Liddle to be celebrated

An honest obituary for Rod Liddle, dead at 66, dead inside for many years before that.

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In his tribute to Rod Liddle, The Spectator’s editor, Michael Gove, calls the columnist “special and brave” and “[a] genius… in the tradition of Swift, Cobbett and Orwell”. Fraser Nelson, Gove’s predecessor in the job, goes even further: “Rod Liddle was the greatest satirist since Swift.” Tim Shipman, a colleague at The Spectator and The Sunday Times, says in his piece on Liddle that he was “a guilty pleasure, someone who would write down what the rest of us were thinking”.

The latter quote is much closer to the real reason why the right loved Rod Liddle so much. He was not some genius satirist but a bloviating bully with a taste for bigotry who could always fall back on the excuse that he was ‘only joking’. In a 2014 interview with The Guardian, he said exactly that:

'I'm just joking, don't you understand?' I try to get away with things too often by saying that. It's a flaw."

The Spectator column for which he is most remembered — on social media, at least — the infamous contribution from 2012 in which he explained that he couldn’t have been a teacher because he would have “shagged” the children presumably doesn’t belong in Shipman’s category of “[writing] down what the rest of us were thinking”. In it Liddle chuckled:

I seriously contemplated being a teacher once upon a time when I was a lot younger. It seemed to me an agreeable doss, and one didn’t have to be too bright or too ambitious or possess any great quality of knowledge… I never found out because the one thing stopping me from being a teacher was that I could not remotely conceive of not trying to shag the kids. It seemed to me virtually impossible not to, and I was convinced that I’d be right in there, on day one. We’re talking secondary school level here, by the way — and even then I don’t think I’d have dabbled much below year ten, as it is now called.

In England, pupils in year 10 are between 14 and 15. Liddle was 52 when he wrote that particular Swiftean masterpiece.

I wrote about Liddle and that particular column in my book:

The ‘I don’t think I’d have dabbled much below year ten’ column has stuck in my mind ever since — and resurfaced on social media often — because it is such a clear illustration of that professional advantage of having it both ways. Liddle expects to be treated seriously when he wants and given the latitude of a clown when he doesn’t. He can be cruel and crass because he knows that’s exactly what his editors want. For all the talk of ‘not being able to say that anymore’, Liddle can and does say whatever he likes, free of professional or personal consequences.

In death, his unpleasantness is presented as brilliance by his colleagues and compatriots. The Times obituary calls him “an irreverent but brilliant columnist”, while The Daily Telegraph celebrates him as “arguably the most offensive columnist of his generation… also the funniest, and the first to burst every balloon of political cant, self-proclaimed victimhood and left-liberal pomposity…” That’s a lot of words to say that he was one of the bullies they most enjoyed standing behind.

Also in the Telegraph, Allison Pearson, who admits she only met Liddle “a few times”, calls him a friend and “the most honest and fearless columnist of his generation”. How much bravery is required to question whether it should be illegal to look at child abuse material as Liddle did in 2003 (“There’s no causal link between viewing child porn and abusing children”), or to suggest that migrants from India might think “they were ticking a box to choose their favourite vegetable side dish” when voting (“I suppose this last comment will be considered a racist aside”)? How brave was he when he wrote about his attempts to draw cartoons of black people?

I have spent the morning trying to draw a cartoon of a black person without it being racist. It’s bloody difficult. Especially the lips. Make them too big and anti-racist people will accuse you of being a white supremacist peddling, in their words, the old ‘sambo’ myth. But too small and they don’t look like the lips of very many black people. It’s the same with the colour. At first, on my cartoon, I used a black felt-tip pen and so the figure came out very black indeed. Sambo territory again, especially when I added big red lips and very white teeth. In the end, I used cross-hatching with a pencil but this was, to my mind, unsatisfactory.

The hook for that column was a row over an Australian journalist who had drawn a cartoon of Serena Williams, but Liddle’s joy there is in being able to revel in racist stereotypes while pretending to do something more intellectual. Brave Sir Rod never shied away from an opportunity to demean black people, whether in the sewers of a Millwall fan forum or in the pages of The Sunday Times and The Spectator.

In November 2009, again for The Spectator, Liddle began an article on the stoning to death of a 20-year-old woman in Somalia with the line, “a quick update on what the Muslim savages are up to”. He added sarcastically: “Incidentally, many Somalis have come to Britain as immigrants recently, where they are widely admired for their strong work ethic, respect for law and keen, piercing intelligence.” Liddle didn’t bother with dog whistles, he owned a klaxon.

The following month, he used his Spectator blog to discuss the case of two black music producers who had plotted to kill a woman:

The overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community. Of course, in return, we have rap music, goat curry and a far more vibrant and diverse understanding of cultures which were once alien to us. For which, many thanks.

When this blatant racism was challenged, Liddle shrugged and said he was just having a debate about multiculturalism. In March 2010, the then-press regulator, the Press Complaints Commission, upheld a complaint against Liddle making the first journalist to be censured for comments posted on a blog. The complaint was upheld only because his claim about crime statistics was unfounded.

In November 2011, Liddle wrote a Spectator article that claimed the trial of two men accused — and later convicted — of murdering Stephen Lawrence would not be fair. The piece was referred to the Attorney General by the judge in the case for possible contempt of court. The Spectator was prosecuted for breaching reporting restrictions and plead guilty, paying a £3,000 fine, £2,000 in compensation to Stephen Lawrence’s parents, and £625 in costs. Liddle sailed on unaffected.

Should you think, like Ben Goldacre who simpered on Bluesky about how “sad” it was to see people posting negatively about the columnist after his death, that I’m being tremendously unfair, let’s remember what Liddle wrote when Nelson Mandela died. Again writing on his Spectator blog, he castigated the BBC for ‘excessive’ coverage of the statesman’s death:

For Christ’s sake BBC, give it a bloody break for five minutes will you?

It’s as if the poor bugger now has to bear your entire self-flagellating white post-colonial bien pensant guilt; look! Famous nice black man dies! Let’s re-run the entire history of South Africa.

I might say the same to the right wing press today, “Famously unpleasant white man dies. Let’s pretend he was, in fact, a brilliant writer whose satire wasn’t just a collection of slurs, low blows, and things we wish we could say out loud.”

But let’s not play down Liddle’s talents. He was not merely a bar-room bigot with a byline. Oh no, he could also be virulently homophobic too. For example, in 2016, after the MP Crispin Blunt said during a parliamentary debate that he had use poppers, Liddle wrote:

I would have thought that the requirement for amyl nitrate to relax the sphincter muscle and lube to accommodate entry was God’s way of telling you that what you’re about to do is unnatural and perverse. Or your body’s way of telling you – your call. So eeeeuw. ... Crispin and others can always use a jemmy instead.

The previous year, he used his Sun column to sneer at a blind trans woman who was standing for parliament: “Being blind, how did she know she was the wrong sex?” When he was obliged to apologise the following month, he mocked her again and used her former first name as part of a joke that he claimed was a coincidence. Of course, he also used the ‘one joke’ about trans people multiple times in his work, such as in 2018 when his Sunday Times column was headlined I’m identifying as a young, black, trans chihuahua, and the truth can go whistle.

Then, of course, there’s the wide selection of Islamophobia sprinkled through his back catalogue. Well, what would you expect from the man who wrote in August 2018 for The Spectator that “my own view is that there is not nearly enough Islamophobia within the Tory Party”. His piece from the following year suggesting that elections be held on Islamic holy days to make sure Muslims don’t vote has since been scrubbed from The Spectator archives.

It is because of all this, not in spite of it, that he is being so celebrated by the industry in which he squatted like a toad for decades. On the Today programme this morning, Amol Rajan delivered a monologue in tribute to Liddle before playing a clip of him slagging off the station where he once worked as editor of that very programme. Justin Webb was then rolled out to share an anecdote about how Liddle told various lies about him but was a lovely chap in person and not at all like the character present in those millions of words he churned out. Rajan assured listeners that Liddle was “a brilliant writer”. It’s a claim that has been repeated often in the tributes to him but where is the evidence?

Subject yourself to Liddle’s body of work and you’ll find someone who never let go of the childish inclination to insult and degrade. He is so beloved of people on this side because he said all the unpleasant things they are too cowardly to say in public. He may have been delightful to his friends but he should be judged on what he put out into the world and that was bile by the bucketload.

The Sun’s tribute to its fallen columnist includes these lines:

Liddle was willing to say the unsayable — and welcomed the flak that followed. Never one to toe the party line, he was both a fierce critic of woke culture and a defender of the downtrodden.

No. He was willing to say exactly the sort of thing that the powerful and privileged enjoy hearing. He maintained columns in The Sun, The Spectator, and The Sunday Times precisely because he was a voice for the party line — the party of Murdoch that never needs to seek re-election. The tributes to Liddle illustrate just how much of their audience most of the British media hold in total contempt.

Is there a better ‘tribute’ to Liddle than the famous words of the Irish football pundit Eamon Dunphy who summed him up as the bloke who “ran away and left his wife for a young one”? Perhaps: Christopher Hitchens said upon on the death of the televangelist Jerry Falwell: “If you gave him an enema. He could be buried in a matchbox.”

So anyway, Rod Liddle is dead.

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