Rod Liddle: A British Polemicist Like No Other

There was a time when the phrase “American-style culture wars” was commonly and derisively used in the U.K. No longer. Chiefly via the platform formerly known as Twitter, Brits now conduct daily arguments every bit as vehement and vicious as those on this side of the pond — if not more so.With Prince Harry licking his wounds after his recent High Court humiliation and new Prime Minister Andy Burnham still on his political honeymoon, this week it was reaction to the sudden death of journalist Rod Liddle that set off Brits battling each other.Liddle, who died of lung cancer at the age of 66 last Monday, was a former editor of BBC Radio’s flagship news program “Today” before becoming a columnist for The Spectator, The Sunday Times, and The Sun. The reason Liddle’s death aroused such rancor was because he was brazenly outspoken on issues such as multiculturalism and modern sexual politics, and the reason he could get away with being so outspoken was because he was such a brilliantly scintillating wordsmith.Liddle’s former colleagues at assorted media organizations across the political spectrum paid fulsome tribute to him after his sudden death was announced, while people who had never met him, but were repelled by his politically incorrect opinions and unseemly historical aspects of his personal life, openly rejoiced he was no longer in the land of the living.Liddle’s background was unusual for a star columnist of conservative media. He came from a northern working class background, was a teenage punk rocker, a member of the Socialist Workers Party, and toiled as a researcher for the Labour Party in the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher had exiled them to the opposition. After getting a degree in social psychology from the London School of Economics, he joined BBC News, rising up the ranks to become the editor of “Today.” It was almost as if he had embedded himself in the liberal establishment in his formative years in order to spend the second half of his life feasting on what he saw as its inadequacies.Rod Liddle left the BBC in 2003 in controversial circumstances when he attacked a pro-countryside march in a column for The Guardian. “You may… have forgotten why you voted Labour in 1997,” he wrote. “But then you catch a glimpse of the forces supporting the Countryside Alliance: the public schools that laid on coaches; the fusty, belch-filled dining rooms of the London clubs that opened their doors for the first time to the protesters; the Prince of Wales and, of course, Camilla; and suddenly, rather gloriously, it might be that you remember once again.”Yet this wasn’t exactly a sacking. Then-BBC Director-General Greg Dyke testified to parliament: “We did not sack Rod Liddle, he chose to leave when we said to him he could not continue [writing]… he wrote something that we regarded as completely unacceptable, that did not go through the proper process, was not discussed within the BBC… we changed our guidelines after Rod Liddle.”Liddle essentially fired himself from the BBC, recognizing, long before the advent of Substack, that his individual currency as a skilled polemicist was more valuable than any tie to a single institution. As part of its many tributes to its star columnist and associate editor, The Spectator republished his first column for the magazine, the 2002 essay “As Mad As It Gets,” on bureaucratic efforts to clamp down on the peanut.Except this wasn’t his first column for The Spectator. Liddle’s first dispatch for them was in 2001, during that year’s UK general election, when he tackled the perception that “Today”, which he was still overseeing, was biased toward the Labour Party. Referring to Tony Blair’s fearsome spin doctor, Liddle wrote: “My protestations are pointless if you are willing to believe that BBC editors get their orders in a sealed brown envelope from Alastair Campbell every now and then….my point is that we make mistakes and that when we do we admit them.”These words would prove prescient given the events of 2003, when a protracted dispute erupted between the Blair government and “Today” over its reporting on claims about Saddam Hussein’s weapons capabilities in the run-up to the Iraq War. Dr. David Kelly, a weapons expert who had spoken with the BBC journalist behind the report, Andrew Gilligan, died after being quizzed over whether he was the source, prompting the Hutton Inquiry to examine the circumstances of his death and the conduct of the government.Liddle had left “Today” by this time but it’s hard not to disagree with Mr. Gilligan, when he wrote in The Spectator earlier this week that the row over his reporting that set the dispute in motion “probably wouldn’t have happened – a stricter script for this live would have been insisted on – if Rod had been in charge.”At this time I was working for the Londoner’s Diary gossip column of the Evening Standard. At The Londoner, we took special interest in colorful characters such as Liddle. When he was still at “Today,” the column had reported he had banned any mention of the wildly popular children’s TV series “Teletubbies,” sending out an email with the subject title, “Shoot Them.”In October 2003, I covered the book launch for Liddle’s collection of erotic short stories “Too Beautiful for You” at a Central London private members club. I was surprised to spot Mr. Gilligan, then on hiatus from the BBC owing to the stand-off with the government. I duly devoted the rest of the evening to trying to ascertain from the dozens of BBC employees whether he would return to the corporation. The evening may ostensibly have been held to mark the launch of Liddle’s literary career, but it drew a strong turnout from the TV news establishment, there to support a beloved black sheep.‘Too Beautiful for You,’ Rod Liddle, 2003. Vintage Contemporaries.Liddle’s sharp, forensic news sense may indeed have prevented a political scandal such as the Hutton Inquiry — Miles Goslett’s 2018 book “An Inconvenient Death” is worth reading on a peculiar British psychodrama. But he soon was mired in scandals of the personal kind. His wife, with whom he already had two children, threw him out in 2004 after he had confessed leaving their honeymoon in Malaysia early to go be with a mistress. In May 2005 he was given a police caution for allegedly punching his pregnant girlfriend Alicia Monckton whom he later married.Ms. Monckton was a receptionist at The Spectator when they met. Liddle’s tawdry domestic troubles soon became entwined with the personal scandals publicly afflicting the magazine’s leading executives, among them its editor, Boris Johnson, its publisher, Kimberly Fortier, and columnist Petronella Wyatt (who wrote in these pages recently). Mr. Johnson went on to become prime minister, but it is a measure of Liddle’s journalistic star quality that he was the only survivor of the “Sextator” scandal to maintain a regular association with the magazine.After a few false starts as a TV presenter, Liddle swiftly became hugely successful at saying the unsayable, combining a way with words with meticulous research. Asked about his writing process on LBC Radio’s Iain Dale All Talk in 2019, Liddle replied, “Alot of it is research — certain people might doubt that, I suppose — some of it is drinking which is equally important. I can tell from the finished column exactly how much I’ve had to drink. If it’s less than one glass it can sometimes be a bit stilted. If it’s two to three, it sings beautifully. If it’s more than three, quite often the Press Complaints Commission gets involved.”This was a reference to the numerous complaints provoked by his outspoken assertions about ethnic minorities and transgender issues. Yet Liddle’s trenchant gifts as a polemical columnist transcended the occasions on which he overstepped the mark. He made no obvious effort to establish himself on this side of the Atlantic, but his romantic, pugnacious sensibility had more in common with two twentieth-century Anglo-American writers — Henry Fairlie and Wilfrid Sheed — than with any of his contemporary Fleet Street counterparts. As with Sheed, Liddle also excelled at writing about sport.Liddle reportedly turned down Nigel Farage’s entreaties to stand as a candidate for the Brexit Party, the forerunner of today’s Reform UK. He did, however, stand for Parliament for the relatively obscure Social Democratic Party, whose economically left-leaning and socially conservative platform resonated with his beliefs more strongly than did the policies of parties that were more in the Thatcherite tradition.I last met Liddle in the summer of 2019, at the London launch of “The Great Betrayal,” his book about Brexit, which he supported on democratic grounds. While it was 15 years later, I assumed that the Farringdon pub hosting the party would be filled with the media intelligentsia I had encountered at the earlier Liddle book launch.Yet most of the people at the book launch were devotees of his columns. Many of them had traveled up from the North of England and regarded their host as a political deity. In the aftermath of his death, “The Spectator,” “The Times,” and “The Sun” have understandably written of Rod Liddle as though he belonged to them. But that evening for the first, and likely the last, time I saw a writer who truly belonged to his readers.

Rod Liddle: A British Polemicist Like No Other

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