Rod Liddle, Today programme editor turned polemical journalist with an army of devoted readers

​​Rod Liddle, who has died aged 66, was arguably the most offensive columnist of his generation in the British press – and wore that badge with pride. To his army of devoted readers he was also the funniest, and the first to burst every balloon of political cant, self-proclaimed victimhood and Left-liberal pomposity.

Liddle’s career as a controversialist was launched by his forced resignation, in 2003, from the role of editor of Radio 4’s Today programme. A column he had written for The Guardian, in which he mocked pro-hunting Countryside Alliance marchers as “rather angry, ruddy-faced people”, was deemed to breach BBC impartiality rules.

Thereafter, in the pages of The Spectator, The Sunday Times and The Sun, and on the airwaves, he took on all-comers, from the commissars of correctness in the broadcast media to the panjandrums of the race-relations industry and the increasingly strident advocates of transgender rights.

Objects of his ad hominem derision ranged ​from the Labour government’s equalities champion Harriet Harman – to whom he eventually apologised for an attack that began “So – Harriet Harman, then. Would you? I mean after a few beers obviously, not while you were sober” – to the rabble-rousing imam of Finsbury Park, Abu Hamza, who had lost both hands in an explosion and to whom Liddle habitually referred as “Hookie”.

Many of his sharpest barbs were aimed at what he saw as the self-reinforcing networks of the “faux Leftie” liberal elite, whose members filled any number of powerful committees and boards, thereby largely controlling the parameters of public debate on issues that animated Liddle. He dubbed this phenomenon “Six Degrees of Shami” in reference to Shami (now Baroness) Chakraba​rti, the ubiquitous civil liberties campaigner turned shadow Labour minister.

He especially loathed members of that elite who let slip their contempt for the white working class, whom Liddle himself felt had been left behind by social change, bad education and modern obsessions with multiculturalism and minority rights. In this respect he singled out the Independent columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown – who gave as good as she got, telling Liddle in a heated Channel 4 debate that she loathed him and was proud to say so to his face.

The truth about Liddle was that he possessed a formidable journalistic nose for hypocrisy and lies, but that he could also be loose with his facts and hurtful with his epithets, particularly when feeling crapulous and close to deadline – leading to several referrals to the Press Complaints Commission and many occasions when he had to defend himself against accusations of racism, homophobia, transphobia and other contemporary thought crimes.

Loyal readers, however, knew where he was really coming from and recognised the dark picture he painted. In particular they understood his sympathy for the common man who had been abandoned by politicians and become a target of casual media scorn.

This instinct was never better expressed than in a 2006 column in which he tracked down, in their Newbury council house, the mother and father of a 14-year-old drink-driver who had kicked off violently in court while her parents hurled eggs at the assembled media: what he found was a couple “perpetually on their uppers”, but kind, loyal and doing their best for their family – an echo, perhaps, of the humble upbringing that was the fount of all his writings.

Roderick Edwin Liddle was born at Sidcup, Kent, on April 1 1960, the son of Edwin Liddle and his wife Margaret, née Clee. Edwin’s father Joseph, from Darlington, had been an engine driver; Edwin worked for the railways and did war service in motor torpedo boats before becoming an Inland Revenue clerk.

When Rod was eight the family moved to Nunthorpe, a “select” suburb of Middlesbrough (though he wrote that describing it thus was a little like saying “a select area of Mogadishu”), where he was educated at Laurence Jackson comprehensive and Prior Pursglove sixth-form college, formed a punk band and joined the Socialist Workers Party.

“I was at my best when I was 16 or 17,” he recalled, “energetic but obnoxious.” He also recalled his long-suffering father’s comment on seeing him dressed for a night on the town, earring in one ear, ripped trousers with “Fuck Off” written on them in Magic Marker, bright red SWP badge on the lapel of a filthy secondhand jacket: “Christ, you can’t sink any bloody lower.”

Having entered journalism as a reporter on the South Wales Echo, Liddle worked for the Labour Party as a speechwriter and researcher from 1983 to 1987 and went on to study social psychology as a mature student at the LSE before joining the BBC as a trainee producer. Appointed editor of Today in 1998, he boosted the programme’s reputation for investigative journalism, winning a number of awards.

After he left Today Liddle enjoyed a brief foray into light entertainment as a team captain opposite Alan Coren on Call My Bluff, but his style of humour proved too saturnine. In 2003 he published a collection of short stories, Too Beautiful for You, and in 2007 a satirical novel, Love Will Destroy Everything.

His non-fiction work Selfish, Whining Monkeys: How We Ended Up Greedy, Narcissistic and Unhappy (2014) achieved – not least through sympathetic glimpses of his parents – an almost elegiac tone as he analysed Britain’s transition from a place of “job security, a semblance of social mobility, steadily rising living standards and a kind of permanence of things, of values and mores” to one where “the glue which bound us all together has dissolved” and “the furious yapping you hear” is the proclamation of outrage by competing grievance groups.

It was good that we have become more tolerant of diversity, he concluded, but “this sacking of the old order has left us fraught and clamorous, unhappy, isolated and averse.” One critic called the book “a flaming, bloodthirsty romp, scything through the lazy thinking of an effete liberal establishment”.

Similar descriptions were applied to his sell-out live performance, bottle of red wine to hand (in interview with the Spectator editor Fraser Nelson), at the 2,300-seat London Palladium in 2018: even a female Observer columnist, previously horrified by Liddle, had to admit he “sent me out of the theatre feeling quite a lot less gloomy”.

Nelson once observed that while “Don’t tone down Rod” was a plea he frequently heard from Spectator readers, Liddle was the writer most frequently deprecated by those who did not subscribe to the magazine. The bien-pensants of Twitter repeatedly fell for Liddle’s bait, tutting over articles such as the one in which he observed that he could never have worked as a teacher because he “could not remotely conceive of not trying to shag the kids”, although he observed in mitigation: “I don’t think I’d have dabbled much below year 10.”

What Liddle never did, in print or person, was hold himself up as anyone’s role model; indeed, it was sometimes evident that he despised himself almost as much as his targets. Acknowledging the mess of his personal life in middle age, he likened himself to the promiscuous North American montane vole. “In common parlance, I seemed to be the sort of chap who couldn’t keep it in his trousers.”

In 1993 he began a relationship with Rachel Royce, a television reporter whom he had met at the BBC. They had two sons, Tyler and Wilder, and were finally married in 2004, in a lavish holiday ceremony in Malaysia. But by then Liddle had begun an affair with The Spectator’s receptionist, Alicia Monckton, who was half his age and who broke off her engagement to another man; Rachel later claimed he left their honeymoon early to return to Alicia – while Liddle declared that “the failure was to have got married in the first place.”

He and Rachel proceeded to vent savage opinions of each other while the tabloids relished a new plot line in the unbuttoned soap opera that was The Spectator under the editorship of Boris Johnson. Liddle reported that Johnson “broke off discussing my next article to howl with laughter” at his discomfiture.

In 2005 Liddle was arrested and accepted a caution for common assault against Alicia during a domestic row when she was 20 weeks pregnant. When their daughter was born she was named Emmeline after the suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst.

Liddle was a member of the Labour Party for 40 years until he was expelled in 2016 for writing about “its strange affection for anti-Semitism”. In 2019 – the year he published The Great Betrayal, a study of the establishment’s attempts to thwart Brexit – he joined the Social Democratic Party; in the 2024 general election he stood as the SDP candidate in Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland, coming fourth.

Among his recent columns, devotees especially treasured an account of his (imagined) presence at the Bafta awards ceremony in which craven apologies were issued after an outburst by a Tourette’s campaigner: Liddle claimed to have bellowed “you self-important, preening, hideous, unnatural, waxen-skinned spaffgoblin” and “arse badger” at the compère without finding himself ejected by bouncers.

A surprising element of Liddle’s make-up, perhaps, was his Christian faith – expressed in a Christmas poem in The Spectator in 2017, in which he lamented the absence of Christ from a festival of “drivel on the telly, fake bonhomie, fake cheer” – but “somehow from up above, He watches… amused, appalled, distraught – who knows?”

Rod Liddle is survived by Alicia, whom he married in 2008, and his three children.

​Rod Liddle, born April 1 1960, died August 2 2026

[Source: Daily Telegraph]