Rod Liddle, who has set off to argue with the saints at the age of 66, was the sort of journalist who made one wonder whether the Fourth Estate had been wise to abandon its feudal origins. Born on April Fool’s Day 1960 – a date that, in his case, suggested either cosmic jest or impeccable career planning – he rose from Teesside roots to edit BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, only to resign in 2002 when the Corporation discovered, to its exquisite dismay, that impartiality and Rod Liddle were not natural bedfellows.
In the years that followed, Liddle colonised the opinion pages of The Spectator, The Sunday Times and The Sun with a vigour that suggested he viewed the English language less as a vehicle for nuance than as a blunt instrument for poking sacred cows until they filed complaints. Where others saw complex social phenomena, Liddle detected pattern and folly: immigration as a time bomb, identity politics as a collective nervous breakdown, and the liberal consensus as a form of institutional self-harm conducted with the serene confidence of the well-pensioned. His critics called him a provocateur; his readers, when not writing letters demanding his head on a pike, found in him the relief of a man willing to say the unsayable, often before breakfast.
He wrote books too – Selfish Whining Monkeys among them – in which he surveyed modern Britain with the affectionate exasperation of a man watching his favourite pub slide into gastro-pub irrelevance. There were marriages, divorces, children (Wilder, Tyler and Emmy, who spoke of him with touching filial loyalty), and a late tilt at parliamentary candidacy that confirmed politics had not lost its capacity to disappoint. Through it all, he maintained the air of a man who had wandered into the culture wars by accident and decided to enjoy the artillery.
Death, that ultimate sub-editor, has now blue-pencilled the lot. One suspects Liddle would have greeted it with a raised eyebrow and a column about how even mortality had been captured by the metropolitan elite. He was, in his irascible, indefatigable way, a reminder that journalism at its best is not a polite seminar but a bar brawl with footnotes. Britain’s public discourse is quieter for his absence, and perhaps a little duller. Which, one fancies, would have pleased him no end.