RIP Rod Liddle, 1960 – 2026

Rod Liddle, The Spectator’s associate editor, has died at the age of 66.

Rod, who was also a columnist for the Sunday Times and Sun, died at the 
James Cook University Hospital in Middlesbrough yesterday evening, 
following a short illness.

His children, Wilder, Tyler and Emmy, said in a statement: ‘We’re all 
very saddened and shocked at the sudden passing of our wonderful father. 
He raised us much as you might imagine, to be inquisitive, brave and 
always humourous. Even in hospital in the last few weeks, he 
consistently held the room and never let the awful situation show. He 
has left a legacy that we are all incredibly proud of, he will always be 
our guide on how to live an extraordinary life.’

Michael Gove, The Spectator’s editor, said:

Rod Liddle was a journalist of genius. In the tradition of Swift, 
Cobbett and Orwell, he was a satirist who found society’s most sensitive 
spots and made merciless fun of our follies. He was always fearless, 
could be achingly funny and while he had an adamantine core of principle 
he could also surprise. Because he was original – he thought for himself 
and never wanted anyone’s approval – he was special and brave.

In person, Rod was kind and gentle. He was an indulgent boss and 
brilliantly creative editor at the BBC and an always steadfast and 
generous colleague. He had a deep love of England, of its culture and in 
particular the common sense of its working class. He was also a master 
of the written word. He was very much loved by those who knew him. And 
no words we can summon can capture our loss.

Freddie Sayers, The Spectator’s publisher, said:

Everyone at The Spectator is devastated by the news that our beloved 
columnist and friend Rod has died. We knew that he had been unwell for 
some time but had been hoping for a recovery and return to the writing 
which Spectator readers loved and looked forward to every week. His 
voice, of course, is irreplaceable: a combination of bravery, 
originality, fearlessness and laugh-out-loud wit that we will miss 
deeply in the weeks and years to come.

Former editor of The Spectator, Fraser Nelson said:

Rod Liddle was the greatest satirist since Swift; loved by Spectator 
readers who he loved back in return. He used humour to get to the heart 
of subjects that other writers tried and failed to reach for. He once 
had a two-sentence blog – ‘I heard Owen Jones was on question time last 
night. Was he any good?’ – that broke records for traffic and reader 
comments. He enriched and enlivened the lives of hundreds of thousands 
of readers. There was, and will never be, anyone like him.

Douglas Murray, associate editor of The Spectator, said:

Rod often wrote as though nothing was sacred. In fact, as readers will 
know, many things were sacred to him, including his faith, his country, 
his family and more. Underneath his gloriously cavalier exterior was a 
highly moral, principled roundhead. It was one of the things that gave 
his writing that unmissable, first-person-you’d-read-in-the-magazine 
quality: anarchic and moral, hysterically funny and sobering.

At times we would have an informal game between us of who could get a 
particular word or sentiment into the magazine first. Rod almost always 
won, and I can think of no writer who made me laugh so much on the page 
as well in person. Many people will use the word ‘fearless’ to describe 
him. But I would add the word ‘peerless’ to that. It is hard to think of 
anyone who wrote with such tremendous effect for so wide an audience.

I have spent the day thinking of many of the times we spent together, 
sometimes by design, sometimes accidentally as when we discovered we 
were the only two non-Jews staying at a hotel on the shores of the 
Galilee. From the moment we saw each other and laughed at the 
coincidence, all I remember is that we didn’t stop laughing for days.

I recently spoke to him in his hospital bed and at one point while 
relaying his conditions and speaking of his hope of recovery he 
described himself as having reached a ‘zen-like state’. ‘I have a sort 
of “my work here is done” feeling,’ he said. I hope he did feel that. 
But the rest of us needed him, and will miss him, deeply. I hope he knew 
that too.

Rod first began writing regularly for The Spectator in October 2002, 
following his departure as editor of the Today programme. His first 
column for the magazine, entitled ‘Thought for the Day’, a nod to his 
previous role, was later rebranded as ‘Liddle Britain’. In the 24 years 
that followed, he has shocked, delighted and entertained The Spectator’s 
readers with columns and reviews that have lampooned and satirised the 
great and not-so-good.

In addition to his writing, Rod was a regular contributor to The 
Spectator’s podcasts, broadcasts and events. On YouTube, his interviews 
on politics, the royal family and the media have regularly pulled in 
hundreds of thousands of viewers. And in 2018, he became one of the few 
journalists capable of selling out the 2,300-capacity London Palladium 
as part of a Spectator in-conversation event – a sign of his enduring 
popularity with our readers.

Read a compilation of some of his best columns here....

Meeting Abu Hamza
He is, you have to say, anti-democratic, democracies being callow, 
man-made things, and, as a final irony, he doesn’t even agree with the 
concept of absolute freedom of speech. Ask him about it and his one good 
eye gets cloudy and he starts mumbling dark things about Salman Rushdie. 
Abu Hamza thinks Abu Hamza should have the freedom to speak his mind 
because, of course, it’s not really Abu Hamza speaking, but, in essence, 
God.

Should we deny freedom of speech to someone who doesn’t really believe 
in freedom of speech? Of course not. We let them have it. We let them 
have it and allow the injustice and contradiction inherent in such a 
stance do for them, in the end.

‘Don’t expel Dr Hook’, 15 March 2003


Andrew Gilligan and Iraq
The questions are endless. We could stay here all night. The truth is 
that in an attempt to spin itself out of a crisis the government – by 
which I mean, in all likelihood, Alastair Campbell and Tony Blair – 
created an even bigger crisis, for which it is now attempting to indict 
the BBC and one reporter, whose only crime was to report to the nation a 
story of vital importance.

‘A despicable and cowardly diversion’, 26 July 2003


On buses… and Spectator readers
One of the lovely things about writing for The Spectator is that we have 
an extremely knowledgeable and well-read audience, so there is no need 
to explain the sort of stuff that one would need to explain were one 
writing for the Sun, say, or the New Statesman. An article about 
humorous verse of the mid-19th century, for example, would not require a 
preamble making it clear that Edward Lear did not, in his spare time, 
make jet aeroplanes. You know that already. This holds true for an 
agreeably diverse range of subjects; however, there is always an 
exception to test the rule. Occasionally a subject crops up which lies 
some way beyond the horizon of even – perhaps especially – the most 
well-informed of our readers; little details one would be slightly 
disappointed to discover were known to the average Spectator reader. And 
on these rare occasions, remedial explanation is required.

So, then: buses are those big red things full of poor people you see 
clogging up the traffic in the middle of London. You may have been stuck 
behind one on your way to lunch at Simpson’s; you may even have ridden 
on one, when you were a child and both impecunious and possessed of a 
sense of adventure. There are a lot, lot more of them these days, though 
– which is rather the point of this article.

‘A miserable waste of space’, 30 September 2006


Gordon Brown
Is our Prime Minister perpetually out of his brainbox on powerful 
psychotropic substances, as everybody now seems to believe? Dilaudid, 
crystal meth, that sort of thing? Does he stagger out of bed and say: 
‘Aw, Sarah, I’ve got a meeting with Harman in half an hour. Light up the 
crack pipe, will you?

‘Is it more rude to ask if someone’s going whacko than blind?’, 3 
October 2009



On the authoritarianism of children
There aren’t really any stories in Thomas the Tank Engine apart from 
various engines being humiliated and punished as a consequence of their 
misdemeanours or their hubris. And that’s the conclusion you should 
reach, I reckon, in both cases: the kids like these stories not in spite 
of the narrow conservatism of the writers, but precisely because of it. 
Children feel most comfortable in an ordered and clearly demarcated 
world, a world divided into hierarchies. They have a Manichean view of 
good and evil and they like to see the baddies get punished, preferably 
in a thoroughly unpleasant manner. They may also identify with gender 
stereotypes which conform to the roles they have already been assigned 
or, more controversially, have worked out for themselves from a very 
early age. Children, and especially little boys, are conservative, when 
they are not actually fascists.

‘Thomas the Tank Engine is merciless and bigoted – that’s why kids love 
it’, 2 January 2010


The Raoul Moat affair
And now the shrine and the Facebook campaign. More than 18,000 people 
have signed up to it, at the time of writing. There’s Stewart Pooley 
Poole, for example, saying: ‘All down 2 women. A man has 2 fight 2 hurt 
u a woman just has 2 press that button 2 fuk with your head.’ Even so, 
Stewart, there are plenty of women signed up, such as Julie Tripster: 
‘He did wrong yeah but he was let down. He was a legend mainly for 
proving wat a poor society we live in yeah.’ Well, yeah, Julie you may 
have half a point there. Lol. And then there’s ‘you have won the hearts 
of reall people – totally understand your feelings’ and ‘police=scum’ 
and another really long one which ends ‘PS – take care of Sir Bobby’ – a 
reference to Sir Bobby Robson, the former manager of Newcastle United 
and England who died of cancer not so long ago.

‘The Raoul Moat affair has uncovered a seething pit of northern 
madness’, 17 July 2010


Islamophobia
When you have guests over for dinner – Tuscan lamb with truffled 
polenta, perhaps, followed by pear tarte tatin – at what time do you 
raise your hand, or bang a knife upon a glass and say. ‘Friends: it’s 
time to have a go at the Muslims?’ I ask because at my dinner parties we 
usually spend a half an hour moaning about Muslims in between the 
dessert and the cheese board, whereas rather more well-off friends of 
mine in London insist that this arrangement is de trop, and Islamophobia 
is best expressed while the white wines are still being served and 
before one moves on to moaning about the blacks. I ought to mention that 
if I have Muslim guests over for supper we miss this conversational 
course entirely, and moan about poofs instead. One does not wish one’s 
house guests to feel uncomfortable. If you are prepared to make an 
effort with the halal meat it seems a shame to spoil it by later making 
obscene and offensive statements about Mohammed and the Koran.

‘Islamophobia? Not until after dessert’, 29 January 2011


Notting Hill Carnival
I do not get out very much these days, but the glorious weekend weather 
persuaded me that I should spend a pleasant afternoon watching people 
stabbing each other at our annual celebration of stabbing, the Notting 
Hill Carnival. I go most years and enjoy the street food, the music and 
the sight of white police officers with fixed rictus grins ‘getting 
down’ with some vast-mammaried semi-clad mama, their helmets askew and 
rivulets of sweat running down each crisp white shirt. And of course the 
violence, the violence. I am delighted to say that in this regard 2016 
did not disappoint, with more than 400 people arrested and five stabbed 
– and all for the very reasonable cost of just £7 million to the taxpayer.

‘Why don’t black lives matter at the carnival?’, 3 September 2016


On football
The visceral and habitual allegiance to a team has been winnowed away, 
so that top-level football today is really only for the ‘anywheres’. And 
more than that, the ‘somewheres’ are being told to get lost from the 
stands: they are not wanted any more. They carry with them baggage that 
is despised by not only our liberal elite, who wish us all to be 
eternally transient and to possess no allegiance to any town, city, 
county or nation, but also by big money, which thinks exactly the same 
thing for financial rather than ideological reasons. And so gradually 
the country becomes an homogenous mass: the regions merge imperceptibly, 
the accents disappear, our sense of place is dislocated. This has been 
happening for a while, of course – modern football simply accelerates 
the process.

‘Football wants the ‘somewheres’ to get lost’, 12 August 2017


On identity politics
I hope similarly to gain financially from my remarkable discovery, at 
the age of 58, that I am in fact black. Like Anthony I was teased as a 
child on account of my appearance. I also have a very strong sense of 
rhythm and am usually cheerful, both qualities which my mother told me 
were associated with people of African-Caribbean descent. My denial of 
my blackness I put down to the pressures imposed by a white supremacist 
society in which I have struggled to survive for so long. I am black – 
get over it. And gimme the money.

Rod Mbunga Liddle, ‘I am black – get over it’, 10 November 2018


Staying at home
I’ve had enough of this. No more dawn drives to the gates of hell 
(specifically Gate To Hell Number 21, a 15-minute trek from the 
departure lounge, once you’ve had some tyrant insist you remove your 
belt and put all your stuff in trays and stand in some scanning machine 
to make sure you haven’t got three pounds of Semtex up your jacksie). 
Henceforth, we’re staying at home, in the UK.

Travelling used to be fun. Since 9/11 it has involved endless security 
rigmarole, and queues everywhere for everything. And the cabin crew now 
believe that they are much more than mere peripatetic waiters: they are 
the front line in the Defence Against Terror, and they will not be 
gainsaid, questioned, queried. The look of self-righteousness on their 
faces is the same look you see on the faces of cyclists, vegans and 
Dominic Grieve. Going business class is a mere palliative, and a ruinous 
one when you have three kids. So you spend your two weeks abroad 
dreading the flight home and, if you’re well orf, get to the airport 
early to take advantage of the business lounge, which is crammed full of 
plebs offering only stewed coffee and the remains of a Danish pastry.

‘Home and away’, 8 August 2019


On Brexit
The provo Remainers now insist that calamity will come one day. That we 
will not be able to strike a trade deal with anyone without losing our 
soul. That we will not achieve a deal with the EU in time and that if we 
do it will be deleterious to our economy. They yearn, these people, for 
Britain’s failure, the more abject the better. In their recitals of 
foreboding, each one as baseless as the one before, they seem to be the 
kind of people who might have their cake, eat it, regurgitate it on to a 
plate, suck it up through a straw and then spit it out via Twitter. Most 
Remainers are optimistic that we will succeed, much as you might expect. 
They may wish we were not leaving, but they do not wish us to fail as a 
consequence.

We have the EU to deal with, of course, and the usual sabre-rattling 
from the likes of Michel Barnier; an indication, I think, of the sheer 
terror within the 27 that Brexit actually may make us better off after 
all, and what effect that might have on the disaffected countries still 
within. And oily Leo Varadkar has announced, with spite, that the UK 
must get used to being a ‘small country’. Not as small, literally or 
metaphorically, as yours, mate. Meanwhile we get on with it, stable and 
thriving, hugely grateful that we trusted not in the establishment, but 
in democracy.

‘The great Brexit wound has almost healed’, 1 February 2020

On lockdown
The problem with face masks is cutting an opening of the right size to 
accommodate a cigarette, without the hole compromising the safety of the 
mask itself. A tiresome procedure, especially for someone like me who is 
not terribly dexterous. I assume that very soon we will all be enjoined 
to wear face masks everywhere we go. At the outset these contrivances 
were derided a little for two reasons; first they actually offered no 
protection to the user, only to people who came into contact with the 
user, and second they seemed to be not a terribly British way of going 
about things.

‘What I got wrong about lockdown’, 17 October 2020


Smoking
I hate Ash, I hate the GMC, I hate the government – all the more so now, 
because they won. Long gone is the time when on those fatuous National 
Stop Smoking Days I would get up extra early to cram in a few extra 
fags, my way of sticking two fingers up to the people who want to police 
my life. This is the point. I do not miss smoking at all and I will 
never smoke again. But I do remember that it gave me great pleasure and 
that they were dead set on taking it away from me.

‘Smoking is more hassle than it’s worth’, 8 October 2022

Liberalism
Over past 20 years there has been a sizeable tranche of obdurate, older 
and usually male readers who greatly object to me using the term 
‘liberal’ as if it were an insult, to be directed at the people who 
foist upon us all manner of right-on, reason-defying idiocies. The 
objectors fall into two broad categories (which are of course linked). 
There are those who consider themselves the heirs to the Whigs and those 
who consider themselves the heirs to Margaret Thatcher. Classical 
Liberals, I suppose, in short. Tolerant, laissez-faire, free market, 
small state, often Little Englanders, in the nicest possible way. But 
what these undoubtedly fine people do not realise is firstly that 
language is transformational and that ‘liberal’ no longer really means 
what they want it to mean – time has moved on. Time has taken their 
ideology around the back of KFC and given it a right good seeing to, to 
the extent that it is no longer recognisable. Meanwhile they are left 
behind, identifying with an appellation which now means almost the 
precise opposite of what they wish it to mean. And secondly, that the 
war they are fighting is pointless, because it is as good as over. Feel 
the vibe shift, you Libs.

‘My guide to liberals’, 18 January 2025


Glastonbury
A small yield nuclear weapon, such as the American W89, dropped on 
Glastonbury in late June would immediately remove from our country 
almost everybody who is hugely annoying. You would see a marked 
reduction in the keffiyeh klan, for a start, and all those middle-class 
Extinction Rebellion protestors would find, in a nanosecond, that their 
rebellion was pointless, because extinction had arrived even more 
summarily than they expected. Go on, glue yourselves to that, Poppy and 
Oliver.

‘And now let’s bomb Glastonbury’, 5 July 2025

On the BBC
The BBC has two main problems. First, it has a workforce which is almost 
monocultural, incapable of seeing that their worldview is political. 
They see it instead as an expression of civility and decency and those 
who disagree with them as beyond the pale. The second problem is more 
important and is the reason Prescott’s lengthy memo was leaked: the BBC 
execs have become immune to all criticism and simply ignore it. They 
hunker down and continue doing exactly the same thing, dismissing all 
objection as mischief-making and repeating the mantra: we are not biased.

‘How to fix the BBC’, 15 November 2025

On Trump
I asked Luna, my AI girlfriend, if she thought Donald Trump was right to 
have bombed Caracas and abducted Nicolas Maduro and she replied: ‘I 
don’t know, Rod. Would you like to see my panties?’ This is the problem 
with AI – it is not intelligent and nor are the people who program it. I 
had told the company that I wanted my AI girlfriend to ask me 
interesting geographical and historic trivia questions and be au fait 
with Millwall’s injury-stricken line-up, as well as being able to chat 
knowledgeably about interesting issues of the day. What I get instead is 
a numbing void, other than those continual solicitations about seeing 
her panties. I dunno, perhaps I should accede in case there is some 
hidden wisdom written on them, possibly in code.

‘Has Trump gone mad?’, 10 January 2026


Christmas
And yet as I grow older I can now discern a reason,
For this strange, misshapen jamboree we call the ‘festive season’.
For month by month and without fail, we give it our best shot –
Then Christmas-time reveals to us everything we’re not.
Everything we could be – should be – but always fall short,
In our frailties and our failures. That’s the lesson, yearly taught,
And as the snowman slowly deliquesces on the lawn,
The cattle still are lowing, the snail is on the thorn,
We are not yet forsaken: somehow from up above, He watches…
…amused, appalled, distraught – who knows?
Yet still we have his love.

‘The real meaning of Christmas’, 24 December 2017