Rod Liddle’s Legacy

Perhaps Britain’s greatest post-Orwell journalist, and a man of similar skills and grounded ideological stance, Rod Liddle, has died, at the ridiculously young age of sixty-six. Britain – not so much Australia, sadly – has woken today to another tragic loss.

Rod Liddle, famous in Britain, was a journalist of the old school, and he wrote for a wide range of publications in Britain. Most famously, for The Spectator. He was an institution. He was adored by readers. He confounded those who attempted to put him in ideological boxes. He entertained and informed. He resisted the modern woke accommodation. And challenged his readers to do the same.

Alas, he is mostly unknown to Australian readers. We are the poorer for that. We have no equivalent of Rod Liddle. I hope I can explain here why this is a problem.

Of the many obituaries delivered across John of Gaunt’s sceptered isle this day, with nary a single negative word contained therein, I like Allison Pearson’s the best.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/08/03/allison-pearson-friend-rod-liddle-great-british-freedom/

Dan Wootton’s show had a few good clips, as well as heartfelt memories.

Both are from the heart, and, in common with most of the others, especially those written by current and former journalists and editors at The Spectator, there were personal stories of Rod’s kindness as well as the universally agreed eulogies reporting his peerless and fearless (per Douglas Murray) journalism, and his great satirical skills.

He loved taking the piss out of the absurdities of the postmodern era in which we find ourselves. And he was up there with the best.

My two favourite Speccie writers – they were much more than journalists – were Liddle and Jeremy Clark, he of the Low Life column.

https://spectator.com/article/a-tribute-to-jeremy-clarke-the-spectators-low-life-columnist/

Jeremy’s last act of authorship was to record his own dying days, in the south of France. They remain some of the most powerful pieces of modern writing.

The Spectator’s continuing tradition of fine writing is all that keeps my subscription alive, especially in these days of the inexplicable editorship of the appalling Michael Gove. That reputation for excellence will be that much harder to maintain and sell, now that Rod Liddle has passed.

Rod’s politics were not just interesting and counter-cultural, they were illuminating and they resonate with the current age as it is emerging. Rod is an old leftie, at least an old Labour guy. Seemingly, he has moved right. But … As the cliché goes, he never left Labour. Labour left him.

Rod’s real legacy is a philosophy for our times. Never forgetting his working class roots, and never ceasing to champion the working class, and calling out the traitorous abandonment of ordinary, normal people by the new age globalist, woke elites.

His politics reflect the hybrid thinking of the late Daniel bell, one of the great American public intellectuals of the twentieth century, who wrote about the post-industrial society before anyone else did. He wrote about much else besides, in our age of false binaries and the UniParty.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Ideology

The two of them were economic interventionists and social conservatives, to summarise and reduce their thinking unfairly. Realists, you might say. It is a philosophy embraced (to an extent) by J D Vance and by the wonderful Compact online magazine.

They have precisely reversed the ugly hybrid of the neoliberal eighties and nineties, with its Blairite radical individualism married to free(ish) market economics and cultural and moral relativism. The great disease of our times.

Rod was a man of the north. Not like the latest ludicrous usurper to the British premiership, but a real man of the north. He lamented what Thatcher’s de-industrialising economics did to his region, once the powerhouse of the national economy and now struggling on welfare and memories.

(Thatcher’s Britain and its legacy are topics for another day).

Rod pushed back against the modern hybrid ideology, with an exquisite combination of graceful, controlled prose and biting humour. His metier, his oeuvre, was satire. (Forgive the vaguely remembered, inadequate, schoolboy French).

Rod regularly incurred the wrath the offended class, in particular the feminazis, as a result of his acerbic contributions to the transgender and rape gangs “debates”. As Allison Pearson notes:

How right he was about that and so much else. I think back to one amazing column he wrote when Labour minister Jess Phillips was prevaricating, disgracefully, about holding a national inquiry into the rape gangs. “Who could possibly object to being ‘safeguarded’?” asked Rod. “Isn’t it nice that, today, we are all safeguarded? It will not stop us being stabbed, or raped, or robbed – indeed, as we’ll see, it may even make it more likely that we are subjected to some or all of those procedures – but at least we will know that, while the crime is happening, we are being safeguarded.

“Jess Phillips is the safeguarding minister, incidentally. She has the difficult job of balancing the safeguarding of those girls who were gang-raped by almost exclusively Muslim men in towns the length and breadth of our country, with the safeguarding of Labour seats dependent upon Muslim votes (which include her own). It is a nuanced thing, this safeguarding, then. She has to safeguard the girls but also safeguard the “protected characteristics” (a tendency to rape young white girls, I think) of the perpetrators.”

Rod’s assumed “far right” credentials were then assumed by his latter-day enemies, despite his earlier embrace of the causes of female and racial equality, back in the day. He had been once a member of the Socialist Workers Party, when those causes were real and important. Not just the objects of, and vehicles for, today’s pathetic, performative wokism.

So many Spectator readers (and Sun readers and Sunday Times readers) always turned first to Rod when their copy arrived on the doorstep.

They will no longer have that privilege. The rest of us have both a journalistic legacy and a political one to savour.

Rod’s body of work and his political sensibility are a reminder that the key to any possibility to us voting our way of our current mess, an existential threat to our way of life, is for good, socially conservative, patriot Labour traditionalists (not just cranky conservatives) to recognise that it has been their own modern representatives that have destroyed the joint.

Only then, with a truly broad Daniel Bell-like coalition that understands our predicament and feels, viscerally, the impacts of what CJ Hopkins (another modern hybrid guy) calls “globo-cap”, can we get on with the hard work of restoring our politics and our lives.

Only one Australian political party currently comes even close to recognising the backstory and having a plan to reverse the recent trajectory of history. Both branches of the UniParty are too invested in the machine, against which Rod Liddle so railed, to be part of the solution. The modern Labour Party has forgotten the working class – hates it, in fact – and the Liberal Party never really understood it.

Rod despised them both.

We owe it to ourselves to get beyond the grief and to look to the enduring lessons of Rod’s thought, his career and his wonderful life.

Paul Collits

4 August 2026