Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
We are apparently incapable of fighting a war, these days, unless a quick and bloodless victory is pre-ordained. Labour (and especially John Reid) deserves some criticism for having pretended, initially, that Afghanistan would be so. But the fact that it has not been so is not the government’s fault, nor the fault of the troops,
A judge has decided that belief in climate change is precisely the same as a belief in religion; a conviction impervious to the “present state of information available”. Mr Justice Michael Burton was adjudicating in the case of a hugely irritating chap called Tim Nicholson, who wishes to have his case that he was discriminated
A fine piece by Fiona Millar in The Guardian about parents cheating the system in order to get their kids into supposedly better comprehensive schools. The key paragraph, I think, is this: ‘Successive governments have preferred to present schools as a market, dressed them up as a hierarchy and then urged parents to ‘do the
Here’s where your money goes. Read it and seethe. Or maybe just sigh a little and fix yourself a stiff drink. I suppose you might hope that things will change, now that Devon is under the control of the Conservative Party. But if you think that you’ve probably had one stiff drink too many; this
You have to admire the magnificent, brazen, blank-faced nerve of Jacqui Smith – the former Home Secretary who could not be entirely sure where her home was. Appearing on Question Time on Thursday, her demeanour flitted between confected contrition and self-righteous indignation – always, at the end of every sentence, coming to rest on the
Try to take your child to a public playground in Watford and you will be denied entry on the grounds that you may well be a kiddie-fiddler. I don’t know why you’d want to take your child to a playground in Watford, even if you live there – but that’s another issue, I suppose. Parents
But don’t worry, says Rod Liddle, they’re not going to. The bee holocaust myth is just another example of our strange yearning for catastrophe The world is going to end in 2012, apparently — hopefully just before the start of the Olympic Games. Armageddon may come about as a consequence of those monkeys firing up the
A few notes and observations on the English Defence League, which has gained a bit of prominence recently and is mentioned in Mel’s latest article in The Spectator. This is the organisation which turns up to Muslim demonstrations and does a bit of vigorous counter-demonstrating for itself; they then are in turn picketed by the
There’s no need for Jan Moir to apologise for speculating about the death of the boy-band singer Stephen Gately says Rod Liddle. Why have we become so censorious and hysterical? I have to say that I don’t particularly like newspaper and magazine columnists, as people. Smug, not terribly bright, usually cowardly, lazy, always self-obsessed, self-important
Ah, hell, it’s the curse of Liddle. No sooner have I sat down and written a stirring defence of the Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir, who had been vilified for suggesting there was something “sleazy” about the death of Stephen Gateley, than the bloody woman apologises. Or, at least, sort of apologises. I don’t see
Malcolm X, the black liberationist hero from that wonderful decade, the 1960s, was apparently bi-sexual – a fact never mentioned to the kiddies during Black History Month, according to the campaigner Peter Tatchell. This is because, in general, blacks are much more homophobic than whites (although the excellent Tatchell does not put it quite as
It’s not just death and taxes you can depend upon – you can also be absolutely certain that the Labour Party will, at every opportunity, take precisely the wrong decision about the BNP. You may have seen Fraser’s blog about Labour MPs voting not to allow democratically elected BNP MEPs into the House of Commons.
How will you be celebrating the birth of Guru Nanak this year? I thought we might get together for a party, bring a bottle, play a few games. The founder of the Sikh religion’s birthday is celebrated in November, although he was actually born in April: that’s just one of the mystifying things about religion,
I have actually cried with laughter six times in my life. Once, when I was 14, watching the famous “Germans” episode of Fawlty Towers; a few years later at the Ku Klux Klan scene from Blazing Saddles. More recently I shed a shaky tear when the politician Ron Davies explained to police that he’d been
Rod Liddle is appalled that, after knowingly swindling the taxpayer, the former home secretary faced no punishment at all. It seems unbelievable after all their grandstanding — but MPs really don’t think they have done anything wrong ‘We have got to clean up politics, we have got to consign the old, discredited system to the
People are getting themselves worked up into a terrible lather over the BNP’s appearance on BBC Question Time next week. Even in this neck of the woods, Melanie Phillips has criticized the Conservative Party for having selected Baroness Warsi to sit alongside fat Nick on the panel. Her argument, briefly put, is that it would
During the feisty game between Swindon and Millwall on Saturday, there was a bit of a bust up between Swindon’s Kevin Amankwaah and Millwall’s veteran striker, Neil “Bomber” Harris. I cannot recall seeing Harris so infuriated in ten years of watching him play. Afterwards, all became clear. Harris fought a long and well-reported battle against
I’ve been so tied up with my financial advisers, getting my bid together for the Dartford river crossing (my plan is to prevent people from Essex visiting Kent, because I don’t like them), that I missed this letter from one of the country’s more thoughtful and free thinking Labour MPs, Denis MacShane. It’s been causing
It is wonderful news that both golf and rugby sevens have been accepted as Olympic sports. It gives us the chance of winning many more medals than if the games were simply a test of brute strength, speed, agility or skill. Now the authorities have accepted that the games should also reward GDP, raw levels
Another year of bitter disappointment – I have once again failed to win the Nobel Prize for Peace. My pitch – that I deserve to win it because I am not George W Bush – had a lot going for it, I thought. But instead the honour went to Barack Obama, whose pitch was identical.
