Brexit, the BBC, moaning Sussexes and ‘black hole of badness’ Starmer – Rod Liddle’s most cutting takedowns

PUCKISHLY profound… A master of the written word… An inimitable journalistic force who was the true voice of common sense. These were just a few of the tributes to legendary Sun columnist Rod Liddle following the announcement on Monday of his death at the age of 66 after a short illness in hospital. Sun columnist Rod Liddle died at the age of 66 after a short illness in hospital Credit: Alamy Razor-sharp Rod Liddle on a visit to Brighton Credit: Alamy The fearless, working-class writer, who grew up in the North East, joined us 15 years ago and was known as a defender of the downtrodden. Whether it was woke culture or political leaders, razor-sharp Rod rightly skewered the lot. Now, in memory and tribute, we share some of his most hilarious observations. ON KEIR STARMER You couldn’t help but laugh when Rod shared his thoughts on what former PM Keir Starmer might have got for Christmas Credit: PA WHAT do you think our Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, got for Christmas? Yes, I hear you. “A personality”. I can see him unwrapping it . . . “Well, it’s very nice, thank you, but what do I do with it?”. THE question, then, is whether Sir Keir is a singularity, a black hole of perceived badness, surpassing everything bad that went before it. EVERYONE seems to be agreed that Sir Keir Starmer is the most useless Prime Minister since the title was invented. I wouldn’t disagree with that. ON BORIS JOHNSON HE seemed “refreshing” for a politician, a kind of village idiot waving around a pig’s bladder on a stick but somehow conversant in Latin. ON KYLIE Rod thought it was about time Kylie Minogue retired Credit: Getty GIVE it up, Kylie, you dingo. You seem to be a nice woman. You were on Vicar Of Dibley once – so why not retire now with good grace? We should be so lucky. ON LILY ALLEN Rod didn’t hold back when sharing his thoughts on Lily Allen’s music Credit: AP ANOTHER gobbet of self-referential, breast-beating respec’ me bro sputum against a backdrop of the usual over-produced R&B pop schlock’ ON ENGLISHNESS THE best thing about being English is not being French. Or Belgian. Can you imagine that? Waking up every morning to the realisation that you’re Belgian? You’d go out of your mind. ON THE NORTH-SOUTH DIVIDE TO the London media elite, the North of England is a dark, mythical realm populated entirely by coal miners, pigeon fanciers and people who eat tripe. LONDON columnists write about the North with the same wide-eyed, patronising fascination that 19th-century Victorian explorers used when describing uncontacted tribes in the Amazon. ON LOVE ISLAND It’s safe to say Rod wasn’t Love Island’s biggest fan Credit: Shutterstock Editorial IT offers us a glimpse into a terrifying, brain-dead dystopia where conversation consists entirely of three-word sentences and heavy sighs. ON TONY BLAIR’S ‘PHILANTHROPIST OF THE YEAR’ AWARD NOT only has he destabilised the Middle East, he’s also pocketed vast amounts from Asian dictators who he advises on how to clean up their image. I assume “philanthropist” is a politer way of saying, “See you next Tuesday.” IF you listen to the Remain campaign, the moment we leave the European Union, locusts will cover the land, the rivers will turn to blood and, worst of all, the supply of prosecco will dry up entirely. TO hear the BBC talk about the European Union, you would think it was a cross between Mother Teresa and the local parish council, rather than a corrupt, unelected, empire-building monstrosity that can’t even get its own accounts audited. ON VIRTUE-SIGNALLING IT’S the luxury good of the modern middle classes. It costs them absolutely nothing to display, imposes heavy costs on everyone else and makes them feel immensely good about themselves while changing nothing whatsoever. CORPORATE virtue-signalling is simply capitalism wearing a rainbow badge. It allows massive multinationals to underpay their staff and dodge their taxes while pretending to be morally superior because they changed their social media avatar for a month. ON NIGEL FARAGE Rod once hilariously described Nigel Farage’s idea of looking relatable to be ‘holding a beer, grinning like a man who had just won twenty quid on a scratchcard’ Credit: The Times FOR the Tories, Nigel Farage is not just a rival politician; he is an inescapable recurring nightmare. Just when they think they have buried him, he pops back up like a pantomime villain with a cigarette in one hand and half their voter base in the other. WHILE every other politician was being coached by PR consultants on how to look relatable, Nigel just stood there holding a beer, grinning like a man who had just won twenty quid on a scratchcard. ON LIZ TRUSS LIZ TRUSS and Kwasi Kwarteng went into the economy like two toddlers who had escaped from nursery with a pair of rusty hedge trimmers, wildly slashing away at anything that looked remotely like economic stability. ON PUBLIC TRANSPORT YOU pay the price of a small holiday in Tuscany for a ticket, only to spend three hours standing next to a broken toilet in a vestibule while an automated voice apologises for a delay caused by “leaves on the track” in May.” ON X FACTOR AS anyone who’s ever watched The X Factor knows, really bad singers are terrifically entertaining. ON ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES I LOOK forward to the sight of [King] Charles, on horseback, leading a battalion against Xi Jinping’s People’s Army to try to take the site of China’s latest coal-fired power station. ON CHINA I WAS thrilled to learn that our government intends to enjoy an “open” relationship with China — one of my favourite countries, as I am sure it is yours. ON THE WEATHER Rod thought people had started to drastically over-react to warm weather Credit: Alamy WE used to call 25 degrees in July “summer”. Now the Met Office issues a red “extreme heat” warning, tells everyone to stay indoors with a damp flannel over their faces and treats a warm afternoon in Sussex as if it were a tactical nuclear strike. ON JUST STOP OIL & ECO PROTESTERS IT requires absolutely zero sacrifice . . . It is purely a therapeutic lifestyle choice designed to allow affluent urbanites to feel morally superior to people who actually have to drive to work. IF it were up to me I would advance towards them in a steamroller. Glued your arse to the road, have you? Well you won’t be needing it much longer. ON JEFF BEZOS THE Washington Post adopted the grand slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” right around the time it was purchased by Jeff Bezos, a man who built an empire where warehouse workers are monitored by algorithms so they don’t spend too long in the toilet. ON ELON MUSK THERE is something magnificently absurd about these multi- billionaires who have conquered every financial frontier on Earth and now feel compelled to build giant rocket ships shaped suspiciously like phallic symbols just to escape the rest of us for eleven minutes. ON BURKAS THEY believe it is in accordance with their religion, and they do so happily and proudly. There are lots of things that people wear which make me cringe. Fat toffs wearing pink corduroy trousers. Chavs wearing onesies. Kids dressed like gangsters in gold chains. But I don’t think we should BAN them. ON SELF-DEPRECATION UNTIL now, the worst case of buyer’s remorse I have ever seen was my mum and dad. Not when they had me. ON COVID ONE of the exciting events you may have missed this week was the appearance of the First Minister for Wales before the Covid inquiry . . . If only you’d have known, you’d have got some friends round, opened a few beers and settled down to watch Mark Drakeford talking 50 shades of s**t. ON ­MILLWALL FC THERE was something about the atmosphere. Perhaps it was the bloke who tried to brick the ref that did it for me, I can’t remember. Or the fella who chased Derek Dougan around the pitch. ON GRETA THUNBERG Greta Thunberg came up with the ‘whitest thing anyone has ever said at the UN’, according to Rod Credit: Getty “YOU have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words” is perhaps the whitest thing anyone has ever said at the UN. What is the correct answer? Is it (a) Go to your room? Or is it (b) Forgive me, to make it up to you, Daddy and I are going to set the entire course of human civilisation on a new track? ON BOB GELDOF’S LIVE AID 30 ANYONE listening to the BBC this week could be forgiven for thinking that the musician Bob Geldof had just emerged from Africa, like a latter-day Dr Livingstone, the first Westerner with news of a deadly new virus. He and his makeshift band of celebrities have adopted Ebola, their song blazing from the radio while Geldof himself has been in every studio exhorting people, with his usual stream of expletives, to . . . ON GARY LINEKER Rod reckons he knows what Gary Lineker would be doing in a parallel universe Credit: Getty IN a parallel universe, where the beautiful game is unknown, Gary Lineker is a popular Leicester costermonger, a job to which his charm, conversational skills and intellectual hinterland are well suited. ON JONATHAN ROSS JONATHAN ROSS is paid millions of pounds a year by the BBC to act like an arrogant, spoiled schoolboy who believes he is utterly immune to the standard rules of decency. ON TAYLOR SWIFT FORGIVE me. I did not see the monster she would become. The morphing, over nine years, into a hideous colossus, a purveyor of ever more derivative and anodyne Kardashian pop. ON ROY KEANE’S INJURY LAY-OFF ALMOST half of the season will have elapsed before he can return to punch, kick and maul people. And I assume he will be so incapacitated in the meantime that we will be spared his pungent views, too. This is a national tragedy. ON THE SUSSEXES Rod decided to rejig the Royal ‘never explain, never complain’ mantra to come up with a new Sussex strap line Credit: Getty IN a very modern twist on the old “Never explain, never complain” mantra of the Windsors, “Always complain, always explain why everyone except you is such a horrid bully” became the Sussex strap line.” THE Groom of the Stool was the most intimate of an English monarch’s courtiers, responsible for assisting in excretion . . . But I do remember thinking, “Oh – so that’s what a Groom of the Stool looks like,” on first seeing a photograph of Omid Scobie. ON AMY NUTTALL ‘She has now issued her cheating husband Andrew Buchan a seven-point plan designed to rescue their marriage. Interesting. Nowhere does it say, ‘Don’t shag anyone else’. That’s an omission’ ON THE BBC Rod gave a cutting insight into the BBC’s idea of diversity Credit: Paul Edwards THE BBC’s idea of diversity is hiring people of every ethnic background, gender identity and sexual orientation under the sun – provided they all went to Oxbridge, read English Lit, live in North London and hold precisely the same political views. THE BBC licence fee is the only tax in the country where you are threatened with a criminal record and a prison sentence if you refuse to pay for a product you don’t even want, produced by people who actively despise you. IF the BBC were forced to go on to a voluntary subscription model tomorrow, half its audience would cancel before lunchtime and the rest would only keep it so they could watch the snooker. ON SOCIAL MEDIA INFLUENCERS THE name under which these women collectively labour is “influencer”, a term which, like “content creator”, is close to meaningless and both could be usefully replaced by “s**tgibbon” or “unemployable”. AN influencer is simply someone with a smartphone, a staggering level of self-absorption and the breathtaking audacity to ask a restaurant owner for a free three-course meal in exchange for posting a picture of a dessert to three thousand bot accounts in Rostov. ON ANDREW MOUNTBATTEN-WINDSOR Rod was ruthless when commenting on Prince Andrew’s infamous Newsnight interview Credit: PA “IN the annals of public relations disasters, Prince Andrew’s television appearance sits somewhere above the captain of the Titanic announcing that the iceberg was actually very small and mostly made of ice cream.” “HE sits in Royal Lodge, surrounded by his teddy bears, wondering why no one is inviting him to cut ribbons at a bypass opening in Slough.” ON EMMA WATSON Emma Watson would have been better off explaining the rules of Quidditch to the UN, according to Rod Credit: AFP or licensors INSTEAD of telling them all the rules of Quidditch or how to turn someone into a frog, she bored them [The UN] all rigid with whining, leftie, PC crap. ON DIANE ABBOTT Diane Abbott wasn’t Rod’s cup of tea but he did commend her on one thing Credit: Alamy I LIKE Diane Abbott about as much as I like getting out of bed in the middle of the night, standing on a piece of Lego and smashing my head into the door. She’s not exactly my cup of tea, y’know? And she has said some wonderfully stupid things in her time. But . . . she speaks her mind. She clearly cares.