‘We thought we liked this new way we were, these new deregulated humans, fearful of nothing. But I think we have deluded ourselves. We have filled our boots, and deluded ourselves’. – Rod Liddle, Selfish Whining Monkeys, 2014
The Glastonbury music festival is now only good for luxury beliefs and blood libels.
Last year, the fatally untalented vegan ‘musical’ duo, Bob Vylan, chanted ‘DEATH DEATH TO THE IDF’ on stage, prompting a police investigation which resulted in no charges – obviously. Sitting in Middlesbrough at the time, the greatest political writer in contemporary Britain, a man with hundreds of thousands – possibly millions – of loyal followers, decided to weigh in on the search for answers. ‘A bomb,’ he wrote, ‘a W89 thermonuclear warhead, dropped onto that field, would see to the evisceration of London’s most annoying people.’
The response to Rod Liddle’s column, published in The Sunday Times, was mental fury. Its bad enough there’s a genocide in Gaza, the establishment-activist-commentary class whined – now he wants one here.
This sequence was standard for Liddle: write something the ‘left’ – as they still can’t meme – couldn’t understand, watch them rattle and croak trying, then explode as some meaning assembled…then wait as they unthinkingly but generously reposted the supposedly offensive material on their social media feeds accompanied by outrage, allowing views without paywalls. Brilliant.
Liddle died on Sunday, aged 66. At the height of his career, he commandeered headline columns at three of Great Britain’s most storied media institutions, namely The Spectator magazine – the oldest English-speaking magazine in the world; The Sun newspaper – property of the working class man driving a van and; The Sunday Times – the metropolitan man’s weekend read. They sprung in different directions yet he was without doubt the most popular columnist at each one.
He was an astonishing man, ridiculously – precociously – talented. Enormous fun. But what made him such a force in the malaise of present British culture was blood.
He was one of these rare specimens who emerged on the left, first as a young working class socialist, then as a Labour party speech writer. In the late 1990s Liddle landed the most socialist-y establishment job possible – editor of the Today Program on BBC 4 – then found himself staring into the disfigurement of the politics he was weaned on. In a column in 2013, he described the people he once found himself amongst:
‘...these awful, awful people who are perpetually wracked with a paranoid fury, drunk or constipated or hunched over the toilet bowl with their fingers down their throats or visited by the Black Dog of depression, or ulcerated or prostate on some sofa to banish the clamorous headaches. And of course continually lying to one another when they weren’t lying to the rest of us, continually stitching each other up, dissolving in a vat of their own bile.’
His departure enraged the creative industries, Westminster careerists and civil servants on the make, most of whom were ‘new left’ or New Labour, and his writing became the subject of hostile, de-personing campaigns. The people he had once worked with or believed alongside reported him to the censors and the police, wanting him humiliated, canceled or sacked. But nothing they tried worked. He cooked their brains.
Liddle was peerless in his commentary on modern British politics and culture. He didn’t want to be seen that way, but it was clear nobody could articulate through the same levels of satire, sarcasm, political incorrectness, toilet and dark humour the way he could, all delivered in striking prose (an editor once described the way he started his columns as the ‘cocaine intro’). This is how he once described former Prime Minister Theresa May:
‘Theresa May has the personal warmth, wit, oratorical ability and attractiveness of an Indesit fridge-freezer which has been faultily connected by a man called Trevor for five quid, cash in hand, and which is now full of decomposing Findus Crispy Pancakes.’
But there was a philosophical and more prescient meaning to Liddle, one applicable elsewhere.
Everyone understood Liddle’s foundation for every column or remark: in the monumental changes sparked by English society’s new direction, people had been left behind. The social engineering required to enforce that change would generate waves of absurdities.
Liddle died amid one of those changes he rallied so amusingly against. Last week, we looked at the case of the DEI academic fraudster cum pathological liar Jason Arday at Cambridge University (it’s only gotten worse). What Liddle would have noted here was not Arday but his enablers – boomer-ish, ‘anti-racist’ academic professionals, all willing to torch the legacy of Cambridge University to make themselves – themselves – feel righteous.
This model is the same profile Liddle spent close on two decades exposing. He wasn’t a YouTube warrior – he never cautioned ‘the end of the west’. He was more precise: the ‘leftist liberal’ that emerged in the late 1990s is capable of anything. In Liddle’s eyes they were rambling, violently-tempered sociopaths and dissembling intellectual pygmies – menacing, preening, dumb as shit.
These were not just politicians, they didn’t just come from London and they betrayed almost every traditional left-wing principle – despite describing themselves as ‘leftists’. These creatures could be found in American coastal cities, in Toronto’s suburbs and on Cape Town’s Atlantic Seaboard. Educated to excess and upwardly mobile, they were beneficiaries of cheap property and low interest rates. They found racism in everything from clocks to plumbing yet lost interest in containing their loathing of Jews. No group in the history of the earth had it so good as the modish Euro / English-speaking professional of the late 1990s / early 2000s – and to express their gratitude, they advocated for initiatives to ruin succeeding generations, the economy destroying net zero or BBBEE in South Africa (even volunteering it in places where such incongruency wasn’t legislated).
In the absence of a narrative chronicling the rise and behaviour of this profile, I think life would be much more frightening. We’d misinterpret things as strong and devastating. We’d be scared. Liddle undressed and disarmed this profile, reducing it to a pathetic if mad existence. They remain reckless and dangerous, but thanks to him, also pointless and sad.
Tomorrow’s reckoning belongs to the hand of today’s 15-year-old white boy. When these guys complete Hopf’s cycle of hard-times-making-strong-men-making-good-times, Rod Liddle will be deservedly remembered as a feature of the resistance. In his honor, and remembering the past, they should adjust the consequence mapping to ensure that no liberal white women emerge from the good times.
[Image: Rod Liddle, right, with the late Spectator Low Life columnist, Jeremy Clarke, Facebook]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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