Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
The swallows have long returned and the summer party season is almost upon us – so I must get organising. Without wishing to be immodest, I think it is widely acknowledged among the UK’s beautiful people that my alfresco July event – it is so much more than a party – is always the highlight of the
Hell, I wait so long to be right about something and then two bits of stuff come along at once. Nine months ago I said Sadiq Khan would become London’s mayor – partly because he was a very good candidate and a likeable bloke – but more because London is one of the world’s most
I am having terrible trouble with my hair at the moment. It is lank, flat and lifeless. There are split ends. Also, it doesn’t smell too good. What’s that appalling stench, my wife asked recently while sitting next to me on the sofa as we watched a rerun of the old racist editions of Midsomer
Christ help us – Corbyn or Hodge! I think, given the choice, I’m pretty firmly with Jezza. One deranged bien-pensant half of Islington versus the other. At least Corbyn isn’t smug. It’s one of the few things you can say in his favour. Re the anti-Semitism. There are a number of broad points to make.
My guess is that the people who voted for Naz Shah at the last election think she did not go anywhere near far enough in her comments about transporting Jews. Ms Shah is, somehow, still the MP for Bradford West, a seat she yanked from under the feet of someone we had all assumed had
Exactly a year ago this week I was at a dinner party when a famous opinion pollster leaned over to me and said: ‘You know, the best thing about this election is that within two years Chuka Umunna will be the leader of the Labour party and Sajid Javid the leader of the Conservatives.’ He
Do you remember the migrants? All those people coming here across land and sea, from North Africa and Arabia and the Indian sub-continent? In boats, sometimes. Occasionally on foot. The BBC used to lead the news with it almost every night. I’m sure I remember them doing that. Tearful migrants who only want a better
Yay – Izzy Christiansen! Yay – Beth Mead! I daresay you were as thrilled as I was to see that these two women had been named as, respectively, PFA Women’s Players’ Player of the Year and PFA Women’s Young Player of the Year. Izzy plays for Manchester City, Beth for Sun’lan. You have never heard of either
‘What’s in the news this week?’ I asked my wife as she browsed the first newspaper we had seen for a whole week, having hitherto been blissfully disconnected from the rest of the country, without phones or the internet. ‘Muslims, largely,’ she replied, flicking from page to page, ‘a bit on in-and-out, but mainly it’s
I see that a small furore has been occasioned by the South Downs National Park. It has urged walkers to stop and talk to one another in a civilised and friendly manner. I do not know what business it is of a national park to enjoin us to act like human beings – these bodies
My favourite quote of the year so far comes from the author Fay Weldon. ‘If this were an all-woman society,’ she said, ‘we wouldn’t have television. We’d just have lots of nice cushions.’ Fay was making the point that it’s men who do all the -inventing and most of the work. She has since profusely
Thrilling news arrives from Turkey, where it is being reported that a government body has issued comic books to the nation’s children telling them how bloody marvellous it is to become an Islamic martyr. ‘I really want to be a martyr, daddy,’ one child asks its idiotic parent. Well you can be, daddy replies, if
I got Boris Johnson into trouble once, without meaning to. The two of us had been driven hither and thither across Uganda by Unicef in the back of an expensive Mercedes 4×4 to gaze at the fatuous projects they had delivered for the benighted natives. We had been chosen for the trip because we were
I do not know if it has officially been measured, but my guess is that Christine Shawcroft, a member of Labour’s National Executive Committee, has an IQ of somewhere in the region of six. This would put her, in the global hierarchy of intelligence, directly between one of those Activia yoghurts women eat to relieve
It was only a matter of time before Brussels got the suicide-bomb allahu akbar treatment, as the Belgians knew full well. Part of the city – especially Molenbeek – is a cesspit of Islamic extremism. The authorities have been content to let such areas fester and until recently the police were noticeable by their absence. Quite aside
You can always tell when a public figure has said something with the ring of truth about it by the abject apology and recantation which arrives a day or two later. By and large, the greater the truth, the more abject the apology. Often there is a sort of partial non-apology apology first: I’m sorry
This is a quite remarkable book. Badly written, devoid of anything even vaguely approaching a methodology, patronising, hideously mistaken on almost every page — and yet it does, inadvertently, answer the very question posed in its introduction: why are certain sections of the white working class so angry about immigration and Islam? The author is
A rather impressive performance by Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany’s regional elections. Second in Saxony-Anhalt and double digit percentages in Baden-Württemberg and the Rhineland-Palatinate. Today’s papers have tended to conclude that despite AfD’s shock success, the elections were nonetheless a triumph, of sorts, for Angela Merkel’s policy towards migrants, if not for her party, the CDU. I
[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thedeportationgame/media.mp3″ title=”The Spectator Podcast: the deportation game”] Listen [/audioplayer]For once it seemed that we were getting tough. Our patience had apparently snapped. We had been worn down by the constant news stories about foreigners whom the UK government was unable to deport — the child rapists, the fraudsters, the thieves, the gangsters, the jihadis
Guardian journalist in self-awareness shock. A very good piece by Hadley Freeman about the utter ubiquity of public school-educated monkeys at the top of every desirable profession (and, of course, trade). Here’s the crucial bit: Life is unfair, and I benefit from this unfairness every day. Even besides being born in the era of modern
