Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
Does anyone remember the England cricket team? Roger Alton makes the very good point in his Spectator sport column this week, while flicking through the runners and riders for this year’s Sports Personality of the Year, that really the England captain Andrew Strauss should win: “…but it seems we’ve almost forgotten that we regained the
I’m not sure how many members of the London Labour party I’ve met over the last 20 years or so. A thousand? Must be something like that. Sitting in local authority buildings which smell slightly of gas, the night outside cold and damp, ploughing through an interminable agenda of candidate selections; or down the pub
I think I owe my colleague Hugo Rifkind an apology for my comments about his piece on climate change a week or so ago. I think I said that he was a gibbering idiot, a lice-ridden whore and the source of all evil in the western world, I can’t remember exactly – something typically measured.
Be careful what you wish for, it might just come true. For a long time now, those of you sceptical about man-made climate change have urged the BBC News to be more balanced in its coverage; that the corporation is prone to ignore sceptical voices and merely run and endless procession of Roger Harrabin and
A pleasure to welcome Diane Abbott to the debate, despite the defamations. There is nothing remotely racist in my blog about the attempted murder of a fifteen year old girl. My argument is much as it has always been; that the creed of multiculturalism is largely to blame, the notion that cultures, no matter how
Fort William beat Strathspey Thistle 2-1 in the Highland League on Saturday and if I know the manager, Cal McLean, they’ll still be out celebrating now. All the goals came in the final ten minutes of play; Fort took the lead with a lob from their, uh, ginger wizard, Sean Ellis, before Thistle pulled level
The first of an occasional series – those benefits of a multi-cultural Britain in full. Let me introduce you all to this human filth. It could be an anomaly, of course. But it isn’t. The overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out
A ban on minarets may seem racist to the BBC, says Rod Liddle, but in fact we should applaud any small battle won in the people’s war against the growing ‘Islamification’ of Europe Here’s a very short and simple pre-Christmas quiz to get you into the swing of Christmas quizzes, as they will soon be
How are you feeling this morning? Muddled and confused? Follow my rule, then: always wait until Thought for the Day has finished before you enjoy your first stiffener of the morning. Lord Stern thinks most of you are muddled and confused, and has said as much. Anyone who doubts man-made climate change is muddled and
I’m writing about the Swiss referendum for the magazine this week. In lieu of a blog on the same issue I thought I’d direct you to a different blog which reveals the even-handed and objective manner in which the BBC views the vote. Its Islamic Affairs Analyst, Roger Hardy, has described the referendum as an
So, here we are then. Another one of life’s harmless little pleasures outlawed by Brown’s nanny state. What will they ban next? You’d think the police would have better things to do than apprehending a bloke simply for enjoying himself and hurting nobody in the process. In the end, they’ll get all of us. Can’t
There is a surfeit of arrogance and certitude on both sides, of course. My own position is that I have little doubt that the climate is changing and most of the evidence suggests that it is, in the medium to long term, heading upwards. I suspect, again from the stats, that it is possible we
I find it genuinely difficult to debate with people who deny my right to debate; this is the case with the climate change lobby. The danger, if you don’t watch out, is that the arrogance and certitude of the AGW lobby pushes one towards an ever more antithetical position. This is a flawed, human, response
Appppareny if you raished the pricxe of alcocoholby 40 p people wouldn’t die of it. What? Shuttuip. I thhink its 40p. Mightv been 60. I don’tnkow. Shome doctor said, and evrbody on Queston Time agreeed that the pricxe should go up to stop people dyinmg, even Mel. I know cos Iwatched it, just now bunch
I’ve been trawling through the emails hacked from the Hadley Centre’s Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University, and very boring most of them are too. It’s a good story, though, if you leave aside the obvious illegality of the hacking. Certainly, three or four (out of 7,000) of the emails seem to imply that
Rod Liddle says that Ofsted’s attempt to rank schools according to their SATS scores is, like so many of its other ideas, not just unhelpful but counterproductive Fancy a job as head of Ofsted? The post apparently pays not far short of half a million quid per year, and I can’t imagine that there’s much
A new opinion poll puts the Tory lead down to just six points, the lowest for quite a while. It’s only one poll, of course, but it does tend to support what I was saying last week about this being a fairly promising time for Labour (with the polls in the week leading up to
I’ve just been looking up the history of Lady Catherine Ashton, who was appointed last week to the post of Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy to the European Union. Nothing too taxing, just a quick browse through Wiki (which is almost always wrong, I grant you) and some other background stuff. It does
Rod Liddle says that Gordon Brown’s contrition about the British children tragically deported to Australia is a very Noughties phenomenon — the perfectly pointless non-apology I never knew it was Gordon Brown who sent all those kids off to Australia, packed them off and waved goodbye from the quayside, and now feels terribly bad about
Here’s a story from today’s Daily Mail, with a cut-out-keep picture, of Somali Muslim savages stoning to a twenty year old woman for the crime of adultery. Last year they killed a thirteen year old girl in a similar fashion; seven Muslim states stone women to death for adultery, and they will even provide the
