Rod Liddle, 1960-2026
I was so sorry to hear that Rod Liddle had died. We met on several occasions and although I never really got to know him he was always great fun.
The first time we met was at The Savoy Hotel in London in 2007 when Forest hosted a dinner to mark the imminent arrival of the smoking ban in England, which at the time was just five days away. The event was promoted as one of the last opportunities to eat, drink and smoke in an indoor public place, and almost 400 people joined us on that memorable evening.
Rod was one of the guests and I made sure we were on the same table because I was keen to meet him and he didn’t disappoint. Writing immediately after the event I described him as ‘extremely good company’ and noted that he was ‘one of the last to leave’ (at 1.30am). ‘Famously combustible,’ I wrote, ‘he was last heard arguing with a hotel flunkey about the quickest and shortest way to leave the building.’
A few days later he wrote about the event in the Sunday Times:
Spent a wonderful valedictory evening chain-smoking at a bash organised by Forest on Monday night. It was a convocation of some of the most extraordinarily right-wing people I have ever encountered, the odd tobacco magnate fresh from flogging his wares to eight-year-old Vietnamese children, cheerful old buffers who looked like Jimmy Edwards in his heyday, and smart young chaps who run right-of-centre think tanks.
There were some fine speeches – pugnacious and rabble-rousing from Antony Worrall-Thompson; politically-loaded and sharp from Andrew Neil; counter-intuitive from the excellent Claire Fox. The mood was optimistically defiant and the main ground of attack for all speakers lay on the battleground entitled “freedom”.
As it happens, he thought we were fighting the wrong battle and the rest of the article (Where there’s smoke) explained why. (Scientists like the Chief Medical Officer, he seemed to say, were a bigger problem than politicians, and the problem was philosophical rather than political, ‘and thus all the more difficult to address in the political sphere’.)
A few years later Rod wanted to interview me for a short video he was filming for the Sunday Times. It was part of a series called Rod Liddle’s Got Issues and each video, which were seven or eight minutes long, addressed a serious topical issue but in a humorous way.
For example, I’ll never forget the time he travelled to Stony Stratford and called the local councillor who wanted to ban smoking in the small Buckinghamshire town a “halfwit”. Or the short film he made about CCTV cameras and the Big Brother state in the course of which some council jobsworths tried to stop him filming in a London park because he didn’t have a licence. He revisited the issue a couple of years later and you can watch clips from the original film here. Seriously, you couldn’t make it up.
Anyway, it was a very entertaining afternoon because, instead of filming on College Green, opposite the Houses of Parliament, as intended, he decided it would be more interesting to interview me outside a pub, so off we went - Rod, the cameraman and me - to the Marquis of Granby, a well known Westminster pub where politicos often hang out.
After we finished filming we continued chatting (and drinking) and he told me he smoked 30 cigarettes a day, played five-a-side football for the Smoking Monkeys at Millwall Football Club, and the last time out he was top scorer. He also said his wife had bought him a running machine for Christmas because, in her words, he was "fat as fuck". After she caught him smoking while running on the machine she declared the whole thing "pointless".
Ten years ago I invited him to speak at the Forest Freedom Dinner at Boisdale of Canary Wharf, and he was brilliant. Paul Staines (aka Guido Fawkes) called it “the best political speech of the year”, another guest said it was "the best after-dinner speech I've ever heard", and The Spectator published it in full on their website.
It went down so well we invited him back to speak at the same event the following year but, although he once again made guests laugh, some of his points were, how shall I say, slightly inappropriate given the nature of the event and there were a few moments when I genuinely feared what he was going to say next!
I even wondered if he had brought the wrong speech with him because it was remarkably similar to the column he had written for The Spectator the previous week. In contrast, what would have been a far more appropriate speech for a Forest event (Being anti-smoking damages your mental health) was published as an article by The Spectator the very next week. Go figure!
Unsurprisingly, given the era in which we live and the nature of social media, Rod’s death has prompted an outpouring of love and hate because he was a Marmite character whose columns were designed to provoke a reaction. At heart, though, he was a satirist and I’m not sure many people understood that. In some ways he was the Auberon Waugh of his day, but whereas it was obvious when Waugh was writing satirically, there were grey areas in Rod’s work and because he came from a ‘serious’ background (editing the Today programme on Radio 4), it wasn’t always clear when he was being serious, satirical, or simply humorous, and that confused people.
I should perhaps add that he quit smoking five years ago (Smoking is more hassle than it’s worth) and thereafter I noticed a rather less liberal attitude towards the pub smoking ban and even things like disposable vapes and smart phones for under 16s (which he was happy for the Government to ban), but that’s another story.
First and foremost, however, I will remember him with fondness and will miss his weekly column in The Spectator and his Facebook posts, especially the photos he shared of the countryside near his home in the north east of England.
PS. As an aside, the first time we invited Rod to speak at the Freedom Dinner it was suggested that we also invite a close friend to act as his minder, and thank goodness we did because I still have the subsequent exchange of emails between Rod and his friend:
Friend: ‘I have been invited to a Freedom Dinner on 12 July which I gather you are speaking at?’
Rod: ‘Hi mate - oh yep, I forgot I was speaking at that.’
Needless to say we invited Rod's friend to be his unofficial minder the following year as well. His mission: to ensure Rod's attendance, on time and on message. Well, one out of two ain’t bad.
Rod Liddle, 1960-2026
