Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
I have read countless commentaries explaining why we shouldn’t take Reform’s victories last Thursday too seriously. They are all wrong. I have the distinct impression that these were the most significant election results for a good few decades. Up here in the north, everyone I know voted Reform. More importantly, when I used to ask
Going to Glasto this year with your little tent? I only ask because the average age of people who attend this extortionate smugfest is now not terribly distant from that of people who read this magazine. So it is possible that some of you are off to watch good old Neil Young, Nick Lowe and
It is ten months since the then merely aspirant education secretary Bridget Phillipson addressed the important issue of where transgender people should go for a quick slash. Bridget was very much of the opinion that if you had a gender recognition certificate, then you should make for the cubicle which matched with whatever it said
My contention was always that Reform UK would struggle to reach 30 per cent in the polls and, while the party is edging upwards, that still seems to be a ceiling. However, the latest MRP poll in the Sun suggests that, for Nigel Farage to become our next Prime Minister, the party need not gain
The population of the United Kingdom was increased this week by the arrival of two Albanian lesbians who have been given the right to remain here by an deputy Upper Tribunal judge called Rebecca Chapman. The women insisted that they would face persecution in Albania for their sexual preferences. This is despite the fact that
Grade: A Is that a kind of nod to Oasis in the album title? I can’t think of a band less like that grunting Manc convocation, except in the fact that BCNR are just about the biggest band in the country right now, as the Gallagher bros were all those years ago. Vocalist (of a
The dewy-eyed and rather dim-witted vision of globalisation is dead, I think for good. Labour is to effectively re-nationalise British Steel in Scunthorpe and in making the announcement that Parliament was to be recalled, Sir Keir Starmer said: ‘This afternoon, the future of British Steel hangs in the balance. Jobs, investment, growth, our economic and
I had spent my life so far in blissful ignorance of a woman called Gillian Mackay. I mean, I knew she existed – but how she existed and what she did with her existence did not impinge because she was safely sequestered in that booby hatch of methadone, lady-men, corruption and pies which we know
If, for some unfathomable reason, you missed Newsnight last night, do make sure you see, somehow, the interview between presenter Victoria Derbyshire and the former deputy assistant to Donald Trump, Sebastian Gorka. Derbyshire has had it coming for a long time. She believes it is sufficient, when interviewing somebody who takes a Trumpish view of
I heard the self-important whine of a police siren so pulled back the curtains a little to see what was happening. I was in a bed and breakfast in Royston, Herts, so I assumed the rozzers were on their way to handcuff someone who had been mildly disobliging about their child’s school on a social
Grade: B+ Satan’s devoted groupies Cradle of Filth are back with their shrieking, howling, portentous, Exorcist-style incantations, 30 years after effectively inventing the loser-boy goth-metal offshoot, black metal. They’ve got quite good at it. Rapid-paced minor-chord hard rawk, much as AC/DC might have churned out if someone had shown them some Edgar Allan Poe and
In an Appalachian high school, the kids were set the task of writing about Europeans as part of their history curriculum. When the day came to hand in their work, the teacher took one boy aside and expressed displeasure about the sheer lack of effort he had put into his homework. ‘You have had three
Cindy Yu (CY): Slashing winter fuel allowance, keeping the two-child benefit cap, cutting foreign aid, cutting the civil service, axing NHS bureaucracy and slashing welfare spending. Rod, are we actually living under a conservative government? Rod Liddle (RL): No, because the Conservative government didn’t do any of that, because they didn’t have the appetite for
It is difficult to gauge who is the more discombobulated by the Labour government’s recent Damascene conversion to a political viewpoint roughly approximating to common sense – the Labour left, Reform or the Tory right. It is equally difficult to believe that the current administration is the same one which took office on 4 July
In early June last year I had a reasonably agreeable meal with a bunch of Reform UK activists at a restaurant in Guisborough – the main town in the seat which I would be contesting for the Social Democratic party, Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland. There were four of them, united primarily by one thing
Forgive the mordant tone, but this article was written in a desolate post-industrial nightmare girdled by diversionary roads going nowhere aside from away from places. It is somewhere in middle England, where the West Country merges into the Midlands and the north into the south: it is essentially delocated, it is nowhere. There are 15
We were twice transported back to the early 1970s this weekend, our memories snagged on the deaths of Roberta Flack and David Johansen. One of the two was afforded quite a send off by the media, the other wasn’t. I think they got it the wrong way around. Flack, who died aged 88 on 24
The world order has shifted on its axis, having been given a peremptory boot by the US President. What is striking to me is the speed with which our government has accustomed itself to the new dawn, overnight, almost with a sense of relief. Listen to senior Labour figures today and they do not always
As happens with every issue, the world is now neatly polarised about Mr Trump. There are those who refer to him as a Nazi, a dictator, a fascist, a rapist and could not possibly discern anything beneficial about his regime even if he announced he was both joining Hamas and transitioning. And then there are
In January last year the European Union revealed that it had dreamed up a ‘secret plan’ to sabotage the economy of one of its member states. Brussels was growing impatient with the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who had shown the temerity to dissent from EU orthodoxy on a number of issues. In this particular