Taken as a fibrous, indigestible whole, Rod Liddle’s political views don’t fit into an obvious category. He is leftish on the economy (favouring the welfare state and a high minimum wage), sympathetic both to old Labour and certain Marxist notions, mostly anti-war, Anglican, ambivalent towards the working class, sceptical of multiculturalism, sensitive to condescension (particularly from those in London’s ‘golden crescent’), disdainful of political correctness, pro-football and its fans but anti-footballer, critical of what he calls the ‘free movement of labour and capital’, liberal on sexual matters but with a streak of tabloid phwoar when it comes to women. In 2019, after many years of political homelessness, he joined the Social Democratic Party, which describes itself as ‘patriotic, economically left-leaning, and culturally traditional’.
Liddle’s notoriety is a consequence of his writing style more than his convictions. As a columnist he offers blunt, common-sense takes on the issues of the day, while making coarse jokes that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow in a Wetherspoons, but might stir opposition in a Pret. Contrary to his reputation among the online left – who place him a notch or two below Katie Hopkins and a hair above Toby Young in the hate-figure hierarchy – he is something of a people pleaser. He reaches a large, mixed audience with his columns for the Spectator, the Sun, and the Sunday Times, and from 1998 to 2002 he served as editor of Today on BBC Radio 4. In the early 2000s he was a columnist for the Guardian, where his hostility to New Labour and staunch defences of the BBC seemed to go over quite nicely with a readership that abhorred sanctimony and censoriousness (then, if not now).
Fraser Nelson, editor of the Spectator, has championed Liddle as ‘one of the best writers in the country’ and claimed that a recurring plea from his readers is ‘Don’t tone down Rod’. Matthew d’Ancona, Nelson’s predecessor, described Liddle as ‘a national treasure in the making: a saloon bar genius satirising the absurdities of the world’. In 2002, Thomas Jones of the London Review of Books noted the Guardian’s ‘poaching of ace columnist Rod Liddle from his frustratingly behind-the-scenes role at the Today programme’. Thirteen years later, in the same publication, Ferdinand Mount swapped ‘ace’ for ‘crusty’.
So which is it: ace or crusty? He is an effective writer, insofar as he gets his point across in a terse and often entertaining way. But even the most reliable columnists are seldom excellent writers. The job itself – forging armour-plated opinions out of inklings – precludes complexity, thoughtfulness, originality, and fruitful contradiction.
Often I will read one of his columns and brace myself for a week-long furore1 – but nothing happens. Then a storm will gather over a piece that seemed on first glance to be relatively innocuous. It’s not that lightning strikes at random, but that it takes time for the clouds to darken and densify between blasts. If his enemies recorded every single infraction there would be no room on the outrage schedule for anything except Rod Liddle and his latest column.
Even during his tenure at the Guardian he didn’t pay much attention to broadsheet etiquette. Here is an editorial correction appended to one of his 2003 articles: ‘A description of the mole, in a column, G2, yesterday, referred to its “weird, spazzy, claws”. The use of “spazzy” is totally contrary to the Guardian’s approach to disability’. A column from 2001 begins: ‘There is a state of sexual excitement in female pigs known as lordosis. The sow truffles her snout in the ground whilst raising aloft her moistly quivering hindquarters, desperate for the swift and brutal ministrations of the boar.’ Needless to say, his writing style hasn’t changed all that much in twenty years.
In common with just about every other working columnist, Liddle’s ultimate objective was to write fiction. But it wasn’t until he was dumped by Today, following a column that flouted the BBC’s impartiality rules, that he put his mind to the task. Too Beautiful For You, a book of short stories, appeared in 2003 – and that was it. No more fiction. His Wikipedia bibliography lists a novel called Love Will Destroy Everything, allegedly published in 2007, and Amazon has a synopsis for a book with that title but, while there’s a chance an orphaned manuscript is swaddled in a drawer somewhere, it doesn’t appear to exist in commercially available form.
Don’t mistake this long preamble for a set-up. Too Beautiful really isn’t that bad. Parts of it are quite funny. Two or three stories are nicely composed, true to their conceits. A couple are outright failures.
Infidelity is the primary theme. For much of the book it’s the only theme. A man throws himself out of a window in a fit of depression after his lover ends their adulterous relationship. A man tries to have an affair with a nurse while his wife is giving birth to his child. A man has an affair with his wife’s mother. A man kills his wife in order to facilitate an affair with a nightclub singer. A man, on his way back from an extramarital encounter, loses an arm in a train accident and can think of nothing else but how to hide evidence of the journey from his wife. A man becomes physically trapped inside a woman during adulterous intercourse and has a kind of hallucinatory panic attack.
Liddle emphasises the inanity of male lust, the confounding meat-headedness of it. In these stories, men are bemused by their own inclinations, helplessly caged by their impulses, no wiser than monkeys (probably Liddle’s favourite word – as in ‘media monkeys’, or his 2014 volume, Selfish, Whining Monkeys). Desire itself seems to evaporate when analysed, unless it is made tangible by metaphor. One man yearns for an ex-lover whose savoury skin tastes like something between Marmite and Worcestershire sauce, the homely tang of past love made literal, while his wife ‘tastes of nothing, her skin has no flavour at all’. What he really wants is to be ‘unfaithful a bit’, but a scalding inner voice warns: ‘infidelity bad bad bad bad bad bad bad [and so on]’.
With the exception of one story – or one and a half – Liddle chooses not to examine or inhabit the lives of his female characters. Even as objects of desire they are at best mundane, at worst demeaned. The book’s title comes from the opening story, in which a man realises his lover is out of his league: ‘No matter how profound we believe our relationships to be, he thinks, the balance of power will always reside with the truly beautiful.’ But elsewhere the male characters see women in a less flattering, though not necessarily more revealing light. When a woman is described as ‘pretty’ it must be qualified by adding: ‘in a London Zoo small-mammal enclosure sort of way’. The same woman is ‘firm and youthful’ with ‘bright, if slightly thyroidic’ eyes. In another story, a complimentary remark – ‘You have very beautiful hair’ – is corrected by the narrator: ‘She has adequately lustrous, thick black hair cut a little too short – probably for professional reasons – for her thin pale face. It’s OK, really, as hair goes… But beautiful would be stretching the point.’
Liddle, in his columns as well as his fiction, seeks truth in ugliness, as though beauty can only ever be false or partial. Other writers I’ve covered – notably AA Gill and Jonathan Meades – are similarly motivated, with varying results. But Liddle’s fiction is at its strongest when he accepts the grotesque as just another distorting lens.
In ‘Headhunter Gothic’ a newborn baby embodies the male fear of domesticated adulthood. Witnessing the aftermath of his son’s birth, James is horrified by the image of his wife with her ‘legs still hoisted up in the grotesque stirrups’. He tries not to look at the ‘complicated, livid mess beneath the green sheet’ and almost forgets the baby, a ‘thing’ wrapped in cotton, that he had ‘somehow expunged from his mind.’
James stares with horror at the creature before him. What in God’s name is it? It is a fucking nightmare being, with its cone-shaped skull, elongated and twisted at the top; green and yellow face dripping with alien mucus and huge, clever, black eyes.
‘Ugh,’ James can’t help but say.
‘Motherhood is a fact, while fatherhood is a fiction,’ wrote Adam Mars-Jones in Venus Envy, his 1990 essay on Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. Liddle’s B-movie presentation puts this in the most outlandish possible terms: fatherhood is a horror show, a visitation from another world. The new arrival is pure antagonism – not merely a ‘thing’ but a ‘creature’, a ‘rank bundle’, a ‘disgusting little cunt’. By the end of the story James has murder in mind, ‘hunkered down behind the sofa on his hands and knees, clutching a jackhammer, waiting.’
In ‘St Mark’s Day’ family life is more stable – although in this case it’s a family of flies, feasting on the mucky residue of their dysfunctional human hosts. Father fly remembers when he first clapped compound eyes on his future mate:
There she was, just inside the gates, this vision, dancing in the air surrounded by a virtual swarm of swooning, just-hatched stone flies with their soft and frankly hopeless gossamer wings and Trisha spinning above and around them in this peculiarly elegant ellipse or maybe a trapezoid which later became so familiar and then, in the end, unaccountably irritating to me.
Even the truncated lifespan of a fly leaves plenty of time for romantic torpor.
In the longest story, ‘Fucking Radu’, Liddle makes an effort to write in a woman’s voice, somewhere between valley girl and Essex girl – ‘I just so don’t want to be here, you know?’ – but it’s never entirely convincing. When the narrator broods over a stretch of insomnia, wondering why ‘night brings back the day in a terrifyingly condensed form, all its iniquities and traumas and acts of gross inappropriate behaviour’, we recognise the tone of loutish regret.
Too Beautiful finishes with two very weak stories. ‘Ring, Ring, Goes the Bell’ is a distended opinion column about a festering education system that elevates racism to the status of the one and only sin. ‘The Lost Honour of Engin Hassan’, apparently inspired by an Abu Hamza pamphlet, is a farcical tale involving a useless terrorist who becomes a minor celebrity. Timeliness is its only virtue – in 2003, seven years before Four Lions and five years before The Second Plane, it might have had a transgressive edge.
But it’s ‘The Long, Long Road to Uttoxeter’ that seems to stand taller than the rest. Once again a man is distant from his child, in this case a ‘dissolute’ two-year-old daughter, ‘so thin and bedraggled she looks like one of those ponies rescued by the RSPCA from a gypsy encampment’. Frustrated with his wife, his child, the ‘tiny and stupid’ Ukrainian au pair, Christian gets on a train to visit the aforementioned Joanne – the one with the ‘thyroidic’ eyes – a 22-year-old English Literature post-graduate living in Cambridge. Improbably, she’s a fan of Ayn Rand, which might explain her appeal to Christian, who ‘has a thing about very right-wing women.’
Joanne is not the first. In the six years Christian has been with his wife, Angela, he has ‘constructed elaborate deceits for seventeen extra-curricular fucks or moistly agreeable rummagings.’ Deceit is a token of his dedication – you need to love someone ‘to lie to them convincingly’. So Christian has lied about his journey, telling Angela he is due to lecture at an Alan Turing conference. This sham event is in Uttoxeter, chosen by Christian because his wife hasn’t heard of it, and might struggle to pronounce or spell ‘Uttoxeter’ if she felt the urge to track him down.
With all the lying and practical obstacles, it’s not clear that Christian is having a good time. ‘He does feel himself, on these excursions, to be unwillingly propelled by something – maybe genetics or even historical inevitability – and not the master of his own destiny.’ After losing his arm in a train crash he flees the carnage and makes his way to Uttoxeter, his alibi, carrying his amputated arm in a plastic bag. Mesmerised by the belief that his wife ‘should not be encumbered with the misery of his transgressions’, his increasingly thin justifications echo in his mind: ‘You think I’m doing all of this for my own sake? he enquired of an imaginary audience.’
In an interview with Lynn Barber, Liddle parroted Christian’s own self-regard, agreeing with Barber’s suggestion that the story is ‘a tribute to uxorious love’ : ‘Yes, absolutely, it’s a love story,’ said Liddle. ‘As he’s lying on the ground right at the end, he thinks, “Gosh, I must love her to bits to do this!”’ He also admitted that it’s the one story his partner, Rachel, didn’t enjoy reading.
Not long after the publication of Too Beautiful, Rod and Rachel became gossip-rag fodder when it was revealed that he was having an affair with a 22-year-old woman. A good critic, in his cool and professional assessment of the text, might dismiss this extraneous detail; a less good critic would say the book failed in its primary purpose, which was to sound the alarm for women everywhere: STAY AWAY FROM THIS MAN.
In his final column for the Guardian, published in August 2003, Liddle made passing reference to a contemporary news story about a woman from Wales who left her family for an Australian man she met on the internet. ‘Falling for the glamour and charms of dangerous antipodeans is the sort of thing one does in one’s early 40s, I suspect,’ wrote Liddle, himself in his early 40s, remarking obliquely on his impending transfer to the Rupert Murdoch fold. He continued: ‘Something happens to us and we perhaps lose sight of our moral compass.’ As usual with Liddle, there’s a regretful pang, a touch of self-hatred, but above all is the impression that he, like his characters, is merely the slave of whim and fancy, making all the necessary excuses even while he charges ahead under his own steam.
A recent example from the Spectator: Young people ‘need to learn a whole gamut of skills to be an HGV driver: how to abduct women and dispose of the body carefully [etc.]’