Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
This week we have been bombarded with statistics about how the smoking ban, introduced exactly six months ago, has not remotely damaged the pub trade, but has resulted in millions upon millions of people giving up smoking — so that cancer is now a thing of the past. The shovel-faced government minister Dawn Primarolo will
There is a term for what Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, did at the weekend. She announced that she would not feel safe walking the streets of London alone after dark. This, I believe, is called ‘doing a Ratner’. If you remember, Gerald Ratner was the boss of the eponymous down-market jewellery company which dissolved
Rod Liddle says that the notion of ‘compulsory donations’ is oxymoronic and the pinnacle of the medical profession’s zeal to get its hands on our corpses The question is, I suppose, hypothetical in my case. Or beyond even hypothetical. They are not going to want the liver of someone who opens a bottle of Rioja
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Hebrews XI 1 Ah yes; things not seen. A little while ago this country had itself a Prime Minister who received rather more guidance from things not seen than any of us had imagined at the time. That thing not
So the mop-headed ingenue teacher Gillian Gibbons has been released from her torment in Sudan without being horsewhipped or banged up for too long. The Scousers — Ms Gibbons is from Liverpool, naturellement — had insufficient time to organise a candlelit vigil for her or a minute’s silence at Anfield, but they did manage to
Tarnow, Poland (maybe) I’m hungry, stuck here with a tube of flavoured pork fat, a bottle of bison grass vodka and 400 cut-price English cigarettes. This is the sleeper train from Krakow to Bucharest, via Budapest, at the bad, cold hour of midnight — and there’s no dining car. Just pork fat and vodka for
Samina Malik may be cretinous, but shouldn’t be criminalised Eeny meeny miny mo Catch a kafir by the toe, If he hollers, chop his head off, And put the video on YouTube. I’d better be quick, because I assume the Old Bill will be around any moment now. The little verse quoted above is my
It was true in Orwell’s day and it’s no less true now: there is nothing the British public likes more than a good, old-fashioned, grisly murder. Sixty-odd years ago, when Orwell wrote The Decline of the English Murder, the crucial ingredient was some hidden, shameful, sexual misdemeanour – almost always adultery, but sometimes homosexuality. The
A policeman once told me, over lunch in the House of Commons canteen just off Westminster Hall, that the problem of immigration would be sorted for good and for all, very soon. ‘The chill north wind, from Odin’s Land, will exterminate the scum we have brought to our shores,’ he said, equably enough, and then
I suppose there must be someone left in Britain who is surprised or shocked that a minor member of the royal family has alleged homosexual tendencies and is partial to the odd snort of cocaine. Lord Charteris of Amisfield, for example — formerly the Queen’s private secretary — would at least have pretended to be
Notable people who are quite right-wing live a lot longer than notable people who are decidedly left of centre. This discovery of mine is, you might argue, counter-intuitive; you would expect right-wingers to be eaten away with dyspepsia and choler, the blood vessels on their foreheads popping open every time they read of a mosque
People living within a 25-mile radius of Michael Gove, MP, are more likely to die of cirrhosis of the liver and alcohol-related tumours than anywhere else in the country. There is a direct correlation between (fairly) close proximity to Michael and very high levels of alcohol consumption. A study carried out by researchers from the
There was a strange non sequitur in Jack Straw’s latest policy announcement. The Justice Secretary revealed that inciting hatred of homosexuals would soon be a crime punishable by seven years in prison. And justifying the legislation, he said this: ‘It is a measure of how far we have come as a society in the last
Caught in the centre of a soundless field While hot inexplicable hours go by What trap is this? Where were its teeth concealed? You seem to ask. ‘Myxomatosis’ by Philip Larkin Aldbourne, Wiltshire I saw the rabbit, a young doe, 50 yards or so down the path. ‘Look,’ I said to the kids, ‘a bunny.’
The EU has not helped Aung San Suu Kyi’s cause It has been a long-held view of mine that most of the evil in the world today can be traced back, somehow, to Peter Mandelson. People tell me that this is irrational and warped. And yet, as the Burmese soldiers sprayed those protesting monks with
Less a rage against the dying of the light, more a prolonged, high-pitched whine of complaint and self-justification, the sound of a swarm of badly earthed strimmers, heard from a distance on an early autumn morning. The Commission for Racial Equality has issued its valedictory press release before its duties are acquired by the Commission
Madeleine’s disappearance sparked a grotesque media circus Did Kate McCann inadvertently kill her daughter Madeleine and then confect a four-month long parade of grief and concern for the benefit of the media, in order to avoid being done for the crime? This seems to be what the Portuguese police have come to either believe or
The morning after England’s Rugby World Cup triumph over Australia four years ago I walked down my local high street and saw two boys doing something which deeply disturbed me. Knock knock. Who’s there? Jonny. Jonny who? The morning after England’s Rugby World Cup triumph over Australia four years ago I walked down my local
Nobody much likes television, especially not the people who work in it. They think it’s a cretinous medium, a sort of institutionalised con-trick, the cultural equivalent of a McDonald’s Happy Meal — processed excrement which everybody, including the consumer, knows to be dumb and bad for you. I suspect that this has always been true.
I hope you enjoyed the Notting Hill Carnival and made it back home in one piece, maybe with a becoming scar of some sort — gunshot wound to the gut, stab wound in the throat, that sort of thing. Or perhaps just short of a few quid from your wallet, and maybe your wallet itself.