There is a reason the death of Rod Liddle has provoked such a swirling tide of grief among his millions of followers, including readers of this magazine, and that is that in the last 25 years Rod came to occupy a crucial position in journalism, and indeed in our country as a whole.
His columns became a haven, a refuge, in which he gave us permission to think things that are in fact common sense, but which have for some reason become taboo. He gave us a renewed permission to laugh – at him, at ourselves, at our collective absurdities – at a time when laughter is increasingly controlled and often suppressed.
It was fruity stuff to say Africa was run by gangsters, megalomaniacs, Marxists and murderous warlords
Look at what has happened to free speech in the last couple of decades: J.K. Rowling all but cancelled just for saying a woman is a woman; the cops knocking on your door for non-crime hate incidents; students banning brilliant minds from their campuses; endless ridiculous ‘content warnings’; people fired just for a stray comment on the internet.
It’s mad, and yet more and more journalists have been invisibly capitulating. We have been toning it down, cutting that joke, sandpapering things to avoid getting into trouble.
