I only met Rod Liddle a few times, though at The Spectator and the Sunday Times I worked alongside him and to a large degree in his shadow. He was irascible and lugubrious and bloody funny, both in person and in print. Like a lot of bogeymen, in person he was a delight and nothing like his image. He was humble and polite and faintly decorous, keen to know what you thought and to know what you knew – even though he was clear about what he knew and generally put it better than anyone else, week in and week out.

Rod Liddle, 1960 – 2026

Do liberal Londoners know how much they are detested?

At first he was a guilty pleasure, someone who would write down what the rest of us were thinking, often without the decorous need in speech to acknowledge the validity of views of those who differ. There was an element of reading Rod that was like reading Viz in my teenage years – a little bit naughty, the schoolboy yelling ‘bum’ at a junior school teacher. 

Then came the realisation that this often hilarious scribe was not a provocateur at all – he was simply the best critic of........

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