Rod Liddle, a columnist and associate editor at The Spectator, has died at 66. You can read some extracts from some of our favourite columns of his below.

He is, you have to say, anti-democratic, democracies being callow, man-made things, and, as a final irony, he doesn’t even agree with the concept of absolute freedom of speech. Ask him about it and his one good eye gets cloudy and he starts mumbling dark things about Salman Rushdie. Abu Hamza thinks Abu Hamza should have the freedom to speak his mind because, of course, it’s not really Abu Hamza speaking, but, in essence, God.

Should we deny freedom of speech to someone who doesn’t really believe in freedom of speech? Of course not. We let them have it. We let them have it and allow the injustice and contradiction inherent in such a stance do for them, in the end.

‘Don’t expel Dr Hook’, 15 March 2003

Andrew Gilligan and Iraq

The questions are endless. We could stay here all night. The truth is that in an attempt to spin itself out of a crisis the government – by which I mean, in all likelihood, Alastair Campbell and Tony Blair – created an even bigger crisis, for which it is now attempting to indict the BBC and one reporter, whose only crime was to report to the nation a story of vital importance.

‘A despicable and cowardly diversion’, 26 July 2003

On buses… and Spectator readers

One of the lovely things about writing for The Spectator is that we have an extremely knowledgeable and well-read audience, so there is no need to explain the sort of stuff that one would need to explain were one writing for the Sun, say, or the New Statesman. An article about humorous verse of the mid-19th century, for example, would not require a preamble making it clear that Edward Lear did not, in his spare time, make jet aeroplanes. You know that already. This holds true for an agreeably diverse range of subjects; however, there is always an exception to test the rule. Occasionally a subject crops up which lies some way beyond the horizon of even – perhaps especially – the most well-informed of our readers; little details one would be slightly disappointed to discover were known to the average Spectator reader. And on these rare occasions, remedial explanation is required.

So, then: buses are those big red things full of poor people you see clogging up the traffic in the middle of London. You may have been stuck behind one on your way to lunch at Simpson’s; you may even have ridden on one, when you were a child and both impecunious and possessed of a sense of adventure. There are a lot, lot more of them these days, though – which is rather the point of this article.

‘A miserable waste of space’, 30 September 2006

Is our Prime Minister perpetually out of his brainbox on powerful psychotropic substances, as everybody now seems to believe? Dilaudid, crystal meth, that sort of thing? Does he stagger out of bed and say: ‘Aw, Sarah, I’ve got a meeting with Harman in half an hour. Light up the crack pipe, will you?

‘Is it more rude to ask if someone’s going whacko than blind?’, 3 October 2009

On the authoritarianism of children

There aren’t really any stories in Thomas the Tank Engine apart from various engines being humiliated and punished as a consequence of their misdemeanours or their hubris. And that’s the conclusion you should reach, I reckon, in both cases: the kids like these stories not in spite of the narrow conservatism of the writers, but precisely because of it. Children feel most comfortable in an ordered and clearly demarcated world, a world divided into hierarchies. They have a Manichean view of good and evil and they like to see the baddies get punished, preferably in a thoroughly unpleasant manner. They may also identify with gender stereotypes which conform to the roles they have already been assigned or, more controversially, have worked out for themselves from a very early age. Children, and especially little boys, are conservative, when they are not actually fascists.

‘Thomas the Tank Engine is merciless and bigoted – that’s why kids love it’, 2 January 2010

The Raoul Moat affair

And now the shrine and the Facebook campaign. More than 18,000 people have signed up to it, at the time of........

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