Boisterously Laden

Rod Liddle would have had tremendous fun with the more negative reactions to his death, and also with the fact that he had expired on the same day as Jimmy Cricket. Although economically well to the left of the rest of them, he was also one of the surprisingly high number of figures whom the Right adored despite their ferocious opposition to foxhunting: Ann Widdecombe, Alan Clark, Sir Teddy Taylor, Sir Roger Gale, Sir Anthony Beaumont-Dark, and at least at one time Douglas Carswell. Rod’s departure from the BBC was occasioned by a column on that issue in The Guardian, where Stephen Bates writes:

If the first rule of column writing is to be read and the second and third to be interesting and provocative, the journalist Rod Liddle, who has died aged 66 after a short illness, certainly met the bill.

His columns in the Sunday Times, The Spectator and The Sun, and his Saturday morning shows for Times Radio, gave his fans, mainly on the political right, all they needed to fulfil their prejudices, laced with a satirical edge and verve. He could fill the 2,500-seater London Palladium, as he once did for his conversational show.

A tousled and dishevelled figure, shirt flapping open, Liddle’s iconoclastic targets in recent years have included bureaucrats, politicians, “thought police”, campaigners for gay and trans rights and, above all and constantly, the supposed politically correct, liberal-left elite alleged to be undermining the stolid, respectable working classes, leaving them feeling left behind and ignored.

The columns regularly became boisterously laden with invective moderated by an ebullient, wrecking-ball humour and were the subject of regular complaints by those who did not see the joke.

Welsh nationalists were “miserable, seaweed munching, sheep bothering, pinch-faced hill tribes” and grievance groups indulged in “furious yapping”; others were waxen-skinned spaffgoblins. The alleged sacking of the old order had “left us fraught and clamorous, unhappy, isolated and averse”, never mind that some of his readers espousing such views were inflamed and confirmed in their opinions precisely by his prose.

The one person to whom he felt he owed an apology was the Labour politician Harriet Harman for a crude snub, saying that he had not thought how the remarks would affect her. Liddle was the first journalist to be censured for a blog by the Press Complaints Commission in 2010 after alleging that the majority of violent crime in London was carried out by “young men from the African-Caribbean community”.

It was an irony that some of his most ardent fans were among those he had mocked in regular columns for The Guardian for more than three years between 1999 and 2003. When in 2002 he had derided conservative members of the Countryside Alliance who had demonstrated against the Blair government as “angry ruddy-faced people”, going on to say “you may have forgotten why you voted Labour in 1997 but then you catch a glimpse”, he was condemned by the Telegraph and The Sun, which he would subsequently go on to write for.

Liddle was born in Sidcup, Kent, into a respectable, church-going family, the son of Margaret (née Clee), who worked for the then Department of Health and Social Security, and Edwin, who came from a north-east family of railway workers but was himself an Inland Revenue clerk. They moved back up north when Liddle was eight to the Middlesbrough “select” suburb of Nunthorpe, a description that he later characteristically described as like saying “a select suburb of Mogadishu”.

He was educated at the Laurence Jackson comprehensive school and Prior Pursglove sixth form college, undergoing as he did so a rite of passage as a punk, a sartorial style that never completely left him, and briefly joining the Socialist Workers Party. Canvassing for Labour at the 1983 general election, he claimed his appearance must have cost Labour 5,000 votes.

Liddle joined the South Wales Echo as a journalist, and then moved to London to study social psychology at the London School of Economics and worked as a researcher for the Labour party before joining the BBC as a trainee producer.

In 1998 he was made editor of the Today programme on Radio 4 and became perhaps the first to be widely known beyond the corporation. He undoubtedly made the previously rather cosy programme sound more aggressive and competitive, with more use of investigative journalism, and increased its audience figures accordingly.

It was under his watch in 2003 that the BBC was engulfed in a furious row with the Blair government over allegations that a dossier alleging that the Iraqi government was preparing weapons of mass destruction had been “sexed up” as a pretext in advance of the Iraq war – a story that led to the suicide of the weapons expert David Kelly, who had been the unwitting source of the reporter Andrew Gilligan.

Liddle defended the programme and the BBC vigorously in columns for The Guardian against the government and other newspaper attacks, reserving deepest scorn for Peter Mandelson, whose briefings he claimed had heightened the row.

It was Liddle’s increasingly outspoken columns for the paper that goaded the corporation into requiring that he either gave them up or left the BBC. Choosing the latter course, he soon found himself in demand by the Sunday Times and others for his pugnacious commentaries, delivered professionally on time and to length. A novel and books of his writing followed, including Selfish, Whining Monkeys in 2014 and The Great Betrayal (2019), stating why in his view the Brexit referendum vote had been undermined by, naturally, the liberal elite and politicians.

While at the BBC in 1993, Liddle began a relationship with Rachel Royce, a reporter, whom he married in a ceremony in Malaysia in 2004. The relationship had already produced two children, Tyler and Wilder, but Liddle left the honeymoon early to his wife’s fury when she discovered he had done so to continue his affair with Alicia Monckton, a receptionist at the Spectator magazine who was half his age. Following the divorce from Royce, Liddle married Monckton in 2008 and the couple had a daughter, Emmeline.

Professor Tim Luckhurst, with whom we are now blessed in the Eternal City, writes:

I regarded Rod Liddle as a close, loyal and utterly brilliant friend for 42 years. We first met in 1984 as parliamentary research assistants working for members of Neil Kinnock’s shadow cabinet. Rod worked for Barry Jones, shadow secretary of state for Wales. I worked for Donald Dewar, shadow secretary of state for Scotland. Rod was a sophisticated mystery even then. It took me months to work out that he was still studying for his degree at the London School of Economics. While I toiled away at my desk between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., stopping only for lunch in ‘Plod’s’, as we called the cafe off Westminster Hall frequented by police officers and security staff, Rod took regular brief absences from work to dash from SW1 to WC2 to attend lectures. He must have been one of very few students in 1985 who wore a smart suit. It certainly impressed the girls. There were two things I noticed then: he never lacked attractive female company and he almost always carried a newspaper.

Rod’s affection for newspapers helped me meet my wife. I had spotted in Plod’s a delightful looking brunette whom I guessed had to be a Conservative. One lunchtime in 1986, I asked Rod if he knew who she was. He explained, with his usual blithe confidence, that she was an American and that he had noticed that she did the Times crossword very fast. He concluded that she was plainly bright but he did not fancy Tory girls. He urged me to ask her out. Reluctant to wimp out in front of my friend, I approached Dorothy Williamson (now Mrs Dorothy Luckhurst) and asked her how the crossword was going. Her answer made me laugh out loud, not because it was not charming but because she spoke in a perfect Kelvinside accent. I reported back: ‘Rod, she’s from Glasgow! She’s not American. She’s posh Scottish. Westbourne School for Girls and St Andrews University. She sounds like Donald Dewar’s ex-wife!’

My most recent encounter with Rod took place at the James Cook University Hospital in Middlesbrough in the first week of July. Rod was in his bed in a mixed public ward. He knew he was critically ill. He had every reason to be acutely miserable. He knew he faced complex surgery and that it might kill him. Yet Rod was full of good cheer and self-effacing humour. For two hours as I sat with my friend and his children, he entertained us and anyone else in the ward who was listening. He was clearly very popular among his fellow patients and with the hospital staff, about whom he spoke with respect verging on reverence. I recall only one surprise: Rod insisted that he had absolute faith in God and was quite certain that he had nothing to fear. He had never previously shared with me such certainty about his Christian faith.

I should have seen what was coming. Instead, I went on holiday to the South of France and promised to be in touch as soon as I returned. My last text message from Rod Liddle arrived shortly after I arrived at a villa close to Montpellier. It said, ‘Hallo my friends x. Operation astonishingly successful every bit gone. See you soon. Have a lovely holiday.’ Again, I should have guessed. He did not send another message.

Rod must have known that he was very ill when he last came to dinner with us here, at the residence Durham University provides in my role as principal of South College. Our other guest, on that occasion, was the brilliant Professor Jolyon Mitchell, Principal of St John’s College Durham and an academic theologian. Rod and Jolyon’s extended debate was lively, enlightening, amicable and intensely entertaining. Rod wore his learning lightly, but his commitment to the world of ideas was sincere, lifelong and vividly apparent. I am glad Rod was not an academic. His ideas reached a huge audience through his columns here in The Spectator and in the Sunday Times. However, he delighted in academic debate and could hold his own and more with the brightest and the best.

Rod was a wonderful friend and he played a defining role in my life. I will miss him for as long as I outlast him. Rod was not simply Britain’s most impressive columnist. He is irreplaceable. I hope and pray that I shall see him in the afterlife in which he believed absolutely, and I hope to find the faith he professed.

As Robin Aitken writes:

If, in the 1980s, you had been trying to visualise BBC-man made flesh, you might have conjured from your imagination someone like Rod Liddle – who sadly died on Sunday. Young, scruffy with a slightly studied air of the bohemian about him, fully armed with a set of opinions tailor-made to epater les bourgeois, I looked on him at first meeting with some disdain. “Just another BBC Leftie,” I reckoned. I was doing an attachment to the Today programme at the time and one night I was teamed with Rod to cover, of all things, a mass gay wedding at a West End nightclub. It was an event so camp and so obviously designed to provoke that I couldn’t help gently taking the mickey out of it. I soon discovered I’d found a kindred spirit. Rod’s subversive sense of humour always got the better of him.

Needless to say the night editor, a slightly po-faced individual, didn’t see the joke and the piece was spiked; thus depriving the programme’s audience of a much-needed belly laugh. I didn’t see much of Rod for the next few years; he rapidly made his way up through the BBC’s ranks to become editor of Today whilst I stagnated in the BBC’s News and Current Affairs wastelands. And then, some time in the late 1990s, our paths crossed again.

I was smoking around the back of the studio complex at Television Centre and there was Rod, still scruffy, fag-in-mouth with that world-weary cynical charm that served him so well. We got chatting about the BBC and right there and then he offered me a job as a reporter. Which I happily accepted and then began my only really productive period at the BBC. Why? Because Rod was the only BBC editor I ever worked for who was a genuine free-thinker. He wasn’t intimidated by the BBC’s suffocating dogma (despite their claims of impartiality); he was prepared to commission, in fact, was eager for, journalism that challenged liberal-Left group-think. That made him a rarity then – and there’s no sign of that having changed within the Corporation; is there a Liddle among the current crop? I don’t see them.

Years later Rod confessed to me that, looking back, he felt he should have done more to challenge the BBC’s prejudices; as he put it to me his shtick was to say the unsayable and he hadn’t been brave enough. Maybe so, but I think he was too hard on himself: on his watch the programme enjoyed a golden period because it allowed voices and opinions to be aired that were usually rigorously screened-out by the BBC thought police. No editor since has matched him.

Eventually, of course, the party ended. Rod had got up too many BBC noses and they used one of his pieces for The Guardian to get rid of him (it was about his dislike for the Countryside Alliance – he was a great lover of foxes). His replacement as editor was very much a BBC conformist and so shortly after that I got pensioned-off and went to write my first book Can We Trust the BBC?; Rod meanwhile went on to become the superstar columnist of his generation.

But there was one side to Rod Liddle that, despite his prodigious output, was not always well understood. Many others have paid tribute to his personal warmth and kindness, but the key to the man was his underlying belief in God. He didn’t wear it on his sleeve but it was there alright. Rod was brought up in a Middlesbrough household where religion played a major part. His father was a strict Methodist; there was always chapel on Sundays and very often evensong, too. The infant Rod was known often to wander up to the preacher, whilst in full-flow, to hold his hand.

But, like teenagers so often will, Rod rejected religion preferring Marxism until – as he put it – he saw through its “imbecilic pretensions”. His personal journey through his adult years was one of a gradual return to an understanding of the importance of religion and his own personal faith. I did a long interview with Rod where I explored all this with him at some length. In it he says how he came to realise that the wholesale abandonment of religion in this country had done tremendous damage. How we as a society and culture have all but banished God and yet found nothing at all to put in his place. And how the dominance of the liberal, secular intellectual classes has led to legislation which has been the ruination of so many poor families. He cited easy divorce laws which have led to the epidemic of broken homes making children unhappy and society unstable.

He wasn’t one to proselytise. If you asked him to define his own beliefs he was apt to quote a favourite poem by John Betjeman: “… not my vegetarian dinner, not my lime juice minus gin, quite can drown the faint conviction, that we may be born in sin.” That paradoxical “faint conviction” was the heart of the man. And it’s what gave him, I believe, the standpoint from which he was able to unleash that steady stream of piercing satire, the absence of which will be keenly felt.

Robin Aitken’s interview with Rod Liddle can be seen here.

Andrew Gilligan writes:

The best word for my feelings about Rod Liddle’s death is one that Rod was occasionally heard to use himself. Fuck.

Rod was my editor at the Today programme, the most exciting boss I’ve ever had. He hired me, from a newspaper, to be part of a team he was building because he wanted reporters who would lift up more rocks and break more stories than the mainstream, central BBC correspondents he mostly had to use. ‘They’re spokesmen for the spokesmen, mate,’ he told me. More than one of those people indeed ended up as PRs for the official bodies they’d just been reporting on.

The spokesmen for the spokesmen – and, to be fair, several much better BBC journalists – hated Rod (and some, by extension, me) because they genuinely felt it was not the BBC’s business to be breaking news, because they were getting less airtime on the BBC’s top show, and because Rod was so spectacularly rude about them.

Today and its TV counterpart, Breakfast News, then shared the same open-plan office at Television Centre, separated only by a row of possibly plastic pot-plants. On my first day, making sure that everyone could hear, Rod stood on Today’s side of the Berlin Wall. ‘That side, television,’ he said. ‘This side, journalism.’ I’m hearing there’s a vacancy for the breakfast TV editorship, I said with mock innocence. ‘I’d rather clean the toilets,’ said Rod, loudly.

It was thrilling to join the intense world of the programme, with its 20-hour days and its news impact perhaps then at its absolute height. Some of the stories I and the other reporters worked on dominated the headlines, won us awards, and sounded early warnings which, now they have been ignored, have helped humble the country (I did a lot of stories exposing the increasingly Potemkin nature of the armed forces, for instance.)

The show’s ruthless demands also gave Rod the ideal excuse for his complex private life. We booked the pre-dawn cars to get people in, so we knew which of his love-nests to collect him from each day, but were strictly forbidden from passing this data to his future wife, who would call in, unconvinced by claims of a sudden editorial crisis. ‘I know where he is! He’s with that bloody [name of current girlfriend]!’ she would shout down the phone at us.

Today’s enemies, external and internal, had their moment when Alastair Campbell, now a claimed apostle of ‘disagreeing agreeably,’ disagreed so disagreeably with a report of mine about his sexed-up Iraq dossier that David Kelly, the man who blew the whistle to me and other BBC journalists, lost his life. 

Rod had left the programme the year before, after a column he wrote was deemed to breach BBC impartiality. But at a time when I and the BBC were silenced by our participation in the Hutton inquiry, his was a staunch and powerful voice against the outrage of the affair and of the inquiry proceedings. The judge produced an inquisition of the BBC rather than of the government, and sought to hold journalists, with all the difficulties they face, to a standard that he did not appear to demand of, for instance, government dossiers. Rod’s advocacy was one reason why Hutton’s verdict never commanded public confidence, why Campbell did not get the win he sought, and why the consequences for the BBC, though not nil, were less severe than feared.

Rod was blamed in some quarters for hiring me, but other more perceptive critics noted that as well as being edgy, his Today was also rigorous. Although my story was correct, I made, as I admitted at the time, a slip in an early live interview – a claim which turned out to be true, but which I didn’t have enough evidence for, and wrongly attributed to Dr Kelly. That gave Campbell a handle to clutch, but it probably wouldn’t have happened – a stricter script for this live would have been insisted on – if Rod had been in charge.

Rod was always going to be too big for the BBC – where, despite his programme’s power, and unlike a newspaper editor, he was a long way down the hierarchy, with the stale breath of about six layers of suits over his shoulder. But it’s quite wrong to pigeonhole him politically. The column that got him sacked from Today was written for The Guardian and attacked the Tory party. His only real mission was épater la bourgeoisie, to provoke the priggish. Thankfully, social media created marvellous new fountains of biens-pensants who could be utterly relied on to take Rod’s bait. I shall miss him and so, I suspect, will they.

Rosie Duffield writes:

When a public figure dies, it’s customary to post something respectful on social media. If you had a personal connection to them, the post might contain a fond memory or amusing anecdote. If you disliked them, you really ought to have the decency to keep that to yourself as others share their sadness and grief.

But inevitably, in the gladiatorial arena that platforms such as X have become, those harbouring a hatred of public personalities they have never met still feel compelled to share their opinions as fact. All who dare to disagree, or have a slightly more nuanced take, will be piled upon, dismissed, cancelled and added to the “Very Bad Person” list.

When a close friend of his messaged early on Monday to let me know that the journalist Rod Liddle had died the night before, I was shocked and upset. In that weird window of disbelief, I checked our last messages. Just two weeks previously, he had told me about the great care he’d been receiving at his local hospital and, not at all unusually, was more concerned about his family than himself. We agreed we would catch up properly when he was allowed to go home soon. It didn’t occur to me that we would never get that chance — that he wouldn’t, in fact, be going home again.

Our first encounters were awkward and far from pleasant. Rod made no secret of the fact he was angry at those young voters he blamed for overturning the Tories’ historic grip on Canterbury and imposing a “Corbynista” Leftie as his MP.

In my first few days in Parliament, I had a desk, a phone ringing off the hook, a couple of kind friends who had volunteered to answer it, and not yet a single member of staff. As I sat alone in my office one day, ploughing through hundreds of emails to the backdrop of constantly wailing bagpipes, I cracked and decided not to let the calls go to voicemail.

An extremely grumpy constituent was ranting about the evils of Viagogo and what he described as the extortionate racket of dodgy ticket resales. At the end, I asked for his details and, when he shared his name and number, I chose not to admit that I wasn’t actually one of my imaginary team of staff. Later, I knew Rod would find that amusing, but never quite got around to confessing it was me on the other end of the line.

In 2019, when I made a speech in Parliament about my own experience of an abusive relationship, he mocked me rather spitefully in his Spectator column. That was a while before we met, before he concluded that he actually liked and respected me for standing up for my beliefs and refusing to simply toe the line.

We disagreed hugely on many issues — Brexit, immigration and Islam, for example — yet agreed on several others. Rod tried earnestly to persuade me that the mix of Left-of-centre economics and socially conservative policies of the new Social Democratic Party was the future, while laughing at his own candidacy in the 2024 general election.

In the days following his death, there has been vitriol online directed not only at Rod but also at feminists who dared to be friendly with him. Along with the likes of Kathleen Stock and Julie Bindel, I expressed my sadness at his death. While many long for us to appreciate opposing views and engage in healthy, respectful debate, it seems that the policing of women’s every thought and word is still as rife as ever. Apparently, I am no longer allowed to call myself a feminist because Rod accepted a police caution for a domestic incident 20 years ago. I consider that to be an entirely personal matter for his wife and family, rather than the business of total strangers on social media.

Our friendship was one of mutual respect, gained by discovering our similarities at the same time as tolerating one another’s often vastly differing views. Once we got to know each other, he never stopped apologising for that column, which I had long forgotten. Those friendships with thoughtful and interesting women, and that concern for his wife’s wellbeing despite his own illness, tell me more about him as a person than thousands of judgemental comments on social media ever will.

And Brendan O’Neill writes:

Every death leaves a hole in someone’s life. But it’s a rare death that leaves a hole in public life. Rod Liddle’s does. His passing has robbed us of the finest, funniest and most sardonic chronicler of the absurdities of the 21st century. His writing was brilliant: sometimes brutal, always truthful. He was the only newspaper scribbler of our times whose name could be justly uttered in the same breath as Swift’s. You can feel his loss already. You just know the next time something mad or ridiculous happens, you’ll find yourself thinking: What would Rod have written about this?

He died on Sunday evening after a short illness. Until about six weeks ago – when he backed out of work – he’d been a prolific, heroic columnist. He wrote for The Spectator, The Sun and the Sunday Times. He hosted a Saturday morning show on Times Radio, which I loved appearing on. He was once a speechwriter for the Labour Party. He made TV documentaries and wrote books – my favourite was The Great Betrayal, his stirring defence of the ‘uneducated thickos’ who voted for Brexit against those posh twats malingering in the ‘Brexit Derangement Syndrome intensive care ward, wired up to saline drips, attended to day and night, occasionally afforded a few thousand volts of ECT when things get really bad, but still foaming, still beside themselves with apoplexy’.

His journalism career included four years as editor of the Today programme on Radio 4. A man who went from editing the morning show beloved of the Beeb’s leafiest listeners to being nominated for Islamophobe of the Year Award by the nutters of the Islamic Human Rights Commission (sic)? Truly we shall not see his like again. He and I were nominated for that award in the same year, and we often shared our dismay that neither of us won, not least since the prize-giving ceremony was at the Holiday Inn in Wembley, which would have been a great night out.

It was for his columns – dry, acerbic, profound – that he became best known. His prose sparkled like a jagged diamond in a media world dominated by privileged pricks more interested in being ‘correct’ than candid, honest or funny. He was the only columnist who could make you laugh out loud on the Tube. He once said the Severn Bridge between Wales and England connects Wales to the ‘First World’. Back in 2018, when even many feminists were going along with the trans lunacy, he temporarily identified as a ‘young, black, trans chihuahua’. Hilariously, Pink News published a thundering editorial accusing him of ‘dehumanising trans people’ illustrated with a split pic of Liddle and a black chihuahua.

He was an implacable foe of what most people call ‘woke’ but which he called ‘wank’. He heaped derision on the fake left that dominates our institutions. He once said the reason he used the term ‘bien-pensants’ is because it’s more acceptable than ‘cunt’. He ripped the piss out of leftish elites who are ‘aloof from the country’ and understand neither ‘its aspirations’ nor ‘its gripes’. Like many of us, he was heartened by Brexit, which he viewed as a ‘rebellion of the poor’. ‘One can be on the wrong side of history until history suddenly and rather capriciously switches sides, as it did on 23 June [2016]’, he said of the EU referendum and the working classes’ wrestling of the historic narrative from the bien-pensants / cunts. I once gave a talk on Brexit in Kent and heard wheezing whoops of approval from the audience: it was Rod.

Naturally, he fell foul of the tyranny of literalism. When Islamist extremist Anjem Choudary said radical Muslim Brits should become suicide bombers, Liddle agreed – so long as ‘they blow themselves up… a decent distance from where the rest of us live. Tower Hamlets, for example.’ The media fury was intense, as if he were literally inciting suicide bombings rather than, you know, making a joke. When he wrote a column wondering whether he’d sleep with Harriet Harman, a Guardian columnist said his ‘diatribe’ was ‘so disgusting’ that it caused her to ‘flush violently all the way from my breastbone to my forehead’ until she ‘looked like [she] had German measles’. Rarely had the narcissistic insanity of cancel culture been so starkly on display.

What ‘progressives’ really hated about Rod is that he met their earnestness not with indulgence but with scoffing. He was the nation’s cocked eyebrow. He was the irreverent guffaw of everyday Britain. He was a bawdy iconoclast of the northern working class, wielding his unflashy, quite Methodist scepticism against the crank ideologies of the rich and dumb who had colonised the left. The fools called him ‘far right’ but he was more properly left than any of them – a lifelong Thatcher sceptic and devotee of the Social Democratic Party who longed for the restoration of the common sense of our once great kingdom.

To my mind, his ribald humour and natural-born non-conformism made him the heir to the likes of John Wilkes, the pamphlet-publishing tearaway of the 18th century. He carried a flickering candle for the great English traditions of satire and ‘lower-class’ heresy in an era in which you could find yourself cast out for saying lesbians don’t have todgers. Rod worried about lesbians. He once told me that, courtesy of the trans madness, lesbians seem to be an endangered species, like red kites. Truth is, the likes of Rod were the true endangered species: Englishmen who speak as they see, and damn the consequences.

A little-known fact about Rod is that he was kind. He was fantastic company. His throaty laugh could carry an entire night. He was a great friend of spiked, often appearing on our podcasts and bigging up our writers. He and I were due to speak about anti-Semitism in Leeds just six weeks ago. He messaged me to say he couldn’t do it, because ‘I’m not in a good way’. ‘Get well’, I replied, and now I wish I’d said more. Everyone at spiked is deeply saddened by his death and we offer our heartfelt condolences to his wife, Alicia, and his children, Wilder, Tyler and Emmy.