing the Metro Mayor for the Liverpool City Region, Steve Rotheram, on the radio every five minutes or so demanding cash from the government. Mr Rotheram has been praised by the Prime Minister for his ‘strong leadership’, despite the fact that the mayor himself eviscerates Boris Johnson and the government almost every time he opens his mouth.

What I got wrong about lockdown

Thursday

8 Oct 2020
Rod Liddle
Rod Liddle

Who’s missing from that list of Great Black Britons

There are two striking things about the new book, 100 Great Black Britons, which was compiled to celebrate the achievements of British people from an African or Caribbean heritage. The first is the sheer number of people included who are ghastly or mediocre or both. The second is the number of truly brilliant black Britons who were left off the list — for reasons which are not, I think, terribly mysterious. Under the ‘both’ category we have, to name but a few, Diane Abbott, David Lammy and the reliably hilarious Dawn Butler. There is also Kehinde Andrews, of course, a lecturer at a former polytechnic who will be appearing on a TV programme in your front room very soon opining about how everything in the universe, from hydrogen to oganesson, is racist.

Who’s missing from that list of Great Black Britons

Thursday

1 Oct 2020
Rod Liddle
Rod Liddle

The sound of pop eating itself and throwing up: A.G. Cook’s Apple reviewed

Grade: A The future, then. The sound of pop eating itself, throwing up into a bag and then getting a spoon and digging in. A mash-up of everything — largely very sickly EDM, but also trance, house, power ballads, industrial techno, soft rock, winsome acoustic guitar. Meticulous to the point of almost derangement, endlessly inventive both musically and rhythmically, full of arch puns. Such as the album’s title here — Apple. Mr Cook is the boss of the record label PC Music. Geddit? Sides splitting? That’s the other thing — the future also promises to be very irritating. What you cannot doubt is A.G. Cook’s nerdish attention to detail, nor the crucial thing overlooked too often — he writes a good tune, as in the opener here, ‘Oh Yeah’, which is simultaneously utterly inane and pretty.

The sound of pop eating itself and throwing up: A.G. Cook’s Apple reviewed

Thursday

24 Sep 2020
Rod Liddle
Rod Liddle

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.

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

Thursday

17 Sep 2020
Rod Liddle
Rod Liddle

JK Rowling’s fundamental mistake

I had my first doubts about Lord Hall, the former director-general of the BBC, when he addressed a group of us BBC editors back in about 1999 in his role then as head of news. A pleasant, emollient man, he revealed that he was thoroughly enjoying reading the second Harry Potter book, which had recently been published. Grow up, Tony, I thought to myself. Get yourself some Dostoyevsky for Christ’s sake. Snobbish it well may be, but I can’t take seriously an adult displaying such infantile predilections (and this goes for those grown-up admirers of Philip Pullman). Harry Potter was a big sensation at the time. I remember being on the train into London from Salisbury, on the morning commute, and seeing a middle-aged man wearing shorts, eating a packet of crisps and engrossed in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

JK Rowling’s fundamental mistake

Tuesday

15 Sep 2020
Rod Liddle
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.

The BBC’s ‘stuff the elderly’ campaign continues

Thursday

10 Sep 2020
Rod Liddle
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.

Falsehoods are running amok

Thursday

3 Sep 2020
Rod Liddle
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.

How a lie becomes truth

Sunday

30 Aug 2020
Rod Liddle
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.

The woke revolution is devouring its children

Thursday

27 Aug 2020
Rod Liddle
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.

The West doesn’t know best

Thursday

20 Aug 2020
Rod Liddle
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.

Brits aren’t idiotic – but our institutions are

Thursday

13 Aug 2020
Rod Liddle
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.

My pronouncement on the BBC

Thursday

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

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.

The ineptitude of despots

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

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.

The police have become too politicised to function

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
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