Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
Grade: B– Chugga-chugga, grawch, chugga-chugga. Never mind 72 seasons, it’s actually been a little over 500 seasons since Metallica first started bestowing their peculiarly Los Angeles brand of heavy metal – shiny, taut and smooth – on a grateful audience of dispossessed lower-middle-class white incels. And nothing very much has changed. They have got better,
I thought I had forgotten about Diane Abbott, but in fact there has been a Diane-sized hole in my life and I only properly realised this when she came back, gloriously, to fill it again. Hitherto I had been going about my business, writing columns, cooking for my family and so on, and perhaps to
For people who take politics seriously and very earnestly, such as myself, the present debacle within the Scottish National party is surely a time of great sadness and disappointment, rather than of jumping up in the air, screaming ‘Ha ha ha, suck it up, you malevolent ginger dwarf!’ and breaking open the champers. Gloating in
The journos weren’t very impressed with Nicola Sturgeon’s house. Never mind the plod staring like morons at her barbecue or heaving out sacks of half-completed pools coupons to their summer marquee on the front lawn – the southern hacks were more interested in the paucity of this real estate. Her house was, we were assured,
It is with great sadness that I must report the departure of the world’s only female head of state who is as fit as a butcher’s dog, Sanna Marin of Finland. Sanna’s Social Democrats – plus her allies in various awful left-wing parties – have seen their votes slump as the Finns turn to the
Grade: A– No, Lana, I didn’t, thank you – all cleared up. The most extravagantly talented of that lachrymose, self-harming genre, miserycore, returns with an album described by critics as ‘heavy’, as if we might have expected Mungo Jerry or the Venga Boys. The difference between Del Rey and the rest of those dispossessed chicks
Have you had your fourth Covid booster jab yet? They are being very quiet about it these days. I used to be bombarded with injunctions to attend my local clinic, but not any more. This is a shame because a new study suggests that unless I am properly up to date with my injections, I
Wyndham Lewis once said that ‘the ideas of a time are like the clothes of a season’ – but that, of course, is not how they are seen by liberals today. They are regarded immutable, inviolable, permanent and not up for argument. This is especially the case when they are demonstrably counter-factual, such as in
There was a kind of peak BBC Radio 4 moment last week when the network put on a play called Bess Loves Porgy. As you might have guessed, this was a rewrite of Porgy and Bess, the twist being that Porgy was a black, disabled grime rap artist in south London. I hope it went
I am at a bit of a loss to understand the hoo-ha about the civil servant Sue Gray. She has been offered the role of Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, and many Tories suggest this implies that her investigation into those Downing Street parties may not have been wholly neutral. Where have these Tories
You want some tomatoes? Come up here, we’re inundated. We’ve got a tomato mountain. That’s because nobody in the north of England eats salad vegetables, yet the government keeps sending up vast lorry-loads of the stuff to stop us dying of diabetes. So much of what we were forbidden to say about Covid has turned
A little late in the day, perhaps, it has been pointed out to the intellectual colossi of South Tyneside Council that the Vikings may have been a bit right-of-centre and therefore ripe for a spot of cancelling. There is a statue, you see, of a couple of these marauding Norsemen outside a shopping centre in
How are you coping during this cost- of-living crisis? Have you made your way to the food bank yet? I am interested to find out. On Tuesday I listened to an edition of Radio 4’s You and Yours for which listeners were invited to call in and explain how they were managing in these desperately
Once upon a time, a fox with a large bushy tail and a disingenuous smile changed his name from Reynard to ‘Chicken Little’ and applied for a post in a local hen coop. During the interview for the position, which was conducted by members of the Scottish National party, he wore red plastic wattles, which
Grade: D Yes, it’s porky Sam from Essex, with his body issues and his complex gender pronouns and his endless narcissistic banalities, his depthless self-importance. This is Smith’s fourth studio album in a career that seems to be nosing a little downhill, mercifully – although it will still sell by the million worldwide. He has
Aretha Franklin’s 1967 hit ‘(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman’ should be removed from the music streaming network Spotify because it perpetuates anti-trans stereotypes, according to a whole bunch of alphabet people with too much time on their hands. The spearhead of this attack on the Queen of Soul’s famous hit is a
It is rare to find an example of public art which one can applaud, unequivocally, but I think I have found one in London. The educational group Black Blossoms is running a series of lectures as part of the Art on the Underground scheme making the case that – as I had long suspected –
Grade: A– James Newell Osterberg Jnr’s unexpected and unwarranted longevity on this planet has conferred upon him the status of irascible, but very loveable, grandfather of punk: it suits him just fine. A delightful contrarian in a profession otherwise staffed by vapid, guileless, liberals – Iggy actually meant it when he sang ‘I’m a Conservative’
I did not enjoy the Christmas festivities this year: I sang no carols, ate no turkey and failed to watch It’s a Wonderful Life. There were two reasons. First, I received my DNA heritage results from a company I’d bunged £100 or so back in the autumn. My family had been greatly looking forward to
Two very brief excerpts from Radio 4 last week. First, my wife turned on her radio in time to hear an actor in the afternoon play utter the words: ‘But Bob, you’ve been helping young disadvantaged black kids all your life!’ At which point, she turned off. Two days later I switched on my car
