Editors From England

"Her only policy, her only raison d'être, is a particularly vacuous feminism dating from a sixth-form common room in about 1973. Were this a serious commitment and grounded in reality, one might respect her for it and even agree. But it never is grounded in reality. It is the perpetual shrieking of an idiot."

"Men, too, have to give serious thought to what they want to be in this bewildering social landscape. Liddle says, "Men always want other women", and although I can't know what it is like to have one's entire being dominated by the twitches and spasms of uncontrollable manhood, is he content to be thus defined? Can such men comprehend the need to create a new masculinity and fatherhood where consistency and contentment matter more than lust?"

"A small yield nuclear weapon, such as the American W89, dropped on Glastonbury in late June would immediately remove from our country almost everybody who is hugely annoying. You would see a marked reduction in the keffiyeh klan, for a start, and all those middle-class Extinction Rebellion protestors would find, in a nanosecond, that their rebellion was pointless, because extinction had arrived even more summarily than they expected. Go on, glue yourselves to that, Poppy and Oliver."

"[T]his is the cover story of the Spectator magazine. We're back in the schoolyard – or is it the brothel? Again. I wouldn't usually bother spitting the words "Rod Liddle". It is like being angry at cows – tempting, but pointless."

"My own choice of election date would be a day when universities are closed and Muslims are forbidden to do anything on pain of hell, or something. There must be at least one day like that in the Muslim calendar, surely? That would deliver at least 40 seats to the Tories, I reckon."

"The liberals believe this is another pitch from Boris [Johnson] to the right wing of the Conservative party and that the Islamophobia within the Conservative party is every bit as corrosive as the anti-Semitism within Labour. My own view is that there is not nearly enough Islamophobia within the Tory party."

"We will rue the day we all decided bullying was a bad thing. The consequence is that the inept, the imbecilic and the perpetually frit will hang on to their jobs and we will become a much less efficient country. By bullying I do not mean physically beating someone up and stealing their lunch money, which is what it used to mean when it had a proper meaning. I mean telling someone they're useless and deserve to be sacked, which is what bullying means today."

"A national newspaper edited by an iconoclast determined to challenge the tyranny of the liberal metropolitan elite would have been a real addition to the national conversation, not least because Liddle's challenge would have come from the left."

"To tell you the truth I thought the "Auschwitz Experience" had been devalued by the people who run it to the point where I think it deserves taking the p*** out of ... it's set up as a politically correct tourist attraction, sort of Hitlerworld."

"I went a year or so back. F***ing outrageous that you can't smoke in Auschwitz. I had to sneak round the back of the gas chambers for a crafty snout."

"I seriously contemplated being a teacher once upon a time, when I was lot younger. ... I never found out because the one thing stopping me from being a teacher was that I could not remotely conceive of not trying to shag the kids. It seemed to me virtually impossible not to, and I was convinced that I'd be right in there, on day one. We're talking secondary school level here, by the way — and even then I don’t think I'd have dabbled much below year ten, as it is now called. I just thought we ought to clear that up early on."

"But for sure, what Mr Forrest did was wrong. I suspect — and it is only a guess — that thousands of teachers up and down the land conduct sexual relationships with their older charges and that in most cases no harm comes of it."

"According to her allies, Priti Patel is about to "go off like a shotgun", which should keep us all entertained a while longer, as long as the shotgun is this time pointed in the right direction, rather than at her own head. Someone tell the woman: turn the gun around; those two holes you’re staring at are where the pellets come out. Pull the trigger now and you'll be a far less Priti Patel. I suppose, pointed in the right direction, a shotgun might do a bit of good. Theresa May's government resembles a dog with a broken back, dragging its tail in the sea; you shield your eyes from watching its dying spasms, block your ears from the pitiful whining, yearning that it might soon be put out of its misery."

"As it happens, I disagree with Boris. Postboxes are bright red and bank robbers traditionally wear tights over their faces. I think they look more like Darth Vader. If you are an unpleasant person who enjoys rather macabre entertainment, wander down to Mile End and watch the women in the full burka trying to cross the A11. That's always good for a laugh. Almost as good is watching them take selfies. I mean, what's the point?"

"Anjem [Choudary] and I fervently agree on one important issue, though. He has urged British Islamists to leave the country and blow themselves up. Me too. Actually, I don't really mind if they don't leave the country, so long as they blow themselves up — somewhere a decent distance from where the rest of us live. Tower Hamlets, for example."

"If you have a student son or daughter who's thinking of voting, shove some high grade skunk under their bedroom door the day before the poll. You can lace the skunk with horse tranquilisers if you wish — do anything, just stop them voting. Pay them not to vote, or organise a rave with bangin' choons for polling day. It is your duty — and the kids will thank you for it in about ten years' time, when a semblance of sentience has established itself inside their heads."

"The Home Secretary, Priti Patel, who is 5ft 6in tall, has been accused of using bullying behaviour with regard to her civil servants. Nowhere near enough bullying behaviour in my book."

"Exciting news from Durham University, which is helping its students to become "sex workers". This noble institution is offering two courses in the various forms of harlotry. My only concern is that at present they do not actually offer an academic qualification in these subjects — at the very least an undergraduate degree in, say, Practical Whoring. Perhaps followed by an MA in Deconstructing the Topless Hand-Shandy1897-1913. Such courses would probably result in more lucrative career opportunities than many of the more traditional subjects which students pay through the nose to study. I am attending a dinner at Durham University next month and fervently hope that some of the ambitious young ladies on these courses will be in attendance."

"I am not saying that we should do this, of course – it would be a horrible, psychopathic thing to do. I am merely hypothesising, in a slightly wistful kinda way."

"Then, later, after his father has died alone in a care home, notes that nearly no one attended the funeral. If our dreadful generation is to blame for the bored, fat kids of today, then why aren't the Liddles Snr responsible for their terribly unhappy son? Never mind the bombast, Liddle’s pessimism about the rest of us is actually pessimism about himself. His Golden Age is bleak, his best is blown, his future is death. A panic attack is mistaken for a heart attack. The grey in his hair can no longer be disguised by Grecian 2000. He longs to be 16 and rebellious again, but doesn't seem to have had a new idea for a decade. Now all he can do is rage, rage against the dyeing of the white."

"Rod Liddle might have given a new Independent impetus. Now, if Lebedev gets his prize, he should make every effort to retain [[w:Roger Alton|[Roger] Alton]]. He might start by expressing regret for permitting his representatives to advertise the prospect of a Liddle editorship before the deal was done. An apology should be offered to Liddle as well. He did not ruin his own chances of editing the Independent. That was done by the people behind a viciously intolerant campaign of liberal bigotry."

"[R]epulsive shagger ... Liddle, by the way, is the Michael Winner or Jeremy Clarkson of political journalism – all bluster and no balls. The idea of an articulate woman being in charge of the country for a whole seven days is enough to give chaps like him sleepless nights. What is the world coming to."

"The Big Lie was first used by Hitler in Mein Kampf, to describe what he called the use by Jews of a lie so huge that no one would believe someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously". He was referring to what he said was Jews blaming German general Erich Ludendorff for defeat in World War One - a lie designed to remove "the weapon of moral right from the only adversary dangerous enough to be likely to succeed in bringing the betrayers of the Fatherland [the Jews] to Justice." The phrase was subsequently widely used to describe the Nazis' propaganda technique to poison Germany against "international Jewry", the real holders of power in the world. In other words, the title 'The Big Lie' reminds people that the Corbynites share with the Nazis an obsession with Jews."

"'Oh Jeremy Corbyn' refers, of course, to the Glastonbury chanting in 2017. Nostalgia has its uses, but when it serves only to highlight your utter irrelevance six years on, it's not so great an idea. All those three words serve to illustrate is how far the world has left the cult behind. In 2023, far from singing along, Glastonbury has pulled the film. Those poor Corbynites; they don’t even have a field in Somerset any more."

"[Stuart] Jeffries is genuinely criticising a documentary about a massacre on the grounds that including the victims' stories means the film is slanted towards sympathy with the victims. It isn’t so much immoral as amoral – unable to deal with evil as evil, always seeking to relativise, and thus diminish, it."

"Still more insidious is the hidden bias of the BBC. Most of it is subtle, and all the more dangerous for that. Take the use of the word terrorist. Both the US state department and the UK government, along with the rest of the EU, classify Hamas and Islamic Jihad as "terrorist organisations". Even Palestinians have used the term "terror" to describe attacks on Israeli civilians: on the BBC World Service on December 4 2001, Jibril Rajoub, head of the Palestinian Authority security service, referred to the attacks in Jerusalem and Haifa as "terror attacks"; on Newsnight the same day, Nabil Abourdeneh, an adviser to Yasser Arafat, referred to Palestinian militants as "terrorist groups". But not the BBC's correspondents themselves. When they refer to Hamas and Islamic Jihad they call them not "terrorists" but "militants", "hard liners" and "radicals"."

"The Big Lie is not the first big lie to come from the Corbynites and it won’t be the last. On social media, #ItWasAScam is the hashtag that usefully links them together. I’ve long been intrigued by one of defining characteristics of the Corbybnites, which is often thought too rude to state plainly. They are, like their leader, very stupid. Nothing better illustrates this than a film intended to show how Labour’s antisemitism scandal wasn’t real, which deals obsessively with how Jews control British politics. See what I mean?"

"Actually, Worsthorne is much more convincing when he portrays himself as a cad. He wrecks the property of an elderly retired couple who had found him plausible as a tenant; he turns away a wounded German officer who finds him in bed with his wife, herself suborned by Worsthorne’s access to forbidden food rations. He is as much Harry Flashman as Fielding Gray when the odds are in his favour, which he is good enough to confess they mostly have been."

"The problem with his ridiculous and often hateful opinions – on Suez, on Vietnam, on McCarthyism and on apartheid – is not their moral and political obtuseness. It is Worsthorne’s habit of conflating them with two other claims he makes for himself – the claim of being or having been "against the stream" and the claim of being a gentleman. In upholding McCarthyism while he was in Washington, for example, he may well have had to meet objections from his superiors at the Times, but he can hardly be said to have occupied a position of signal isolation or courage. Yet he writes as if his prejudice took nerve."

"Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, former editor of the Sunday Telegraph, received respectful obituaries on his death last year. These made no reference to his book In Defence of Aristocracy, published in 2004, where he lauded the Vichy regime as "a blessing in disguise", for it purportedly healed the divisions of the French Revolution. There are, believe me, French conservatives who hold the same view."

"Ever since Hiroshima, the mushroom cloud had been a nightmarish possibility hanging over all our imaginations, and now, quite suddenly, it was threatening to materialise. Oddly enough, fear did not come into it, so there was no need to keep a stiff upper lip; no need to ‘eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die’. For if everybody was going to die, then nobody was going to die, since dying involves leaving loved ones behind and this time there were going to be no loved ones left behind. No need, therefore, for tears or sadness. It was more a question of intense excitement; of being in on not the creation but the destruction of the world; in on, that is, the drama to end all dramas. From the moment of announcing the exclusion zone, President Kennedy and his small team of advisers had gone into purdah in the White House, making no appearances and issuing no statements. This unprecedented hush lasted for several days during which there was nothing much to do except wait and pray and hope for the best. I think we all knew by then that if anybody was going to flinch from this eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation, it would not be President Kennedy. How we knew that I do not know, but we did, and somehow or other the total public silence from the White House had succeeded in communicating determination more effectively than any number of official communiqués."

"I think a good deal more discretion on the part of homosexuals and a good deal more understanding that the majority of the country does worry about homosexuality and does fear that their children might become homosexuals, the old-fashioned traditional attitude to homosexuality is being undesirable. I think that the majority of homosexuals ought to understand this and oughtn't to push their luck."

"Sir, In considering whether a racist should be allowed a seat on Question Time, it is chastening to remember that most of my octogenarian generation of British, high as well as low, believed in white superiority, which in no way meant that they were necessarily fascists. Indeed, most of us had fought in the war against Nazism. As it happens, I am no longer a racist, but the arguments that made me one in the relatively recent past still do not seem to me to be so abhorrent as to be out of order in civilised debate. Unquestionably, the leader of the BNP — an unsavoury character — is not the right man to do such arguments justice, but that is because of his bigotry rather than the views themselves. Sir Peregrine Worsthorne Hedgerley, Bucks"

"Sir Peregrine had been struck by the thought that it might be a good idea to revise the mediaeval concept of outlawry, whereby known IRA members could be shot at will by the police and armed services... In Worsthorne's prescription, Mrs Thatcher would be awarding herself the much coveted 00 licence to kill, or at any rate to organise murder gangs on the South American model."

"Social discipline—that surely is a more fruitful and warding theme for contemporary conservatism than individual freedom. Libertarian arguments forged at a time when there were still slaves and serfs to be freed from monarchical despotism, peasants from domineering landlords, or proletarians from brutal bosses, simply do not apply plausibly to the kind of social problems facing Britain in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Britain is not the Soviet Union, and when Mrs Thatcher bends her knee to Solzenytsin, she is worshipping at the wrong shrine and going wrong where George Orwell went so wrong with his nightmare predictions of 1984. The spectre haunting most ordinary people in Britain is neither of a totalitarian State nor of Big Brother, but of other ordinary people being allowed to run wild. What they are worried about is crime, violence, disorder in the schools, promiscuity, idleness, pornography, football hooliganism, vandalism and urban terrorism. The film Clockwork Orange, with its terrible portrait of a gang of juvenile thugs bereft of all moral restraint, terrorising the old and the weak without mercy, is what most people fear today."

"If one thing is certain about the next Tory government, it is that it will need, sooner or later, to impose its will on large groups of rebellious workers to an extent which Socialist governments have proved unable to do."

"I went to an English boarding school where homosexuality, perhaps faute de mieux, was very much a practice and it was touch-and-go, I think, with a number of people whether they continued to be homosexual or ceased, and this could be very much affected by a glamourous master, by particular teaching. I do think that you can be affected in this way."

"Can there really be any doubt that on any issue where Third World interests clash with those of the West, the immigrant population will side with the Third World? This is not a criticism. It is perfectly natural that they should. But it would be wholly unrealistic not to conclude that problems of race are going to be at the centre of British politics for many years to come, and that they will not easily be resolvable in a fashion acceptable to liberal-progressive ideology."

"Yes, settlers. This is what they are, and it is contemptuous to see them as anything else. They do not want to be dissolved into the great pool of British life. In time it must be assumed that political leaders will emerge who will articulate this sense of separateness and that this in turn will lead to tensions which are much more serious than street rioting and ghetto violence, since they will be the result not of economic grievance, or of social deprivation—although these can be expected to play some part—but of straight communal rivalry: that most fateful canker in the body politic. I am paying the immigrants the courtesy of seeing them as they ought to be seen, not as they are now, weak, vulnerable and in need of protection, but as they will become—strong, purposeful and potentially disruptive. With the benefit of hindsight it is now clear that British emigrants should never have been financially encouraged to settle in Africa, that they should long ago have been encouraged financially to come home. To urge that this lesson by applied to the problem of coloured immigrants in this country is the opposite of racialism. It is a tribute to their future strength."

"It is not "socialism" that Britain is suffering from; nor syndicalism, nor corporatism, nor any other form of coherent organisation. What Britain is suffering from is "riotous disorder" and to argue, as Mrs Thatcher does, that "setting the people free" will cure it is as senseless as trying to smooth raging waters with a stick of dynamite or to quieten hubbub with a brass band. The urgent need today is for the State to regain control over "the people", to re-exert its authority, and it is useless to imagine that this will be helped by some libertarian mish-mash drawn from the writings of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and the warmed-up milk of nineteenth-century liberalism."

"I supported the legalisation of homosexuality between consenting adults in '67 and still do so. I think that anything which would increase… I regard homosexuality as being a great misfortune. I see it as something the less frequent it is in any society, the better for that society. All I am saying is that at schools, and I do think one has to emphasise at schools, I think that it shouldn't be something which anybody should be allowed to encourage or promote, certainly not any schools which are funded by the local authorities and where people have to go to by law."

"[H]ere is a man fully conscious of the dignities and duties of his class, fearlessly and shamelessly expounding views appropriate to that class in a style appropriate to the views. But it is a nineteenth-century rather than an eighteenth-century mind, this, Tory rather than Whig; moved by Shaftesbury, touched by Young England, aware of Coleridge and even of Cobbett, a bit reminiscent of the earnest young Gladstone at Oxford; feeling no contempt for the poor and humble, but rather sympathy or even a certain affinity, respectful even of their errors and prejudices."

"What is becoming clear is that apartheid is not at the heart of the racial issue. At the heart of it is the fact of Western superiority, resentment of which would remain even if revolution came to South Africa. This is what the liberal-progressive ideology so dangerously overlooks... The struggle for racial equality will be seen as a power struggle and because of this intimately bound up with all those revolutionary forces, both within these shores and outside them, aimed at weakening the West. The West in short can never hope to win the hearts of the Third World except by ceasing to be the West, since in reality it is its virtues, quite as much as its vices, that cause the hostility. It is in this sense that the liberal-progressive obsession with Britain's being on the right side of the race war is so unrealistic. It inculcates a Western inclination to self-abasement that plays into Soviet hands."

"[I]t is not the importance of the Cape route...that forces Britain to support a hateful white supremacist state. It is the fact of white supremacy which makes the relationship so peculiarly irresistible. Of course it would be much less embarrassing if white supremacy was exercised in a less morally obnoxious manner. But if it was not exercised at all, the relationship would lose much of its point. The harsh truth, which will become clearer and clearer as time passes, is that Britain, far from being neutral in the race struggle, let alone on the coloured side, is positively on South Africa's side, since in the crucial battle in the world today—which is not between North and South but between East and West—Britain has no alternative but to throw in its lot with the white peoples, in spite of their imperfections."

"The truth will get harder and harder to burke: racial equality will never be achieved by raising the Third World up; it can only be achieved by casting the Western world down. The Soviet Union knows this full well, which is why it supports the coloured cause."

"Imagine what would have happened to the Labour Party in 1964 or 1966 if it had appealed to the country in these terms: "We appeal to you, the people of Britain, to give us your votes so that we may wind up the empire, reduce Britain to the status of a minor power, and devalue the national currency." It would have been political suicide. It might have helped the Labour candidate in Hampstead and in a handful of other constituencies where progressive intellectuals reside in large numbers. But throughout the rest of the country, particularly in working-class areas, it would have disastrously confirmed the deep-seated suspicion among all classes that in fact the Labour Party does not stand for Britain."

"[T]he only way for a Labour Government to bring about economic growth was through socialism, since only socialism could bring about that upsurge of working-class enthusiasm to compensate for the loss of business confidence... But...such policies are outside the range of any Labour Government, however large its majority, for the most compelling reason of all: Labour Governments lack the authority to take the international risks inherent in such a policy, to set the country against the prevailing international trends; lack the authority, that is, to summon up from the deep the forces of nationalism and put them behind socialism. The history and composition of the Labour Party precludes such risks... Yet without a leader able to spark the flame of nationalism, socialism will not work in this country."

"The liberal-progressive view, so beloved of the intellectual community, is that the most crucial battle in the world today is in the field of race, and that Britain, for reasons of morality and expediency, must throw in its lot with the coloured peoples, for all their imperfections. But one can only doubt whether any Government in fact will pay more than lip-service to this view. During its last period of office Labour was able to blur the issue in a way that gave some satisfaction to both the realists and the idealists, backing the liberal-progressive view in words but only very partially in actions. It did not sell arms to South Africa, but it carried on cynically enough with trade and defence co-operation."

"Just as the British in India and Africa sought to create oases in those continents where they could live according to their own mores and values, so will the Africans, West Indians and Asians seek to do the same in Britain. I see no reason to suppose that the coloured immigrants in these islands now will be more prepared to become British than the British emigrants to their own continents then were prepared to become Indian or African. The fact has to be faced that large-scale coloured immigration has taken place at a time when the African and Indian races are rediscovering pride in their own ancestries; when the impulse to demonstrate the quality of their own cultures is growing stronger all the time. Indeed the dynamism of cultural pride, even of colour consciousness, is much more marked today among the black and brown races, who feel that their glories lie ahead, than among the whites—at least the European whites—who feel that their glories lie in the past."

"Perhaps this is special pleading, an anticipatory apologia for what may have to be done in this country if the far left ever comes to power, using the Parliamentary system to encompass what will be, in effect, a coup d'état. In that event, the question will not be who are "the Fourth and Fifth men," since their number will, I trust, be too numerous to count. But in our case, their will be a transfer of allegiance, not to the world's bastion of oppression [the Soviet Union], but to the world's greatest buttress of freedom [the United States]. That will make all the difference."