From a Left-Wing agitator with a book to flog

This edition is a bit meta. Consider it a sequel to yesterday's Rod Liddle obituary.

Previously: Liddle to be celebrated

---

If you read this newsletter regularly, consider upgrading to a paid subscription. Paid subscribers allow me to keep writing.

---

I am a hot-fingered ghoul; a nobody unfit to clean Rod Liddle’s boots; I am a Left-Wing agitator with a book to flog; I’m all this and more in the imagination of Joanna Williams of the Telegraph. She dredged Bluesky for disobliging posts about Liddle and scooped them up into one handy place where her readers can be outraged that anyone might criticise a man who made his living by generating outrage.

I appear in this section:

… there’s Mic Wright, a Left-wing agitator with a book to flog, who is bold enough to declare that Liddle “was not some genius satirist but a bloviating bully with a taste for bigotry”.

That is an opinion, one I backed up with quotes from a wide range of Liddle’s output over the years. I didn’t, as the headline of Williams’ piece suggests, celebrate the death of Rod Liddle but nor did I feel it necessary to join in with the oleaginous tributes to the columnist. I judged Liddle on his work and public statements. I didn’t know him. You don’t need to know a writer to criticise their work or its intentions.

As I wrote yesterday, Rod Liddle may well have been lovely to his friends, a witty and ebullient dinner party guest, a fine father, and an upstanding member of his local community. None of that has any bearing on that he produced as a commentator with a national platform for decades. His fans liked him because they were not the butt of his jokes or the targets of his invective. Over and over, the tributes to Liddle call him brave as though writing to deadline is the equivalent of trench warfare.

Let’s, for a moment, accept the claim that he did, in fact, say the unsayable and was some great satirical truth-teller. If that’s the case, why would he want to be protected from the very same kind of harsh language he dished out towards others for such a long time? In her piece, Williams writes:

Forget politics for a moment. It’s the sheer audacity of these people that’s so galling. How dare this motley collection of nobodies damn Liddle’s work? They are not fit to clean his boots.

Putting aside the fact that the dead don’t need boots — a great title for a Western — this outrage runs contrary to the lines that the Right peddles all the time. Facts don’t care about your feelings, so why is it so wrong to quote Liddle’s own words? People are too sensitive these days, a bunch of woke snowflakes, but the very people who Liddle mocked and denigrated for decades should maintain a dignified silence because he’s dead? Free speech for the Right is sacred but they want free speech for Left to be contingent. It’s all fun and games until they’re offended.

The Daily Telegraph’s own obituary for Liddle opened by calling him “arguably the most offensive columnist of his generation”. If his work is so easily damned, perhaps it’s not so damn good as his defenders suggest. Williams doesn’t respond to any of the criticisms levelled at Liddle. Instead, she complains:

We get it. You didn’t agree with Rod. But please, give his grieving family at least one day off.

It wasn’t those of us who diverged from the rapturous praise of Saint Rod who put our words on a national newspaper website under a neon sign saying, “Look at this filth!”

Williams writes of “the rage of the keyboard warriors” which she claims is in stark contrast to the hilarity of Liddle’s “biting satire”. She finds him funny because she was never the target of his jokes. Those who were found less to chuckle at in Liddle’s invective. I don’t think he was brave. I think he was the most cowardly sort of columnist; the type that panders to their readers’ prejudices and never says a word that might make their editors or proprietors feel remotely uncomfortable.

Like so many others, Williams talks about her personal experience of Liddle:

… in real life, Rod was kind and generous. He came to dinner at my house, and brought his family along to one of my Christmas parties, no doubt turning down far grander invitations to be there.

So what? His niceness to individuals is outweighed by the unpleasantness of his work. There’s a strong temptation to reply that Hitler was a vegetarian and loved dogs or that the Krays were very fond of their mother. They’re bad taste comparisons but that’s very much in the spirit of Rod Liddle’s oeuvre.

Yesterday, the Telegraph celebrated that “the bien-pensants of Twitter repeatedly fell for Liddle’s bait”, in tacit admission that the columnist’s main trick was a well-compensated kind of trolling. Today, Williams whines that the Left are “so stuffed-full with a sense of their own moral superiority that they feel liberated to say the most despicable things.” That’s from a regular contributor to Spiked and the Telegraph. She must not spend much time reading her colleagues’ work.

Still, I’ll cop to be left-wing and while I’m sure there are plenty of people who’d say I don’t remotely put enough work in to be an agitator, I do, indeed, have a book to flog. It’s called Breaking: How the Media Works, When it Doesn’t, and Why it Matters. It’s out in paperback on August 28th and yes, Rod Liddle makes an appearance.

---

The paperback of Breaking: How the Media Works, When It Doesn’t, and Why it Matters is out on August 28. If you enjoy this newsletter, please think about pre-ordering a copy.

Please also think about sharing this edition…

… and, if you haven’t yet, consider upgrading to a paid subscription.

You can also buy a t-shirt if you’d like to make a one-off contribution.