The most striking thing about Rod Liddle when he arrived at the BBC as a trainee producer was how different he was to the corporation norm. Thin as a rake and with artfully-chaotic hair, he looked like an expelled member of a punk rock band. He was the only man on the Today programme to sport an earring. If ever anyone had a charm that could be described as ‘wolfish’, it was Rod. He had countless admirers because there was a whiff of danger about him as such an unconventional inhabitant of the newsroom.
Rod adored being provocative – a trait that became unmissable in his later career
He was, however, a brilliant journalist. He had relatively little experience – his most recent job had been working for Labour’s Barry Jones at Westminster – but he loved the thrill of the news cycle and he rapidly became the producer you most wanted on your team on one of the gruelling Today night shifts. I scheduled him to go to the Conservative party conference in 1987, partly thinking about how amusingly counter-cultural it would be to take him along – he claimed to have never stayed in a hotel as posh as the one we booked for him. But within minutes he was off round the conference bars, extracting confidences from elderly Tories and up-and-coming ministers – and getting original stories to put on air, which had not been a traditional strength of BBC political coverage.
