Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.

They love to hate us

We are going through one of those horrible and debilitating periods in our history when we are convinced that everybody hates us. Racked with grief, we may even begin to hate ourselves – and thus climb into bed at night praying that we might wake up as Turks. Or Irishmen. It is partly the Eurovision

Why is the BBC so scared of the truth?

Let us imagine for a moment that you are a visitor from the Planet Zarg, a civilised and agreeable world somewhere near the great gaseous star Proxima Centauri. Your spaceship landed here a few weeks ago as part of an interplanetary inclusive outreach scheme funded, on your own planet, by a sort of sophisticated private-finance

Is green the new blue?

Phew! Made it! Just in time, mind. And not without a rather costly rearrangement of the flights back from the Far East, I might add. And a holiday cut short as a result of a lamentable slip of the memory. But all worth it, in the end. Like you, I suspect, I couldn’t have lived

The day of the jackals

The Iraqi information minister, Said al-Sahaf, was still telling Western journalists that the treacherous infidel jackals of the US army had, in fact, killed themselves by swallowing poison, at the time the first looting of antiquities in Baghdad took place. For some Iraqis, clearly, it was not enough to celebrate liberation from Saddam’s cruel and

Don’t expel Dr Hook

A dingy community hall in the back streets of Bethnal Green on a cold and miserable winter’s evening. We’re all here waiting for the weird, hook-handed fundamentalist cleric Sheikh Abu Hamza al Misri, the most loathed man in Britain, who is about to hold a public meeting. When I say ‘we’re all here’, I mean

Black is best

Here’s something to be cheerful about. At an English Premiership football match last year, the fans of one London club were heard to be singing the following jolly refrain: ‘We all agree, our coons are better than your coons.’ We should be glad, because this little chanson marks what we might call a paradigm shift

Loony meets butcher

Now that Dr Blix has done his work, how will Saddam Hussein cope with the latest threat from the West to both his political stability and his sanity? It seems that, as a softening-up exercise before vaporising Baghdad with expensive ordnance, we have begun to export British lunatics to Iraq. And, because this is total

Why not kill Saddam and spare Iraq?

There’s something terribly primitive about bombing the hell out of a country simply to get rid of one man (and, perhaps, his small ragbag assortment of grinning, psychopathic sons, obsequious flunkeys and hired assassins). This is what we’re about to do to Iraq, if I’m not mistaken about the utter futility of this business with

Diana wins – from beyond the grave

Caught on camera at a Remembrance service last week, Queen Elizabeth appeared, rather unexpectedly, to be crying. It was quite a shocking thing to behold: I had never seen our Queen cry before. Perhaps it was just the cold, dank weather getting to her, biting into her bones. Or maybe it was another of those