Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
It was with mild pleasure that I read of the decision of Robin Ince to end his association with the Radio 4 programme, The Infinite Monkey Cage. I enjoy the show, but have never been entirely sure what Ince brings to it. He is not terribly funny, nor erudite, although what he lacks in those
We will remember 2025 as the year that a madness which had gripped us for a decade finally succumbed to that most irritating of things, reality – and the edifice it had built began to crumble like a 1970s brutalist building constructed from high alumina cement. It is not quite the case that woke is
Too much information. That’s what you’re about to get. I wouldn’t read another line if I were you. I will be talking, at length, about my prostate and, by extension, my old fella and why I will not let the medical clergy anywhere near either of them, not the private medics or the chaotic maniacs
For quite a few members of the House of Commons culture, media and sport committee, the answer to the claims of left-wing bias against the BBC could be annulled by the simple expediency of firing the only supposedly right-of-centre person within the corporation, Robbie Gibb. It is a curious logic that the left employs. This
Finding someone who ‘likes’ Sir Keir Starmer is a terribly enervating quest, and I have given up on it without success. It is true that I have not contacted Sir Keir’s close family members, or indeed canvassed inside the walls of Broadmoor hospital, so it may be that some tiny reservoirs of affection remain. Less
Grade: A Welcome to the Andalusian cadence, the minor fall and the major lift, the descent from Am through G and F to E. Welcome also to Rosalia Vila Tobella, who is not Andalusian, but Catalan, but uses that cadence an awful lot, much as Status Quo prefer to stick to C, F, G. She
Assuming the BBC is still in existence by the time you read this, the scale of the task facing the next director-general would have been evident by listening to the output on Monday, the day after Tim Davie and Deborah Turness resigned. This was an organisation in utter denial. It began with Nick Robinson, puffed
You may remember that in February the BBC found itself in a spot of bother regarding a film about the conflict in Gaza which, it transpired, had been narrated by the son of a Hamas minister. Some people, not least Jewish people, wondered if such an account perhaps might accidentally stray into the realms of
Sarah Pochin’s gonna take a lot of coachin’. You can’t just turn up on the telly and say you’re sick of all the blacks everywhere. And the Asians. Un-accountably, perhaps, you will be accused of racism, the definition of the term having been extended rather further than my interpretation: to discriminate against an individual on
Contrary to what I had expected, the Oxford Union president-elect, George Abaraonye, lost his vote of no confidence by a whopping margin and will now have to resign. More than 70 per cent of Union members voted for the semi-literate, dreadlocked leftie to lose his job following his apparent delight at the murder of Charlie
It is more than nine years since I was suspended by the Labour party for – I think – a comment I made about Palestine. I had written: ‘If you handed over Israel to the Palestinians they would turn it into Somalia before you could say Yom Kippur.’ I remember having worried about the sentence
I’ve just got back from doing a spot of shopping in my local town – and do you know what struck me? How white it was. Absolutely heaving with ghostfaces. In fact, in the hour or so that I spent there I don’t think I saw a single non-white person, apart from some young ladies
How important do you think it is to know what the Church of England thought about that ‘Unite the Kingdom’ march in London two weeks ago? There is a very good argument for saying it is about as meaningful and relevant as finding out what Bonnie Blue, that young lady touring the country flat on
Grade: B- ‘I feel within myself a constant dialogue between my masculinity, my femininity and the part of me that is neither of those things. I’m just trying to talk about it because I feel like I’m something that is very ambiguous,’ explains lead singer and songwriter Adrianne Lenker. This may explain why the first
Isn’t it time we banned such marches as the ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally, given the thuggery and lawlessness which ensued? A hate-fest organised by the fascist Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Hitler. No fewer than 528 arrests, 50 of which were for possession of a weapon and 21 for crimes of a sexual
One evening last week I came home, flipped on the TV and saw on the news what must surely be a eulogy for some sainted figure who had been taken from us prematurely, such was the wailing and the gnashing of teeth. Mother Teresa, I wondered? Isn’t she dead already? Only as I sat down
I used to volunteer at a wildlife sanctuary, counting sheep and goats on an agreeable patch of chalk downland in Kent. On hot days the goats would hide in the dense, cool woodland and it could take a long time to find them. Occasionally they broke out of the reserve because our gates were of
As a snapshot of our country, you’ll be pressed to find anything quite so resonant as the one which depicts a leading member of our Skankerati sitting in an inflatable off the southern coast of the UK with tattoo and vape in attendance. There has been much debate of late about the very large numbers
I don’t quite see the point of flying Union flags in Tower Hamlets, or complaining about it when the council takes them down. This squalid little fiefdom run by the deeply corrupt Lutfur Rahman is not part of the UK: it is a suburb of Sylhet, with all that such a location might entail. This
A familiar cliché, which in history has been disproved time and again, is that a police force cannot operate without the consent of the people. Tell that to the residents of what was once East Berlin. But that old canard raises a different problem. Which people are giving the consent? The ones who abide by
