Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
How the hell do we keep the kids quiet in the car now that we can’t subdue them with tobacco smoke? I suppose we’ll have to resort to slipping a tranquiliser into their in-car snacks, somehow. Parliament has now voted to make it illegal to smoke in a car when there are children in the
Can someone please explain to me why the BBC newsreaders were not wearing black armbands last weekend when reporting the tragic story of Sally Morgan being given the boot from Ofsted? In all other manners the coverage was adequately respectful and the reporters, rightly, allowed their anguish to bleed through the fraying bandage of impartiality.
Have you ever harboured affection for Tony Blair’s arse? According to reports, you may not be alone. Wendi Deng, Rupert Murdoch’s former missus, apparently yearned for Tony’s piercing blue eyes, sexy legs and, indeed, ‘butt’. I assume that means his arse, rather than some device perhaps situated in his garden and utilised for the capture of
I don’t know if you’ve seen this letter to this week’s edition of the magazine, from a person called Chris Doyle. He is a member of the ‘Council for Arab-British Understanding’ and has taken exception to last week’s cover cartoon. He objects that the drawing of ‘two bearded, large hooked nose, weapon-wielding men’ was a
London has long since lost its allure for me — altogether too many cars, foreigners, cyclists, middle-class liberals and people who, like me, work in the media, as they call it. I was born in London but only feel truly at home in the north-east of England, an area of the country within which the
You just knew Lembit would make an appearance sooner or later, didn’t you? I only noticed this morning, reading back through some of the weekend papers I’d missed. Anyway, as the Rennard scandal spreads ever wider within the Liberal Democrats, step forward minxy Hannah Thompson, a former ’schoolgirl activist’. According to Hannah, when she was
Much as was the case with Syria, and to a lesser degree Egypt, I wonder if we are getting a true picture of the mood within Ukraine on our excitable daily news programmes. Reporters speak of a ‘revolution’, and certainly there is fury in the capital, Kiev and some other cities in the west of
When I was promoted to being editor of a programme at the BBC, back in the late 1990s, my line manager came and talked to me in a deeply mysterious manner for a number of troubling minutes. He was wary and elliptical and I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about. There were things
Well done Lord Rennard for not saying sorry. I thought at first that he should, just to get the whole thing over with, to partially placate those monstrously transgressed women who may once have had their personal space ‘violated’ by the bloke. But that was wrong. Stick to your guns and tell them to get
People complain that the police sometimes take a terribly long time to turn up to investigate complaints. But then sometimes they do not turn up at all. In fact according to Tom Winsor, the Chief Inspector of Constabulary, ‘there are cities in the Midlands where the police never go because they are never called. They
Two years ago this week the philosopher Alain de Botton unveiled his proposals for a giant gilded tower in central London at which atheists such as himself could indulge in a spot of self-worship. This edifice was to be 46 metres tall and a line of gold at the top would pick out the years
There’s a case for saying that the Thatcher government’s sale of council houses was the biggest redistribution of wealth this country has ever seen. I’m not so sure. I am pretty convinced it was a contributory factor in the vaulting property greed which has been with us ever since, and the propensity of people to
On the evening of the Mark Duggan verdict, Diane Abbott MP tweeted the following: If the #duggan jury believe that he did not have a gun in his hand when he was shot, how can they find it was a lawful killing? #baffled — Diane Abbott MP (@HackneyAbbott) January 8, 2014 Well, Diane, your
One of the genuine seasonal pleasures to be enjoyed as 2013 slipped around the U-bend was Enoch Powell making his familiar comeback as the Evil Ghost of Christmases Past. Enoch was disinterred by the producers of the hitherto un-noticed Murnaghan Show — presumably in order to frighten the viewers and put a spanner in the wheel
Terribly saddened to hear of the death of Simon Hoggart, a lovely writer and to my mind the finest and funniest purveyor of the House of Commons sketch that we have seen. I saw Simon, surprisingly, in concert in Canterbury, around about this time last year, delighting the audience with anecdotes from his many years
At last, it has been scientifically proved that Jesus Christ is better than Muhammad. We’d always known that our lad with the beard and the holes in his hands was far superior to that arriviste Arabian chap who hung around in caves. But tell that to a Muslim and they become unaccountably frosty and defensive.
It’s right, isn’t it, that the storm we’ve just had was far, far, worse than the Worst Storm In A Million Years © we had a month back and which was trailed in advance by the Met Office and all the news programmes? And as others have pointed out, while there was far more damage
After bullying from the government, our major internet providers are now ‘filtering’ pornographic websites, so that children don’t get to see them. However, a BBC Newsnight study revealed, with great alarm, that this filtering often blocks access to sexual advice sites aimed at children. Such as, for example, BishUK, which contains helpful advice on how
I’d just like to take this opportunity to say a big thank you to our heir to the throne, Prince Charles, for, as he put it, spending ‘twenty years’ trying to ‘build bridges between Islam and Christianity and (to) dispel ignorance and misunderstanding.’ Sadly, he has concluded that this noble endeavour was in vain and
I think this following quote, from the Romanian ambassador Ion Jinga, may go down as my favourite of the year: ‘In their overwhelming majority, Romanians in the UK are well integrated and, as Prime Minister David Cameron has acknowledged, ‘work hard, pay taxes and are valued by their employers.’ New figures just out from the
