Thursday

17 Nov 2022
A course in Rod Liddle studies

As someone who has always had a grotesquely inflated sense of his own importance, my experience speaking at Durham University again last week almost tipped me into fully blown, delusional megalomania. On the way to the venue a student informed me that in the big hall nearby several hundred people were crammed into a debate about whether Rod Liddle should be allowed to speak at Durham. Yes, only a matter of yards from another building where Rod Liddle was actually speaking. I had, for a moment, a wonderful daydream about an entire university given over to studying Myself, or listening to Myself, three-year courses on the subject of Rod Liddle and what one might learn from Him, or how one should deal with Him, earnest young readers debating His latest utterances, emeritus professors pontificating affectionately on His early works, His juvenilia.

A course in Rod Liddle studies

Thursday

10 Nov 2022
Advertising’s false picture

An advert for jobs in the prison service has fallen foul of the Advertising Standards Authority because it portrays an ‘imbalanced power dynamic’. The poster showed a white prison guard (or ‘screw’ as I believe they are known) and a black prisoner. The ASA concluded that the advert was ‘likely to cause serious offence on the grounds of race, by reinforcing negative stereotypes about black men’. It would have been OK if the prisoner had been white. I am not sure what the views of the ASA would have been if both men had been black. The fact that both of the people in the ad were men also negatively reinforces a stereotype – that men tend to commit the most crime. This is the problem: men do commit the most crime, overwhelmingly so, but there is no political desire to hide that fact.

Advertising’s false picture

Thursday

3 Nov 2022
Cutting the links with reality

It was a difficult one for the BBC, but they got through it. The problem was this: how to do the story on the chaos at the migrant centre in the former Manston airport which might result in the Home Secretary’s resignation without acknowledging that the root of the issue was a huge increase in asylum seekers? They were avid for the story because they could smell Suella Braverman’s blood on the wind. But it is, I think, contrary to BBC producer guidelines to suggest that Britain may have a problem with illegal immigration. How, then, to stick it to Braverman without implying there’s loads of Albanians flooding the country? They got round it by interviewing, repeatedly, a SJW hobgoblin from a migrant-enabling charity to insist that even though it looked as though there were lots of illegal migrants, actually there weren’t really.

Cutting the links with reality

Wednesday

26 Oct 2022
Why I won’t be watching Qatar’s World Cup

The pop-up ad I get most frequently these days is David Beckham’s promotional video for the Islamic sandpit of Qatar, in which the smirking tattooed oaf enjoins us to discover such delights as buying some spices in a market and being short-changed in a local shop. Around him is the bling architecture of Doha, which looks like it was designed by his wife. The last scene is a semi-veiled hottie laughing coquettishly with the intellectually impaired former footballer, suggesting to the young men who will be visiting the medieval satrapy for the World Cup that its babes might well be inclined to put out and give you one (if you have bags of cash, designer stubble and ride a motorbike). I assume it was directed by a chap called Asif.

Why I won’t be watching Qatar’s World Cup

Wednesday

19 Oct 2022
Nobody wanted Liz Truss

One of the most important ingredients in the oil used to anoint King Charles during his coronation is becoming a bit of an issue – and it may give us a signal as to what sort of monarchy lies in wait for us. Aside from cinnamon and ambergris, the oil also includes musk from the Ethiopian civet cat, obtained through what protestors suggest is a cruel process. The oversized weasel is constrained in a tight cage made of twigs and its bum is forced out of a hole at the back of a cage, whereupon skilled Ethiopian musk gatherers squeeze the animal’s perineal glands, reaping a rich harvest of noisome oil and making the civet cat wish that it had been born in, say, Denmark. The question is: will our new King, for the sake of tradition and continuity, accede to this procedure or, as a concerned and modern monarch, will he do something different? Perhaps he will talk to the civet cat and persuade it to donate some of its valuable musk in a democratic and consensual manner.

Nobody wanted Liz Truss

Wednesday

12 Oct 2022
The SDP is the anti-futility party

Two lessons learned from the breakfast buffet at the Hilton Hotel, Deansgate, Manchester. First, the plates are no longer minuscule, but pleasingly broad. However, they consist of a smallish bit in the centre and a gently elevated wide rim – the message being: put the food only in the middle. The outer circle is simply decorative, so don’t be uncouth. The second is that you are no longer enjoined to help yourself. There’s a bloke there who does the serving for you. So if you go up and say ‘bacon, please’, he will put a piece of bacon on your plate. One piece. The same with the sausages, the fried eggs, the tomatoes. One of each. Of course, you can request more. You can say: ‘I’d like seven hash browns, please.’ I did that on my second morning and he looked at me funny, but I got my hash browns, counted out, one by one.

The SDP is the anti-futility party

Wednesday

5 Oct 2022
Smoking is more hassle than it’s worth

I gave up smoking one year ago this week, as part of a series of pitiful capitulations to the forces of coercive conformity. As far as I see it, the path to the grave is lined with compromise after compromise until, at the moment of the final rattle, one has become a travesty, physically and spiritually, of the person one used to be. Not that I would want to overdramatise the whole thing, mind. I more usually tend to present my dis-avowal of smoking as a kind of glorious epiphany. One moment I smoked, the next I didn’t. And in a sense that is true: no doctors were involved, there were no health scares, nor was I nagged to give up by those close to me. I went to bed one evening – at 23.30 on 4 October 2021, to be precise – and awoke the next day somehow ‘knowing’ that I would never smoke again.

Smoking is more hassle than it’s worth

Wednesday

28 Sep 2022
Why is the right not making the moral case for lower taxes?

There was an article recently in the increasingly woke but still useful New Scientist which attempted to gauge the degree to which luck was responsible for who we are and, hence, an individual’s life circumstances. I think it came in third place after genes and the environment – which are also both down to luck, really, I suppose. The thesis seemed to be we pay too little attention to the role of luck when considering why one man is a millionaire and the other is a lavatory attendant or a book reviewer. I would beg to differ. Ascribing luck to one’s unfortunate position in life is very prevalent indeed and is as left-wing an argument as blaming the class system or the colour of one’s skin (although with slightly less justification).

Why is the right not making the moral case for lower taxes?

Monday

26 Sep 2022
The BBC’s Meloni problem

Here is a quote from the BBC Europe Editor, Katya Adler’s, very short piece on the BBC Radio 4 Six O'Clock News this evening, concerning the electoral victory of Giorgia Meloni in Italy:Millions of Italians didn’t vote for her. They say they do not recognise themselves in her nationalist, protectionist proposals, her anti-immigration rhetoric and her conservative family mores. Isn’t that remarkable? Can you imagine the awful Adler, or indeed any correspondent, commenting on the victory of a left-wing candidate: Millions of people didn’t vote for her. They say they do not recognise themselves in her mentally unbalanced identity politics, ranting support for cripplingly high taxation, foreign policy characterised by a hatred for the West and absurd energy policy based upon the harvesting of unicorn tears.

The BBC’s Meloni problem

Wednesday

21 Sep 2022
Labour has a problem – but it’s not Keir Starmer

I see that Green campaigning groups are angry that the Conservative party has received donations from the aviation industry, because they are not in favour of aeroplanes. Or, at least, these campaigners are not in favour of aeroplanes until they need to use one to get somewhere. A holiday at some eco lodge in Indonesia, perhaps, where they get to gurn at an orangutan and chide the locals about logging. The protestors, then, simultaneously want the aviation industry not to exist but still to avail themselves of its services: this is another marvellous example of the left’s flight from reality. It is all a little like the various institutions which have decided to stop their sponsorship agreements with petroleum and gas companies.

Labour has a problem – but it’s not Keir Starmer

Thursday

15 Sep 2022
A defence of badgers

My dog was bitten by an adder last week. Jessie had been snuffling around in bracken a few yards from where I was walking when I suddenly heard this anguished yelp, followed by still more disquieting, even harrowing yelps. I knew immediately exactly what had happened. I have been boring my family for months with warnings about where not to take Jessie for a walk, because of the adders. They think adders are a manifestation of my warped imagination and do not really exist, possibly something dreamed up by the QAnon people. They never believe me when I tell them anything about animals and yet – ironically, you might think – it is one of the very few things I do not lie to them about. I was not lying about the adders.

A defence of badgers

Thursday

8 Sep 2022

Thursday

1 Sep 2022
It’s time for some home truths, Rishi

I wonder how many people in the country are bitterly disappointed that Liz Truss pulled out of her exciting one-to-one interview with Nick Robinson? I can think of only two. First, of course, Nick Robinson. Nick was very much looking forward to it. His ideal assignment would be to interview himself for an entire afternoon, but failing that, Liz Truss would do just fine. The other, of course, is Rishi Sunak, who must have been hoping that Liz would dig herself another hole and carry on digging until she emerged somewhere near Maruia Springs, say, in New Zealand’s Southern Alps. I suppose it is just about possible that some of Nick’s producers were also disappointed that Liz pulled out, given that they may have a horrifically stunted view of what people consider ‘interesting’.

It’s time for some home truths, Rishi

Thursday

25 Aug 2022
How to run a school

Taking a short break from persecuting Roman Catholic faith schools for ideological reasons, Ofsted has stuck the boot into the Abbey School in Kent. This school, in Faversham, has been given the lowest possible ranking of ‘inadequate’. The report bemoans the fact that pupils are expected to do as they are told, be polite and behave themselves, and describes the atmosphere within the school as ‘oppressive’. By a winning coincidence, Ofsted’s report was published in the very week that the Abbey School reported by far its best ever A-level results. What, Ofsted sees as ‘oppression’, then, is more commonly known as ‘running a school properly’. In 2017, before the fascists moved in to the Abbey School, not a single pupil got an A* or even an A at A-level.

How to run a school

Thursday

18 Aug 2022
The dangers of vegetarianism

I do not doubt that hot weather occasioned by climate change is the primary cause of the many wildfires we have seen in the UK this summer. But I wonder if they have also become more profuse as a consequence of various authorities desperately attempting to make the countryside more ‘accessible’ to people who, in truth, shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near it. The more you encourage the dregs of humanity to visit ‘green spaces’, the more likely it is that they will turn up and ruin them. This is a social class of extremely low intelligence but, concomitantly, a vast gustatory appetite – they are unable to go more than 20 minutes without gnawing or slurping something. That explains why they always take with them on these unwise expeditions a disposable barbecue in order to cook their revolting sausages and burgers.

The dangers of vegetarianism

Thursday

11 Aug 2022
The death of saving

I was intrigued to learn from Tom Daley – that young man who became famous for jumping off a platform into some water – that homophobia is a ‘legacy of colonialism’. The Ugandan President, Yoweri Museveni, begs to differ. He believes that it is homosexuality which is a legacy of colonialism and had been brought to his benighted country by effete whitey – and so he may well think Tom is indulging in the disagreeable act of ‘whitesplaining’. However, it is possible, if not likely, that both Tom and Yoweri are correct – after all, it is difficult to be homophobic if you have around you a complete absence of homosexuals, as I have discovered since moving back to the north-east of England. Tom made his comments on the occasion of the newly woke Commonwealth Games, where organisers have encouraged sports men and women to speak out against political injustices and that ‘the more fictitious or imagined your adolescent drivel and woo woo about victimhood, the more we will applaud it’.

The death of saving

Thursday

4 Aug 2022
When did we give up on the truth?

During that rather strange summer of 2020 I used the phrase ‘the gentle armed robber George Floyd’ in several articles for various publications, but the phrase was often taken out. I had thought it a mild corrective to the seeming beatification of a man who, while having been wrongly killed, was not, to my mind, quite worthy of the retrospective adoration being poured upon him. Nope, there would be no corrective – not about George. Indeed in that summer of lockdowns, hand sanitiser and existential angst it was pretty much impossible to challenge the programme of Black Lives Matter, full stop. Hence it was swallowed whole by the establishment and we saw coppers going down on one knee, TV pundits (and footballers) pressured to wear BLM badges or insignia, the police watching in admiration as statues were toppled and so on.

When did we give up on the truth?

Thursday

28 Jul 2022
As good, and inventive, as modern rock music gets: Black Midi’s Hellfire reviewed

Grade: A+ The difficult question with Black Midi was always: are you listening to them in order to admire them, or because you actually enjoy the music they make? By which I mean when you’ve finished listening to them is it a sense of admiration which lingers in the mind, or are you captivated by one or another of their songs? Previously it has tended to be the former – and there is an awful lot to admire. If you add superlative musicianship to a certain witty and anarchic imagination, you end up with this rather deranged, occasionally irritating, millennial mash-up of styles, where jazz fusion meets post-punk, James Brown, Beefheart, clever prog and pretty much anything else which, however briefly, flits through the consciousness of their auteur, Geordie Greep.

As good, and inventive, as modern rock music gets: Black Midi’s Hellfire reviewed

Thursday

21 Jul 2022
The high price of failure

I was listening to a rich bastard on the radio explaining why he was feeling disinclined to give any more of his money to the Conservative party. The term ‘rich bastard’ is the one which I was habituated to use when I was a member of the Labour party and which I have disinterred now to give my opening sentence a little more punch. It was axiomatic to us that anyone with sufficient dosh to consider squandering a few hundred thou on a political party must be a bastard and was both immoral and undeserving of his wealth. Wealth in any shape or form appalled us in an almost Freudian fashion – Sigmund, you may recall, equated potty training with the accumulation of money, and the supposedly subconscious link between faeces and money has never quite been expunged from the left.

The high price of failure

Thursday

14 Jul 2022
Why it has to be Kemi

Have you considered a career in whoring? It can be very rewarding, apparently – especially financially. World’s oldest profession and all that, a job which offers the potential for travel but which can also be done without leaving one’s bed. A chap who teaches children about sex, Justin Hancock, thinks the kids should not write off prostitution as a viable career option. Justin’s various modules and Q&As on a whole array of vices and foul perversions, most of which he seems to like, are published under the name ‘Bish’. On whoring, ‘Bish’ advises one young woman who had a, er, negative experience as a prostitute: ‘There are many, many people doing sex work who do enjoy what they do – even if they don’t necessarily enjoy the sex.

Why it has to be Kemi

Thursday

7 Jul 2022
The real reason Boris has gone

Boris, your leader, hasn’t gone because he handled ineptly the fall-out from deputy chief whip Chris Pincher’s well-lubricated non-consensual bum-fun. Nor even because he lied about all that stuff as well. He has gone because Conservative MPs no longer believe he could win a general election. This may seem a blindingly obvious thing to point out, but when I made the same argument as to why Boris SHOULD go a few weeks ago in this magazine, it was met with a howled, anguished and rude response from many readers, as if they had blue dyed hair, were 13 years old and I had suddenly misgendered them. Dimbos. Listen, we all fasten our flags to the mast of a ship of fools from time to time. But let me suggest that it is better to do so with Velcro, rather than superglue.

The real reason Boris has gone

Thursday

30 Jun 2022
The law of unintended consequences

When I awoke the other morning and switched on my radio, the airwaves were alive with the sound of furious, transgressed women. Nobody else got a look in. What have we done to get their goat this time, I wondered, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes. Nothing, it transpired. It was all in the USA, where a Supreme Court decision removed the constitutional right for women to have abortions and left it to the 50 states to decide instead. This last part was largely overlooked, incidentally: in essence the women were howling about decentralised democracy and what an awful thing it is. Democracy is sexist. Democracy is especially sexist in those southern states which might impose (or have already imposed) restrictions on terminations.

The law of unintended consequences