Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
Yo — Reader! How are ya doin’? Hot and bothered, I suspect; sticky and irritable. And no less so for having been addressed in such a manner, or for being reminded that this is how the leader of the free world addresses those who do his bidding, the lickspittle minions who bring him gifts of
The Scotch First Minister, Jack McConnell, will doubtless be huddled before a television screen today, dressed in a Portugal football shirt and perhaps munching salted cod, out of respect. An awful lot of his compatriots will be doing the same thing: the Treaty of Windsor, signed with Portugal in 1386, may well be the longest
Sarah Porter may turn out to be Britain’s most prolific serial killer of recent years. Right now, she is behind bars. Porter contracted HIV from a lover and, when she discovered her predicament, set about passing on the virus to as many men as she could, by ‘encouraging’ them to have unprotected sex with her.
Harriet Harman’s campaign against ‘lawyer-speak’ Harriet Harman has got herself back in the news by doing something rather good. She is the minister for constitutional affairs and last week introduced legislation which is more notable for the way in which it is drafted than for the change to the law it effects. The Bill in
Has the David Cameron dog sled recently swung by the little Himalayan city of Thimphu, do you suppose? His latest policy — to make us all, in a rather nebulous way, happier — seems to have been taken word for word from the philosophy of King Jigme Singye Wangchuk, the supreme ruler of Bhutan. Bhutan
Rod Liddle say that — whatever his political failures — the Deputy Prime Minister is the victim of a deplorably hypocritical press assault I spent Bank Holiday Monday trying to find out everything I could about Jo Knowsley, for your benefit. I didn’t find out very much. Certain questions, crucial to the public interest, remain
How should our unelected and unaccountable television and radio presenters and interviewers conduct themselves, so as to avoid the continual allegations of political bias? Last week, in this magazine, Charles Moore had a bit of fun at the expense of Jim Naughtie, the Today programme presenter, for having balked in a rather sententious manner when
This year’s most compulsive television viewing came on BBC News 24 last week, when they interviewed the wrong man. They were doing a story about the legal battle over registered trademarks between the computer company Apple and the Beatles’ record label, Apple Corps. They intended to speak to an acclaimed information technology expert, Guy Kewney,
Your chances of being abducted by a grey-skinned, blank-eyed alien creature have receded very greatly over the last decade or so. If you haven’t already been abducted, bad luck — it might never happen. Your chance has probably gone. Last week a report into UFO activity over Britain was made public by the Ministry of
I am wandering the gilded streets where it all began. A few hundred yards from here a handful of clever, public-school-educated young men met of an evening to discuss how best to transform the thing they loved, the Conservative party. They would meet for something called ‘supper’, apparently. Yes, I am in that little, extortionately
At last there’s the sound of an upstairs window opening, and a woman’s tousled head reveals itself. ‘Stand back, where I can see you!’ it shouts down to me. I pad around for a moment or two on the nicely trimmed front lawn. And then, remarkably, the door is opened. ‘You’re not the man who
It was Colin Welland who first uttered those terrible words ‘The British are coming!’ at an Oscar ceremony, back in 1982 — clutching his gold-plated statuette in his northern paw and grinning from beneath his deeply northern moustache. Colin had won an Oscar for having written the screenplay to Chariots of Fire, a film about
Here are a few reasons why the Football Association should have sacked the manager of England, Sven-Goran Eriksson. 1. Allowing England to lose to one of the worst teams in the world, Northern Ireland, in a crucial World Cup qualifying game. 2. Spending what seems to have been most of his free time attempting to
It is a long, long, time since the Conservative party had the support of a clever, truculent lesbian. In fact, has it ever happened before? Clever, truculent lesbians are usually very left-wing, in my experience. But now one of them has come out, so to speak, for David Cameron — the extremely talented writer Jeanette
I am surprised, incidentally, that our tradi-tional enemies do not object that only Aryan names are used for these disasters — why no Hurricane Isidores or Chaims?David Irving offers up his observations on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, September 2005. David Irving, the British histo-rian and alleged ‘Holocaust denier’ will be spending this Christmas and
Rape is wrong, says Rod Liddle, but it is right to believe — as 30 per cent of British people do — that some victims are partly responsible There was a clever little opinion poll in your morning news-papers this week, courtesy of Amnesty International UK. The headline story from the poll was that about
As France burned, the mullahs arrived on the scene, shook their heads sadly and immediately issued a fatwa. However, for the many Frenchmen who may have shuddered inwardly when they heard the term so invoked, this was a good fatwa, a nice fatwa, a fatwa to be proud of. The mullahs swung by and ordained
So far, at least, we are none the wiser about why God sent an earthquake to kill so many people in Kashmir, Pakistan and Afghanistan. We can only hope that sooner or later his purpose will be made evident, so that we all might learn. Why would he torture his people so? The mullahs have
In the middle of December last year, five police officers turned up at the Welsh home of Nick Griffin, leader of the British National party, and arrested him on suspicion of inciting racial hatred. Griffin was driven to Halifax police station and forced to watch three hours’ worth of his own speeches, which the police
As political scandals go, it may be less immediately compelling than all this business about the Home Secretary’s love life. But in terms of import and, I suspect, shelf life, the extent of British involvement in the attempted coup against the government of Equatorial Guinea is certainly the one to watch. With every careful, clever