Rod Liddle
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, Love Will Destroy Everything, The Best of Liddle Britain and the semi-autobiographical Selfish Whining Monkeys. He has presented television programmes, including The New Fundamentalists, The Trouble with Atheism, and Immigration Is A Time Bomb.
Liddle began his career at the South Wales Echo, then worked for the Labour Party, and later joined the BBC. He became editor of Today in 1998, resigning in 2002 after his employers objected to one of his articles in The Guardian. He currently writes for The Sunday Times, The Spectator and The Sun, among other publications.
Early life and radio
At 16, he was a member of the Socialist Workers Party, remaining a member for about a year, and was a supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament around the same time. He recalled campaigning for Labour in the 1983 general election, canvassing votes by going door to door in full punk get-up. He estimated that in doing so "I must have singlehandedly lost my party a good 5,000 votes".He attended the London School of Economics as a mature student, reading social psychology. His early career in journalism was with the South Wales Echo in Cardiff, where he was a general news reporter and, for a time, the rock and pop writer. He worked from 1983 to 1987 as a speechwriter and researcher for the Labour Party.
Although Liddle considered becoming a secondary school teacher, he decided against it on the grounds that he "could not remotely conceive of not trying to shag the kids", clarifying that he wouldn't have "dabbled much below Year 10.". Liddle instead returned to journalism after graduating from the LSE, and was taken on as a trainee producer by the BBC.
Liddle was appointed editor of the BBC Radio 4 programme Today in 1998. The programme had a reputation for its political interviews, but Liddle tried, with some success, to improve the show's investigative journalism. To this end he hired journalists from outside the BBC. Among these was Andrew Gilligan, who joined from The Sunday Telegraph in 1999. Gilligan's 29 May 2003 report on Today — that the British government had "sexed up" the intelligence dossier on Iraq, a report broadcast after Liddle had left the programme — began a chain of events that included the death in July that year of David Kelly, the weapons inspector who was Gilligan's source, and the subsequent Hutton Inquiry, a public inquiry into the circumstances of Kelly's death. Liddle defended Gilligan throughout the controversy.
Under Liddle's editorship, Today won a number of awards: a Sony Silver in 2002 for reports by Barnie Choudhury and Mike Thomson into the causes of race riots in the north of England; a Sony Bronze in 2003 for an investigation by Angus Stickler into paedophile priests; and an Amnesty International Media Award in 2003 for Gilligan's investigation into the sale of illegal landmines, an investigation that attracted a lengthy legal action. While working for Today, Liddle also wrote a column for The Guardian. On 25 September 2002, referring to a march organised by the Countryside Alliance in defence of fox hunting, Liddle wrote that readers may have forgotten why they voted Labour in 1997, but would remember once they saw the people campaigning to save hunting. His column led The Daily Telegraph to accuse Liddle of bias and of endangering democracy.
The BBC concluded that Liddle's comments breached his commitment to impartiality as a BBC programme editor, and gave him an ultimatum to stop writing his column or resign from his position on Today. He resigned on 30 September 2002. He said later that when he was editor he was ordered by BBC management to sack Frederick Forsyth from the show, and speculated that it was because of Forsyth's right wing political views. The BBC replied that the decision was made for editorial reasons. Liddle also courted controversy discussing the public and police's response to child pornography and highlighted the Pete Townshend case as a means to highlight problems with enforcing the law.
Since January 2025 he has presented a Saturday morning show on Times Radio.
Television
''The New Fundamentalists''
In The New Fundamentalists, a programme in the Dispatches strand broadcast in March 2006, Liddle, a member of the Church of England, condemned the rise of evangelicalism and Christian fundamentalism in Britain, especially the anti-Darwinian influence of such beliefs in faith schools; and criticised the social teaching and cultural influence of this strand of Christianity. The documentary was criticised by David Hilborn of the Evangelical Alliance, and by Rupert Kaye of the Association of Christian Teachers.''The Trouble with Atheism''
In The Trouble with Atheism, Liddle argued that atheists can be as dogmatic and intolerant as the adherents of religion. Liddle said, "History has shown us that it's not religion that's the problem, but any system of thought that insists that one group of people are inviolably in the right, whereas the others are in the wrong and must somehow be punished." Liddle argued, for example, that eugenic policies are the logical consequence of dogmatic adherence to Darwinism.''Immigration Is a Time Bomb''
Liddle's Immigration Is a Time Bomb was broadcast by Channel 4 in 2005. The complaints that followed it included that he should not have allowed British National Party leader Nick Griffin to speak unchallenged. Ofcom adjudicated that the programme was fair, and the complaints were dismissed. Liddle subsequently argued, after Griffin was acquitted in February 2006 of two charges of inciting racial hatred, that the charges were "too ephemeral, too dependent upon the mindset and political disposition of the juror, and upon what is happening outside of the courtroom, on the streets."Other work
In April 2007, Liddle presented a two-hour-long theological documentary called The Bible Revolution where he looked back in history to William Tyndale's translation of the Bible in English and the effect this had upon the English language. On 21 May 2007, he presented an hour-long documentary, Battle for the Holy Land: Love Thy Neighbour, about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. He visited Bethlehem, Hebron and the Israeli settlement of Tekoa. Liddle sought to examine whether Israel was a true liberal democracy in light of its treatment of the Palestinians. He also appeared in Channel 4's alternative election night episode of Come Dine with Me along with Edwina Currie, Derek Hatton and Brian Paddick.With Kate Silverton, he presented the short-lived BBC2 political show Weekend, described by The Independent on Sunday as "The worst programme anywhere, ever, in the history of time", and BBC Four's The Talk Show. He continued to write for The Guardian, and became a team captain on Call My Bluff. He became an associate editor with The Spectator. He also writes for the men's magazines, GQ and Arena, and a weekly column for The Sunday Times.
Later print journalism
Allegations of misogyny and racism
In August 2009, in his Spectator blog he wrote about Harriet Harman, deputy leader of the Labour Party, in unflattering terms. Liddle began the article by asking: "So — Harriet Harman, then. Would you? I mean after a few beers obviously, not while you were sober." Tanya Gold wrote in The Guardian that Liddle had delivered a "tissue-thin polemic." Pointing out that it was The Spectators cover story that week. Rachel Cooke in The Observer nearly two months later recalled finding Liddle's piece "disgusting" Cooke went on to say: "I would still like to do something really unpleasant to the man who wrote ."Liddle said two months later that the Harman column "was supposed to be a parody of guttural, base sexism", a joke he assumed readers would understand. After the negative response from Gold he continued: "And then I suppose I came to the conclusion – gradually – that I must have got it wrong." In June 2014, he said that of those he had offended, Harman was the one person to whom he would apologise.
In November 2009, again for The Spectator website, he offered "a quick update on what the Muslim savages are up to," a brief article about the stoning to death of a 20-year-old woman in Somalia after she was accused of adultery, and the similar death of a 13-year-old the year before. He made remarks, considered sarcastic, that read: "Incidentally, many Somalis have come to Britain as immigrants recently, where they are widely admired for their strong work ethic, respect for the law and keen, piercing, intelligence."
In December 2009, on his Spectator blog, Liddle referred to two black music producers, Brandon Jolie and Kingsley Ogundele, who had plotted to kill Jolie's 15-year-old pregnant girlfriend, as "human filth" and said the incident was not an anomaly. He continued:
The overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community. Of course, in return, we have rap music, goat curry and a far more vibrant and diverse understanding of cultures which were once alien to us. For which, many thanks.
When he was accused of racism, Liddle said he was instead engaging in a debate about multiculturalism. In March 2010 the Press Complaints Commission upheld a complaint against Liddle, who became the first journalist to be censured over the contents of a blog, because he had not been able to prove his claim about the crime statistics. After the publication of London crime figures in June 2010, The Sunday Telegraph suggested Liddle was largely right on some of his claims, but that he was probably wrong on his claims about knife crimes and violent sex crimes.
In October 2010, Liddle called for the abolition of the Welsh language TV channel S4C as a result of the 2010 Comprehensive Spending Review. In his article for The Spectator, he described Welsh nationalists as "miserable, seaweed munching, sheep-bothering pinch-faced hill-tribes".
On 23 May 2013, Liddle wrote about the murder of soldier Lee Rigby near the Royal Artillery Barracks in Woolwich, London. In the original version of a blog article for The Spectator, he referred to the perpetrators as "two black savages". After many objections to his language use, this phrase was modified. Liddle apologised.
Giving a speech at Durham University in December 2021, Liddle said: "It is fairly easily proven that colonialism is not remotely the major cause of Africa's problems, just as it is very easy to prove that the educational underachievement of British people of Caribbean descent or African Americans is nothing to do with institutional or structural racism."