I only met Rod Liddle a few times, though at The Spectator and the Sunday Times I worked alongside him and to a large degree in his shadow. He was irascible and lugubrious and bloody funny, both in person and in print. Like a lot of bogeymen, in person he was a delight and nothing like his image. He was humble and polite and faintly decorous, keen to know what you thought and to know what you knew – even though he was clear about what he knew and generally put it better than anyone else, week in and week out.
At first he was a guilty pleasure, someone who would write down what the rest of us were thinking, often without the decorous need in speech to acknowledge the validity of views of those who differ. There was an element of reading Rod that was like reading Viz in my teenage years – a little bit naughty, the schoolboy yelling ‘bum’ at a junior school teacher.
Then came the realisation that this often hilarious scribe was not a provocateur at all – he was simply the best critic of people whose world view was imposed with unthinking zeal. They were the people doing harm and Rod was the exemplar of his journalistic generation, yelling that the emperor has no clothes.
He was not racist or transphobic or Islamophobic or any of those things – he was just enraged by the willingness of officialdom to peddle the absurdity that the public wants more immigration or that men are women, and the unwillingness of officialdom to point out what motivated most grooming gangs or terrorists. He was not naughty or provocative or insensitive – he was the guy pointing out the violence of thought and action being done to good old-fashioned British common sense.
