Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
I once came up against Mike Gapes in a fraternal game of five-a-side football played at the Elephant and Castle leisure centre in south London in about 1985. Mike is one of the seven Labour MPs to have announced their resignation from the Labour party this week, in order to sit as members of the
Terrible news for gay broadcasters — the BBC has only one year to meet a diversity target which says that 8 per cent of roles on TV and radio must be occupied by homosexuals. This means a reduction in gay TV weathermen by at least three quarters, and they’ll also have to sack a good
Grade: A– I’m here to make you feel old. It’s now nearly 20 years since the pleasing, laconic, Stones pastiche of ‘Bohemian Like You’ hit the charts, the breakthrough song of these faux-indie Portland slackers. They were ever a little despised, even then, partly for their pop sensibilities and partly because there is indeed something
Where would you rather come from, Pakistan or Liverpool? Assuming you were somehow given a retrospective choice in the matter. It is not too tough a call for me. I could just about suffer being accused of a ‘cheeky’ wit and perhaps a sense of victimhood — both qualities maybe unfairly associated with Scousers —
The question I had hoped to pose this week was this: ‘Do people dislike Diane Abbott because she is black and a woman, or because she is useless?’ But then I worried that we would come to a fairly definitive conclusion a long time before my allotted 1,000 words had been used up. ‘The latter,
The question I had hoped to pose this week was this: “Do people dislike Diane Abbott because she is black and a woman, or because she is useless?” But then I worried that we would come to a fairly definitive conclusion a long time before my allotted 1,000 words had been used up. “The latter,
I once worked my way through two whole books of IQ tests devised by Hans Eysenck and by the time I had finished I was much cleverer than that self-publicising ass Einstein, according to the helpful chart, and quite possibly the cleverest person ever to have walked on the face of the earth. So I
There is a satirical website called ‘Guardian headline generator’ which purports to offer a service to aspirant journalists who wish to be published in the floundering, godawful rag. Press a button on the site and it will give you your subject matter for a typical article, such as: ‘Islamophobic white men will soon be widening
For a while, as a 13-year-old, I was obsessed with rabbits — the consequence of having read Watership Down by Richard Adams. I tried to share my enthusiasm for the book with my parents, but my father told me that he thought the scenario depicted by Adams was ‘improbable’. However, they did consent to take
It is always a pleasure to watch Paris burning. On the surface a civilised country, but scrape a little deeper and France is revealed as a nation of kind of faux-Arabs (aside from that rapidly growing proportion who are actual Arabs): easily incensed into an incandescent toddler fury at real or imagined iniquities, things not
I didn’t agree with much that Paddy Ashdown had to say. But what a man! If we could all die knowing that we have given a tenth as much to our country as Ashdown, we should be very pleased indeed. This is from a review of his autobiography I did nine years ago for the
1. Santa – the Man Loose fitting but matted nylon beard, fake optical twinkle, cheap red suit. The distinct whiff of Jack Daniels and ammonia when you close. If he’s such a big shot, why is he drawing unemployment benefit for eleven months of the year? Something scary and offkey about him. And there are
We’re closing 2018 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 10: Rod Liddle on the leader of the opposition: The crowd were singing ‘Oh, Jeremy Corbyn’ again, at a festival in Cornwall, the words appended to a riff by the White Stripes which I once liked but now find a little
It is always a pleasure to watch Paris burning. On the surface a civilised country, but scrape a little deeper and France is revealed as a nation of kind of faux-Arabs (aside from that rapidly growing proportion who are actual Arabs): easily incensed into an incandescent toddler fury at real or imagined iniquities, things not
A couple of days ago I wrote an article uncovering George Monbiot’s shadowy past as an agent of Satan, which was published here. Mr Monbiot took great exception to my suggestion that he kept his extremely privileged upbringing from his readers. He demanded a “correction”. However, when asked to prove that he was upfront about
The Guardian journalist George Monbiot has written a typically powerful piece explaining how a British blogsite, Spiked, once got some money off an institution which had connections to some moderately right-wing people. As George rightly points out, this is an example of “dark money”, which is an occult form of currency designed by Satan and
Thank the blessed Lord it’s over. Not Brexit, or Theresa May’s flailing and spastic governance. I’m talking about John le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl, which has been serialised on the BBC on a Sunday evening, just when people want to watch something interesting. I watched it with the missus, and by episode two decided
I can see that there is a moral case for a General Election, as demanded by Jeremy Corbyn. An election which Corbyn would win, by some margin, I suspect. The government is inept, hopelessly divided, derided and May will not get the majority she needs to push her Brexit deal through the Commons. There is
Nic Roeg’s art-house thriller from 1973 Don’t Look Now was most famous, or infamous, for its lengthy and explicit sex scene. I think it’s fair to say that the lugubrious (and in 1973 near ubiquitous) Donald Sutherland gave Julie Christie a very thorough seeing-to, involving the first act of cunnilingus in a mainstream movie. Even
Grade: C A derided year in pop music, 1975 — and yet a great one. The mainstream was horrible, but we had Neil Young’s Tonight’s The Night, Patti Smith’s Horses, Guy Clarke’s Old No. 1 and Television just beginning to break through. It is in the lacunae, before the next big wave, that we hear