Rod Liddle on the Millwall supporters website

Rod Liddle has been outed by the Mail on Sunday as being the poster monkeymfc on a Millwall supporters' website, though Liddle claims to having been the victim of a hacker. Despite this, he is still posting on the site.

In a thread "Internationally notorious 1st 11" we find comments like these:

The problem is always dealing with a mercurial player like Pol Pot. I'd keep him on the bench, use him as an impact player to come on in the last fifteen minutes and kill two million people...

Richard Reid, the shoebomber who forgot to pack a lighter, could be the team's duff signing, unpopular with fans.

Of the "North Korean fella" (a confusion of Kim Il-sung and his son Kim Jong-il) he responds "yes, he's worth a place, bless him." The name of Brian Clough enters the discussion:

Ooooh, careful with Cloughie. May have been Old Labour but still suggested that there were too many "wogs" in the British game (I think he meant ni**ers) and that he'd join the NF if Africa was allowed two places in the world cup.

Africa now has five places in the world cup, btw.

In a later post, after an intervening reference to "Yids", he returns to his African theme, somewhat inconsistently: "Cloughie was ... pro great big grand schemes for the white working class, but racist. I agree with him about ASfrica [sic] and the world cup though..."

In other threads Liddle has made jokes about a visit to Auschwitz and given what appears to be explicit support for the BNP, after another poster complained that he had not seen the English Defence League beat up Asians:

If you read the last Labour manifesto it will tell you that they are the voice of britain - they want better for you, for your family, for everyone. Utter rollocks. So apply the same criteria to the EDL. The EDL want a ruck, simples. If that's all you want, fair enough. I prefer the BNP to the EDL - they DO support the white working class, even if they are thick as chit, misguided and dislike Islam only because it is practised by wogs (check out their policies - could be Hizbut Tahrir).

Liddle is a journalist who has been noticeably soft on the BNP in the past, so these comments contain nothing which will surprise anyone who "can read between the lines".

Oh no, it's Rod Liddle Independent editor!

If, as expected, Alexander Lebedev takes over The Independent it is forecast Rod Liddle will be the next editor. Taking this hint, I wondered what Yasmin Alibhai Brown has been saying about him.

A "Bad Boy Made Rich", Albhai Brown in 2004 discussed his messy private life, and described the man himself as "physically not unlike a malodorous mop in need of chucking out". Last October, she referred to him as being

a braggadocio now considered frightfully brilliant because he vilifies women, black people, Muslims, the BBC and many others with his anti-PC, cutting observations.

Responding to his unpleasant comments about Harriet Harman, discussed here a few months ago, she asked:

Well would you, male or female readers, would you take Liddle to your bed? He looks as unappetising as a half-eaten fish pie left on a plate, was caught with Viagra in his pocket by his now ex-wife, a woman he then humiliated and left for some young thing at the Spectator. Answers directly to Mr Liddle please. Three cheers for Janet Street Porter, Suzanne Moore and others who have slapped him down.

Street Porter referred to Liddle as "that repulsive shagger" who is "all bluster and no balls" and Moore called him "Liddlerod". Tanya Gold is most to the point:

And so I ask – Rod Liddle, then. Would you? I mean after a few beers obviously, not while you were sober.

And I don't mean would you fuck him. I mean – would you believe him?

Thanks: Viv Groskop in the Evening Standard

Rod Liddle's misogynistic offensiveness

The veracity of The Spectator's Rod Liddle is unclear, but his talent to amuse is non-existent. A few months ago Liddle was staying in a hotel somewhere in the middle east "which is renowned for its profusion and diversity of whores." He continues:

This is all a problem for me, because while I would like to talk to some of these whores — just to be companionable — there are also plenty of normal non-whore women staying in the hotel.

Why stay in a hotel with such a "problem?" Rod, why should you want to talk to women who are not "normal?"

And it is impossible for me to tell these two very different classes of people apart: they seem to me to be dressed identically.

A contradiction?

I daresay for someone more observant there would be differences of nuance, but nothing that I can discern. What should I do? Mistake some middle-class fraulein for a 30 quid an hour slapper and I could be in serious trouble.

So you want to be more than "companionable?" Rod, what is it you want to do?

They should have little plastic ID tags, the whores, like the ones worn by people attending conferences about dental hygiene and what have you.

How would that help resolve your confusion? The women with the tags would be thrown out of the hotel.

The rest of the article is not quite so awful, though his claim that Islam consists of "poisonous sexism" and "misogyny", and government responses to Islam "end up being illiberal, bullying and devoid of principle", is difficult to stomach when Liddle's writing displays just those qualities.

A favourite female target is the Labour Party's deputy leader Harriet Harman. Last April, Liddle was revolting rather than satirical:

Harriet Harman’s plan to remove the wombs from all British women and force them to go to work as stockbrokers and hedge-fund managers in the City of London. How she intends to remove the wombs, and what she will do with 30 million of them when she is done, has not yet been decided.

Earlier this month, he had another pop at Harman in an article charmingly titled "Harriet Harman is either thick or criminally disingenuous." It is based on the assumption that Harman, 60 next year, may soon be Labour leader. Unlikely, but that has never stopped anyone filing their copy before.

Liddle opens with his 'doing it' obsession, though rejecting the reader's presumptive option:

I think you have more self-respect, a greater sense of self-worth, no matter how much you’ve had to drink. I think you’d make your excuses and leave, just as the first bars of ‘Me Myself I’ strike up. I think you’d do the same with most of the babes who were once, or are now, on the government front bench.

Labour women, in Liddle's estimation, are 'lower' than the women he was writing about six weeks earlier. Is it likely any of them would fancy him? The musical reference is to Joan Armatrading's "Me Myself I" jazz fans, not Billie Holiday's "Me, myself and I." Liddle goes on to (un)intentionally sustain objections by feminists that female politicians are assessed on the basis of their looks.

A few weeks ago, Peter Hitchens closed his Mail on Sunday column with a lament:

As long as people think types like Jeremy Clarkson are the voice of conservative patriotism, the cause of Britain is doomed.

One could add other oafs to this list, like A. A Gill and Liddle himself, whose not unsympathetic articles about the BNP are pretty disgusting too.