Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
Slightly bored last Thursday afternoon, I converted to Islam to see what it was like. All I had to do was intone the Shahada – ‘La ilaha illa Allah, Muhammadun Rasul Allah’ – and then have a nice shower with some Head and Shoulders to wash away the deluded Christian filth that had hitherto cloaked
News that almost all young people have gone mental will not surprise anybody who has met any of them recently. However, my suspicion is that while they were probably quite mental to begin with, they have been rendered even more so by constant warnings regarding their mental health by teachers, the mainstream and social media
I’ve decided that I would like President Trump to win the next American presidential election, solely because it will disappoint Hugo Rifkind. I realise that such a statement could only possibly come from a shallow, petty-minded individual and that what should concern all of us is the, uh, stewardship of the free world. But there
Iwas intrigued to learn from our Defence Secretary, Grant Shapps, that we are now in a ‘pre-war’ phase and that there is an almost inevitability of eventual conflict with one or two of the world’s superpowers. I read his comments on the same day that the German newspaper Das Bild reported that Russia was planning
Has Ed Davey resigned yet? Being a man of great decency and honour, I assume he has, leaving the party to be led by Velma from Scooby-Doo. If he hasn’t yet resigned – and from his statements at time of writing it doesn’t look as if he has that intention – then I hope he
I have never been one of those late-middle-aged right-wing men who, at night, hunkers down over the computer to pleasure himself while staring at photographs of Vladimir Putin. He doesn’t do it for me – not even that picture of him riding a horse semi-naked through a river with a very resolute expression on his
I listened to a fascinating debate on the BBC’s The World This Weekend about the ideological origins of that thing, populism. The agreeably thuggish Javier Milei had just taken the reins of Argentina and, perhaps a little late in the day, the TW2 (as it is known in BBC circles) production team had noticed that
Grade: C+ Maximum points for self-awareness, you have to say. The title track of this pleasant, if largely underwhelming, album include the lines: ‘These recycled riffs aren’t going anywhere, any time.’ Never a truer word spoken. Here, this fitfully engaging singer-songwriter shuffles through predictable chord changes pinioned by forgettable piano riffs and intones – deploying
There was outrage in some sections of the Labour party today after its leader, Sir Keir Starmer, praised Satan. Writing in the Mephistophelian Clarion, a publication with a high proportion of readers who are lycanthropes, vampires, imps, goblins and daemons, Sir Keir said that the ‘Prince of Darkness’ had sometimes been ‘mis-understood’ by the left.
Occasionally I wake up in the morning with the rain pelting on the windows and the sky the colour of a gravestone and I think to myself that maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea if we had a Labour government. Partly this is simply a sense of resignation and inevitability, because we are going
There is something therapeutic and healing in watching Professor Chris Whitty give evidence to the independent public inquiry into the Covid pandemic – the sense of calm emanating from the man, his occasionally Panglossian self-satisfaction, his refusal to become anything more than barely ruffled even when his interlocuters gently venture forth the suggestion: ‘Overreaction?’ The
There is something a little spooky about writing off one’s car and wrecking one’s shoulder by driving into a tree and then, suffused with codeine and alcohol, watching incredulously as the government does kinda the same thing a week later, except faster and with a bigger and more intransigent tree. Metaphorically, I should add, for
Grade: A The last song the Beatles ever recorded was called, appropriately enough, ‘The End’, on the Abbey Road album. As a consequence of digital sorcery, however, ‘Now and Then’ is the last song we will ever hear from them – a demo passed from John to Paul, dubbed over in the early 1990s by
Daugavpils You can tell quite a bit about a place by the number of national flags on display. One or two on public buildings here and there is a healthy genuflection to a moderate and comfortable patriotism. But groups of the same national flag every five paces, on every building and festooning the parks and
Things you do not hear very often, number one: a pro-Palestinian protestor denouncing Hamas for the barbarity of its incursion into Israel on 7 October, appalled at the savagery of those attacks upon children, grandmothers, etc. It may seem as if, in saying this, I am stating the obvious – because support for that pogrom was,
I was greatly tempted by Sam Leith’s suggestion in a column on The Spectator’s website this week that we should all shut up about Israel and Palestine because we don’t know what we’re talking about. Certainly the crisis there has made London dinner parties almost unendurable – and it is true that as soon as
I had a brief exchange of messages with a British Muslim bloke on social media who had asked me, very politely, why I had posted a picture of the Star of David with the words ‘I Stand With Israel’ underneath. A good question, really – I more usually think this kind of keyboard-warrior grandstanding embarrassing
Two months ago, in these pages, I predicted that Robert Fico’s Smer-SD party would win the Slovakian elections and everybody would start worrying about what this meant for Ukraine. Why do I mention this now? Because what I predicted happened – and while you may think it rather bad form of me to remind you
A long tradition in the Liddle household on a Saturday morning is to read aloud sections from the Guardian Weekend magazine and fall about laughing. It is of course the sole reason we buy the paper. Two regular features in particular create a quite enormous amount of merriment. The first, Blind Date, is where two
Grade: B The rather wonderful, liberating thing about being a sentient human being, rather than a moron, is that one can agree with Roisin Murphy that giving kids puberty blockers is a kind of child abuse, while at the same time not liking her new album very much. Just as a sentient human being can