"I went a year or so back. F***ing outrageous that you cant smoke in Auschwitz. I had to sneak round the back of the gas chambers for a crafty snout."
Rod Liddle is an English journalist and an associate editor of The Spectator. He was an editor of BBC Radio 4's Today. He wrote the novels Too Beautiful for You (2003), Love Will Destroy Everything (2007), The Best of Liddle Britain and the semi-autobiographical Selfish Whining Monkeys (2014). He has presented television programmes, including The New Fundamentalists, The Trouble with Atheism, and
"No matter how vile we may consider the sexual predilections of paedophiles, we should not be in the business of putting people in prison for simply looking at things. The law should be above the blind, howling, rage of Rebekah Wades moronic vigilantes. But there is the whiff of Salem about it all."
"This is just a guess, but maybe you are reading this as you wait on a station platform for a train that is 30 minutes late ... And you may, therefore - understandably - have forgotten why you voted Labour in 1997. 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."
"Im so furious and upset about it [...] If Id had enough spine I would have said no to the caution. They couldnt have charged me."
"Her only policy, her only raison dêtre, 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."
"So — Harriet Harman, then. Would you? I mean after a few beers obviously, not while you were sober. The alcohol is sloshing around inside your brain, you’ve enjoyed a post-pub doner kebab together and maybe some grilled halloumi (a woman’s right to cheese) and she suggests, as you stand inside the frowsy minicab office: fancy going south, big boy? (I don’t know for sure that she’d use the term ‘big boy’; this is largely hypothetical stuff, you understand.)"
"Nothing terrifies or disgusts us more than paedophilia. It is fashionable to argue that the reason there seems to be so much of it about is that, actually, were simply more aware of the problem than we used to be. Partly, this is true. But there may be more of it about anyway. The more profound the taboo, the greater will be the drive among some to transgress."