Rod Liddle would have loved the headline of this piece. He would have delighted in its (as he would have seen it) risible preposterousness. He would have relished the attention-grabbing contrarianism. And, above all, he would have appreciated the tastelessness of the timing - just days after his death, aged 66, while all his other old friends and colleagues were still being nice about him and saying how wonderful he was, ‘the greatest journalist of his generation’, supposedly.
But though I liked Rod very much, found him entertaining company and loved a lot of what he wrote because of his crass insults, naughty jokes and delicious turns of phrase, I don’t believe he was nearly the rebel he imagined himself to be. He was an Establishment prop not a thorn in its side; a licensed - and very well paid - jester in the Enemy’s employ.
I’ll explain why in a minute, but first let me tell you how we met. It was while Rod was editor of the Today programme, the BBC radio’s flagship current affairs programme. He rang me out of the blue during a general election to ask whether I fancied going on prime minister Tony Blair’s battle bus for the day and to report on the Labour campaign.
This was a typical Liddle commission: risky and mischievous. Liddle, a former Socialist Worker and punk - ‘energetic but obnoxious’, as he described himself - had been given the job to make the show livelier. Perhaps he thought that as an outspoken right-winger I was more likely to cause trouble and annoy Blair’s bullying chief of staff Alistair Campbell; or that as someone with no broadcasting experience I might at least cock up entertainingly. Anyway, it was flattering to be talent-spotted in this way and I’ll always be grateful to Rod for this act of suicidal generosity.
We only met in the flesh years later, probably at some Spectator event, because by then we were both columnists on the magazine. Because we lived not too far from one another in London we would meet occasionally for a drink or dinner, where we would argue about our respective tastes in music. Rod thought that my taste was shit. I thought - and maintain to this day - that his taste was shitter. I considered his political insights to be about on par with his aesthetic judgements, but there was never any rancour in our disagreements. If Rod considered you simpatico you remained his friend, come what may. That’s why I don’t think he’ll much mind my slagging him. “All part of the game,” he’ll think. “And anyway I probably deserve it.” This was one of Rod’s most endearing features. However scabrous he could be about politicians and celebrities and liberals generally, you knew that the person he loathed most - albeit in a lugubriously amused ‘well what can you do?’ way - was himself.
But the fact that Rod Liddle was both lovable and well-loved by his readership does not let him off the hook. On the contrary, his popularity and ubiquity are what made him a menace so inimical to the interests of the mass of humanity he affected to represent. In the years when we were mainstream media colleagues and allies this suggestion would have struck me as outrageous. “Rod’s brilliant. And funny. He’s continually sticking it to the Libs!”, I would no doubt have argued in his defence. But that was before I had begun to understand the true nature of the MSM and the role played by star columnists like Liddle in promoting its noisome interests.
Rod Liddle was a columnist not just in the Spectator - house journal of the Conservative Party - but also in Rupert Murdoch’s biggest UK publications, his tabloid newspaper the Sun and his best-selling broadsheet, The Sunday Times. Even a decade ago, Liddle’s journalism was earning him north of a million pounds a year. You do not get that sort of money by being anti-Establishment. Rather it’s your blood money for propping up its rotten, stinking edifice.
Liddle’s reputation as an outspoken contrarian derived largely from his barbs and diatribes against ‘liberal-left’ causes. To sum up his schtick: “I’m an old fashioned socialist. But even I can see the absurdity of our kowtowing to radical Islam and to the transgender brigade, and the ridiculousness of Labour politicians like Diane Abbott.” In this way, he got to have his cake and eat it: maintaining his street cred image as a bibulous, chain-smoking, sexually incontinent old Labourite while yet reaping the benefits of playing to the prejudices of a small c conservative readership he cordially despised (especially over issues like fox hunting).
He did it very well. But what I don’t think he ever quite appreciated - “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it” - was his role in The System. Rod Liddle wasn’t really speaking truth to power in a world rendered mad by political correctness. His real function, not unlike that of his fellow Sunday Times star columnist Jeremy Clarkson, was to act as a containment figure, designed to promote the illusion that we’re living in a democracy in which we’re still, just about, able to speak our mind and make tasteless jokes about sacred cows and protected minorities.
But while his adoring readership was chortling affectionately over Liddle’s latest burst of irreverence, congratulating themselves that ‘it’s still a free country’, they were in fact being herded into a containment pen. Liddle’s supposedly brave, outspoken position on fundamentalist Islam - endless jokes about evil, hook-handed cleric Abu Hamza, etc - relentlessly pushed a narrative key to the interests of the Predator Class: the idea that Britain (and everywhere else) is being overrun by bearded, child-grooming terrorists hell bent on turning every pub and church into a mosque or a madrassa, banning sausages and making burkas the new dress code on Ascot Ladies’ Day.
I’m not arguing that some of this stuff isn’t happening, nor that Mirpuri Pakistani immigrants are a model of benign social cohesion nor that it isn’t a total disaster that boatloads of fighting-age men from some of the world’s ugliest hell holes are being imported and housed at the expense of the native populace to act as some kind of future UN containment force or death squad. But the more closely ‘conservative’ attentions are focused on these helplessness-inducing, rage-baiting details, the more likely they are to be distracted from bigger questions like: “And who is ultimately responsible for this stuff?”
One answer that you would never get from a passionate Zionist like Liddle is “Israel.” And by “Israel” I don’t mean specifically the Middle-Eastern state currently run by Benjamin Netanyahu, but rather the international Military Occult Banking Syndicate (as Mathew Crawford calls it), of which Israel inextricably a part.
Had you put this theory to Rod while he was alive, I’m sure he would have dismissed it, with a string of entertaining comical epithets, as the ravings of an anti-semitic conspiracy theorist. He would have believed it too because that’s how everyone in the right-wing MSM thinks. As I remember myself from the days when I was part of it, you believe these things quite sincerely as an article of faith - and would never think to question your position because to do that would guarantee instant rejection from your tribe. It’s the same with subjects like 9/11. Rod Liddle believed that the Twin Towers were brought down by mad Muslims on the orders of a bearded man in a cave not because he had ever once looked into it but because he already knew the answer: only sexually-deprived keyboard warriors living in mum’s basement think 9/11 was an inside job.
Sometimes, when Awake purity-spirallers - or intelligence services bots - want to finger me as Controlled Opposition, they cite my refusal to pour vengeful bile on former MSM colleagues like Rod. But I just can’t see the point. It’s not that I’m bosom buddies with them all - I’ve not seen any of my Spectator columnist colleagues in years, apart from one at a funeral - but that I don’t see them as culpable evil agents of the Beast System so much as its pitiable, useful-idiot dupes. If I’m wrong, and they really do know that they are acting on behalf of a child-sacrificing, Satan-worshipping elite that wants to kill us or enslave us, then God will judge them and their punishment will be far worse than anything I could ever inflict in a few vituperative sentences. The thing that makes me think I’m right is that unlike my critics, I’ve spent time as an MSM insider and know - or think I know - how people who work in it think. As opposed to how paranoid, embittered, self-aggrandising, vengeful fantasists imagine they might think based on no evidence whatsoever.
Rod Liddle - I may be wrong: one always has to allow for that possibility in this world of mirrors - belonged to the useful-idiot dupe camp, rather than the evil agent one. This would acquit him of much of the moral responsibility for the damage done by his work - just as well, really, since Rod was a staunch Christian - but it doesn’t let him off the hook intellectually. “C’mon Rod,” I shall certainly be saying to him next time we have a pint in the Angels’ Wings or the Pilgrim’s Progress, or whatever the pubs are called up there, if they have pubs up there, and if one or other of us isn’t in the Other Place, “For someone described as the greatest journalist of his generation you were a pretty bloody useless journalist.”
And if asked, ruefully, what exactly I mean by that, I shall go on: “Journalism isn’t just about writing entertaining sentences, which both of us can do, with our eyes closed and our hands tied and a shark strapped to our backs. It’s about being curious; about getting to the bottom of what really makes the world tick. And on the latter score, mate, as our children might say, you were a total fail.”
As Exhibit A, let me provide another example of something - besides hook-handed clerics [all intelligence services stooges, btw] and Israel - that Liddle was inexcusably wrong on. Here is a Spectator piece he dashed off in 2010 titled ‘The Politically Correct James Delingpole.’ Even though I’m biased, I’d say it’s not one of his best because it exposes the woolly nature of his thinking and the inconsistency of his posturing. Liddle always wrote as if he were speaking on behalf of the ordinary, common sense, bloke-in-the-pub-with-the-Milwall-scarf but here he is acting as glib, unwitting PR agent for that man-in-the-pub’s Satanic oppressors.
The piece is Liddle’s take on a short film released in 2010 by an environmental campaign group called No Pressure. It quickly went viral on YouTube because of its arresting imagery. Gillian Anderson from X-Files plays a teacher in a classroom full of children whom she executes one by one by pressing a button which causes their heads graphically to explode. This, apparently, somehow illustrates the urgency of the climate crisis. The children Anderson executes are the ones who have shown insufficient enthusiasm for remedial climate action. So their appropriate punishment - at least according to the morality of this campaign video - is death.
I was writing a blog for the Telegraph at the time and christened the incident Splattergate because to my mind the video had exposed the green movement’s true colours: not as the cuddly, caring nature-lovers they pretend to be but as psychopathic, population-culling Malthusians. Rod’s hot take was that I was making a lot of fuss about nothing and suffering a sense of humour failure. If it had featured famous climate activists being exploded, he claimed, I would have been ‘howling with laughter’. Also, he added parenthetically, “I don’t see what’s wrong with cutting carbon emissions, regardless of whether you sign up to AGW.”
Global warming, evidently, was yet another of those big issues that Liddle felt happy to pontificate on without the need to put in any research. Nothing too shocking about that necessarily: it’s what star columnists do. But setting aside his lamentable ignorance about the origins and nature of the climate change industry, it was an odd position for a gun-slinging freedom fighter to take. That No Pressure video had been filmed by one of the world’s most bankable film directors, Richard Curtis; the campaign had been promoted by everyone from fashion designer Nicole Farhi to food writer Delia Smith to prime minister David Cameron. For anyone with eyes to see, it was another assault by the rich, ruthless and unaccountable Climate Industrial Complex on those ordinary people who selfishly want to be able to afford to heat their homes and maybe take the odd foreign holiday. Yet here was Rod, not fighting for the underdog but rather sticking the boot in on behalf of the Eco Nazi behemoth.
Climate Change wasn’t Rod’s most costly positioning error, though. That honour goes to his championing of the vaccines during ‘Covid.’ By the time of the ‘Pandemic’, Rod and I had pretty much lost touch with one another, having moved to different parts of the country. But he still thought of me, on occasion, because in at least a couple of his columns I noticed him having a dig at me for thinking I knew better than the ‘experts’ on Covid and vaccines and generally mocking my batshit crazy flight from reality. (I wish I could find the actual quotations but they don’t seem to come up very easily on search).
It wasn’t hurtful because it was done in Rod’s playful, bantering, ‘you’re a mate so I can take the piss out of you’ spirit. But it was bloody annoying. And disappointing. In the days when we used to see more of one another - the Brexit campaign years, for example, when we were both Brexiteers - I saw Rod as both an ally and a kindred spirit, the sort of person you’d want next to you in your foxhole. We might disagree on a lot of things ideologically, I thought, but his heart was in the right place: he was as much against ‘The System’ as I was. Well, during Covid he tested that illusion of mine to destruction. Here was the closest either of us had got to living under totalitarianism. But instead of giving it both barrels, calling it out in all its monstrousness and absurdity, Liddle’s take was nuanced, measured, balanced when it needed to be bilious and vituperative. His position, more or less, was: sure the authorities might be overstepping the mark, somewhat - but are they any worse than those idiots trying to stop us getting those safe and effective vaccines?
During the ‘Pandemic’ - ie when it mattered - Liddle was a fierce critic of anti-vaxxers, whom he described as ‘people who have had their brains removed with a soup spoon and replaced with crushed Ranch Dipped Hot Wings.’ Amusing, sort of; except that this would have reached an audience of at least a million readers and you do wonder how many of them fell under the influence of that soft pressure, stifled their instinctive scepticism, and went on to take the jabs that top medical influencer Rod Liddle clearly believed to be a good thing. I see - AI is keen to tell me this for some reason - that in May 2024, Rod recanted his position somewhat. “Doubters should never have been branded doollaly,” he generously conceded. But this was surely too little too late. First, by that stage, people had long since made their covid vaccine decisions and lived - or in some cases, died - by them. Second, it was in the context of a very dubious opening claim to the effect that the “Covid-19 vaccine saved millions of lives.”
Liddle’s death at the really-not-that-old age of 66 has inevitably led to speculation that it might have been his multiple Covid jabs which speeded his demise. The excuse often made when people from louche professions (rock stars, actors, journalists) die young - as, you may have noticed, an awful lot have been lately - is that it’s just those years of hard living taking their toll. Well maybe. I know that Rod used very much like to drink and eat and smoke a lot in his middle years. But I also know that in more recent ones he preferred to enjoy a quiet life in the rural North with the wife and children on whom he doted, going to church and going for long walks with the dog. I know furthermore that one of the effects of those Covid jabs was to exacerbate existing medical conditions. So, for example, if you’d been suffering on and off for years from a cancer that had gone into remission, you’d find that after your multiple Covid shots that cancer would come back with a vengeance.
Presumably - fingers crossed: this is what I hope happens when we die - Rod has now reached the stage of his celestial journey where Everything Is Revealed. In which case, he will by now have been given the shock news that, yes, his fox hunting dickhead old mate James was right and that, incredible but true, the world really is run by an evil Cabal of bloodline Satanists whose power largely derives from lies and deception, promulgated in places like the mainstream media. [Mind you, as a Christian he ought to have known this. The Bible does offer one or two clues]. What Rod will also have deduced are the implications of this: that far from being merely an innocent prankster who has made a tidy living cracking near-the-knuckle jokes about how drunk you’d have to be to want to shag former Labour MP Harriet Harman he has in fact spent much of his career propping up the same corrupt, hypocritical, ungodly system which 2000 years ago consigned his Lord and Saviour to crucifixion.
I hate it that this should be my last word on Rod Liddle. We spent many happy times together, he was a lovely bloke, adored by his friends and family, and I despise all the amphibious swamp creatures now crawling out of the slime to caricature him as a vile, racist, transphobic, homophobic bigot. Most of the creatures spewing this bile will be fully jabbed up, will have slavishly worn their masks during Covid, will be fully behind open borders and Net Zero and are at least as naively indulgent of the creeping New World Order as Rod ever was. But as Rod would well have understood, for any half way decent hack the concept of de mortuis nil nisi bonum just doesn’t, or shouldn’t apply. No one wants to read a critique of someone eight or nine months in the grave. You need to write this stuff, as Rod might have put it with his characteristic sensitivity, while the body is still fresh.
And my take on Rod is also, I hope, slightly more nuanced, sympathetic and informed than that of those in the Awake not-a-community who see his death as some form of poetic justice for the early position he took on the Covid jabs. The point that Awake folk are too often inclined to overlook in their righteous zeal is that the MSM, toxic, lie-machine tool of the Satanic elites though it is, is largely populated with dupes who aren’t in on the secret. If you’re tempted to expostulate “But how could they not know? It’s so obvious!” just try to remember how you were before you woke up, how susceptible you were to all the false narratives that the ruling Cabal imposes on us from cradle to grave. Liddle would never have gone anywhere near those kill shots if he’d known the truth. I rest my case.
