Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
It is lovely to have Timbuktu back in the news, a welcome whiff of backwards exoticism and savagery. I am still not sure yet about Mali, and what we’re doing there. I think that in general bombing berserk Islamist Arabs is probably a good thing. I am aware too that Mali is, technically, a constitutional
I’ve just sent off a cheque to the RSPCA in the hope that they will put it towards the costs of bringing another prosecution against those arrogant pink-jacketed psychopaths who continue to hunt foxes with hounds despite the fact that it is against the law to do so. It’s a small contribution towards the upholding
So, that Gerald Scarfe cartoon, then. I don’t like it much, but then I like cartoons which make me laugh, (and especially so if they have animals in them). McLachlan, Honeysett, Rowson et al – and on a daily basis of course, Matt. I’m always at a bit of a loss with those big cartoons
David Ward, a Liberal Democrat MP, is in trouble with his party bosses. He chose Holocaust Remembrance Day to indulge in a bit of anti-semitism, suggesting that the very Jews who suffered under the Nazis in death camps were now meting out the same treatment to the poor old Palestinians. I am not sure why
It did not, in the end, take very much to outfox Ed Miliband. You wonder what he had been expecting the Prime Minister to say about a referendum on withdrawing, or otherwise, from the EU. As it was, Ed floundered, and felt obliged to say that Labour would not be promising a referendum – that
Oh, this age! How tasteless and ill-bred it is.’ — Gaius Valerius Catullus ‘I do not know whom Mary Beard is but wyth a name lyke that she surely has a third teat and a hairy clopper.’ — Internet posting following Professor Mary Beard’s appearance on Question Time So Catullus, mate — things have not got much
I see that Will Self is being lined up as a “writer in residence” at BBC Radio Four. I think this is very good news. Self is an excellent writer and while obviously of the left, is not doctrinaire or predictable in his views. He has wit, he is well-read and very clever. Good luck
Superb piece of journalism on the BBC News from Lyse Doucet. A horrible story, of some appalling mass murder in Syria – told calmly and bravely; unpartisan, questioning and undoubtedly exposing the team to danger, for our benefit. The very best of journalism. You can see it here. Actually, the piece which followed Doucet’s wasn’t
It’s an odd thing. I had been a little nervous of writing (subscribe here) about the Suzanne Moore twitter business because, much though I like and respect Moore and Burchill and the excellent Julie Bindel, it seemed to me to be a Crouch End dispute of negligible wider importance. And here we were with Algeria on
‘Women … are angry with ourselves for not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape — that of a Brazilian transsexual.’ — Suzanne Moore One of these days, not too far away, the entire bourgeois bien-pensant left will self-immolate entirely leaving behind nothing but a thin skein
Anyone remember Mary Fitzpatrick? She was the BBC’s ‘Diversity Czar’ back in the middle of the last decade, paid £90,000 p.a by the licence payer to spout egregious pc bollocks. From a quick Google she now appears to be coining it for doing precisely the same job for the UK Film Council. Nice work, etc.
A very good article indeed by Charles Moore in today’s Torygraph, regarding Operation Yewtree and the astonishing news that Jimmy Savile nonced the entire country. You can read it here. There is a middle way, surely, between not believing anyone who says that they were sexually abused 40 years ago by Savile and believing, utterly, everyone who makes such an allegation. As Charles
Does it matter that white Britons are now a minority in three towns or cities in this country? The latest census figures suggest that whitey is outnumbered in Leicester, Luton and Slough. I assume the reason for this is that lots of Asians have colonised these places and as a consequence many of the whites
Isn’t it time, just out of perversity, that we all signed the petition on the Operation Black Vote website to restore the part-time nurse Mary Seacole to the national curriculum? I am beginning to think that our children should learn all about this entertaining woman; she’s given me a good laugh for the last dozen
If you haven’t seen it yet, this video of Piers Morgan interviewing a lunatic is good value for a few minutes: He is the butt of many jokes, Morgan, and I suspect the Americans like his rather bumptious public school schtick more than we do. He is, however, a very good interviewer indeed, both in
Have you seen these Change4Life adverts the government has shoved on the television to stop fat chavs eating themselves to death? They suggest that people grate some carrot into their ‘spag bol’ and ‘eat some nuts and raisins’. Diane Abbott, for it is she, has rightly condemned the adverts as being patronising, insulting and a
I was in bed by one o clock on New Year’s Day. We did the countdown thing, for the kids, and then hung around for a while looking tired; it was only later, when my wife and I were upstairs in bed, that the real fun began. A long and corrosive argument about the mice,
If there was any justice in the world, Yorkshire pensioner Gordon Wilson would feature in the New Year’s Honours list – but I suppose it’s too much to hope for. The Wilkcockson family, from Hunmanby, kept noticing that their pussycats were going missing, never to return – but they did not suspect the kindly old
So the wassailing and drinking and pigging out has been done. The relatives have mercifully left. You have taken many, many medications to restore to yourself a certain cloudy consciousness and are beginning to wonder what the year ahead holds in store. Keep taking those medications, then — because here is 2013 in full. I’d
They always manage to pull something special out of the hat at Christmas, over at the Guardian. Last year it was that fantastic woman, an editor at The Ecologist, who agonised over what to buy her son for Christmas that was green, ethical, sustainable and non-materialistic, if you remember, when her son Dimitri just wanted
