Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
I suppose in time we will all come to terms with our grief over the removal of Dame Liz Forgan as boss of Arts Council England. Although, of course, it will be a great struggle. The Culture Minister Jeremy Hunt has said Dame Liz’s tenure will not be renewed because he wants the council ‘to
Three jobs only a madman would covet, and all of them up for grabs this spring: manager of the England football team, Archbishop of Canterbury and director general of the BBC. Wouldn’t the world be a much happier place if, by May, something weird happened to all the applications and we ended up with John
Fabulous stuff from Ken Livingstone, as reported in the Daily Telegraph. Labour’s mayoral candidate wishes to make London a ‘beacon for Islam’. He was speaking at the Finsbury Park mosque, once the redoubt of Islamist mentalists. According to Andrew Gilligan’s report, the idiot also pledged to ‘educate the mass of Londoners’ in Islam, saying: ‘That
In the magazine last week I wrote about an illiterate Muslim idiot in the north of England who posted on his Facebook site nasty things about the British soldiers killed in Afghanistan, to the effect that they would ‘go to hell.’ For this, he was arrested and charged with some imaginary crime the last government
And so, farewell Rowan — the only Archbishop of Canterbury ever to have suggested that Sharia Law might be a good thing for England. His flailing, his ability to be wrong-footed at every turn, his inconsistency, could not have been better summarised than by his response to the ‘can Christians wear crosses?’ controversy of the
I find myself at a bit of a loss this week, for which apologies. I had hoped to write something inappropriate and threatening about Iran. Or, if not that, then contrasted in a less than sensitive manner the amount of press coverage afforded to that appalling murder of Afghan civilians by a soldier with the
A few weeks ago, in a cover piece for the magazine, Rod Liddle backed John Sentamu as the next Archbishop of Canterbury. Given that Rowan Williams announced his resignation today, here’s that article again: Who shall be the next Archbishop of Canterbury, do you suppose? They are jockeying for position at the moment, suffused with
It’s lasted a lot longer than I had thought, this coalition. I gave it a year, assuming that either the AV referendum would do for it entirely or the Lib Dems would tire of playing grown-ups and revert to type. There is certainly plenty of evidence of the latter. Almost every time Lynne Featherstone opens
I’ve been to West Sussex a number of times and on each occasion have been struck by how stupid the local people are. I don’t mean this unkindly — it’s just how it is. Everywhere you go there are small puddles of drool where the local citizens have stood, wreathed in puzzlement over the simplest
Is Britain about to be engulfed by a race war promulgated by white, dispossessed, millennialist fantasists? No, of course not, don’t be so stupid you fat oaf, is the right response to this suggestion. But a survey out this week concerning the supporters of the country’s far-right parties suggests that a certain appetite for interracial
I think we should have a short poll. Who is the thickest person ever to appear on the BBC’s Question Time? I ask having watched a woman last night, can’t remember her name, who worked for the Daily Mail, and who could have been outwitted by a bowl of semi-thawed Iceland Atlantic Prawns. Also, she
The opening ceremony for the Olympic Games is now only a few months away, and daily the excitement mounts. I know you are looking forward to it, as I am. To involve yourself more closely, you can sign up to become a ‘Local Leader’, which seems to involve whipping up enthusiasm for the event among
What proportion of the Syrian population is fully in support of the continued uprising against the country’s authoritarian leader, Bashar al-Assad? It is not a question I have heard addressed often — not by our journalists bravely reporting from beneath the Syrian army’s mortar attacks, nor indeed by those sitting at home writing for outraged
It’s good to see that Dr Karl Brandt has been reincarnated as an attractive young research associate at Oxford University, and is now known as Francesca Minerva. All too often the leading Nazis were reincarnated as very lowly life-forms, such as moss or krill. Reinhard Heydrich, for example, was reborn as Chlamydia and is now
Things certainly seem to be coming to a head in Syria, with today’s news that Assad’s forces have launched a ground assault on Homs, forcing the rebels to withdraw, and that the UN Human Rights Council has passed a resolution condemning the brutality. John R. Bradley, writing for the Spectator last month, argued that this
Let’s get the following out of the way first: Assad is a brutal authoritarian and Syria is not a democracy. In particular, the shelling of Homs has been an outrage. But. What proportion of the Syrian people are in favour of the uprising and support the rebel army? All of them? Most of them? Or
I don’t know if you watched the show, but there was a bravura performance from the British historian Simon Schama on Newsnight last Thursday evening. He spent much of the time furiously condemning the venality and greed of the bankers in accepting large bonuses. He was, for a while, wracked by a sort of camp
This is a bit of a non-blog really, so apologies for that. Just that if you get a chance to buy the magazine this week, turn to Tanya Gold’s restaurant review first. She’s done The Grand Hotel, Brighton and it’s the best bit of writing I’ve seen for a bit, here, there or anywhere. The
How can we help the talented writer Rachel Cusk to overcome the extraordinary hurt she has suffered as a consequence of losing her family and, far more importantly, her feminist identity? Mrs Cusk has been explaining, at some length, and repeatedly, to like-minded souls at the Guardian the anguish occasioned by the apparent disappearance of
I have been asked, rightly enough, to use obscene language a little less frequently on these pages. This is something which I have strived to do. But there’s a problem, because this morning I read an article written by the actor Sean Penn, about the ‘Malvinas/Falklands’ dispute, and cannot find any way in which I
