Re: RIP Rod Liddle, 1960 – 2026

Julian <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 03/08/2026 19:49, Julian wrote:
>> 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
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBq1dZGrR3c
> 

I especially like this description of Rod:

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.