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.
Rod was always going to be too big for the BBC – where, despite his programme’s power, he was a long way down the hierarchy, with the stale breath of about six layers of suits over his shoulder
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.
