To the average Australian, Liddle is a typo. And even for most Brits, a surname which is a homophone of a discount supermarket chain would make you low-hanging fruit for workplace wags. Unless, of course, your workplace was the Sunday Times or the The Spectator, in which case few of your co-workers would live close enough to a Lidl for it to impinge on their frames of cultural reference. But Rod Liddle also wrote for the Sun and was a season-ticket holder at Millwall – making him the most populist fan of England’s least popular football team. Imagine if Collingwood only recruited players from the sex offenders register and you’re in the Millwall zone.
A claim of many of the Liddle tributes I’ve read was that notwithstanding his public cruelty he was a privately kind man. I can corroborate this. My only meeting with him was a brief one, on the steps of the London theatre where The Speccie hosted ‘An Evening with P.J. O’Rourke’ many years ago. Before the Q&A I went out for a smoke, as did Liddle, who had introduced the great American, and at one point he asked me if I’d enjoyed the show, and I said that I wished his introduction had been longer. ‘Never mind me,’ he said, with becoming modesty, ‘what did you think of O’Rourke?’ ‘To be honest,’ I said, ‘I didn’t think he was very funny.’ He frowned and nodded before taking an enormous drag on his ciggie and holding it in long enough – as it seemed to me at the time – to think of a generous response. ‘Well,’ he said at last, directing an impressively long stream of smoke towards the dome of nearby St Paul’s, ‘jet-lag affects people in lots of ways.’ It was only in the taxi back to my hotel that I remembered telling him I was visiting from Sydney.
If the ability to access real public feeling is rare amongst celebrity pundits, it is even rarer amongst politicians who’ve had limited contact with the public. The lowest-hanging fruit for Australian journos in recent weeks were, of course, the melons Mr Albanese received from his visiting Japanese counterpart. To Australian cartoonists, in particular, they were a gift that kept on giving. But I’m not sure the Prime Minster deserved all the flak his podcast recollection of the Takaichi meeting attracted. As someone who jumped straight from the student union to the Labor party without dipping so much as a toe in a real job, and who has consequently never spent much time around real Australians, Albo can hardly be expected to know, without being briefed, that grasping an imaginary woman’s bosom hasn’t been acceptable behaviour in pubs, let alone podcasts, since about 1990. To make matter worse, presumably mistaking the camera crew’s gasps of incredulity for laughter, he went on to reference Australia’s most famous breast cancer survivor in a way which even a young Bob Hawke wouldn’t have done after a long lunch. You can’t help wondering if the closest our current Labor leader has ever come to reading the room is hiring a feng shui consultant for his Copacabana love nest.
Rod Liddle is not the most honoured Pommy writer to have died recently. But Nobel Prizes aren’t awarded posthumously, so it’s unlikely that Professor Jason Arday will get one, despite a legacy considered by many to include some of the greatest fiction in the Western canon. I say ‘unlikely’ because, at time of writing, we still haven’t seen official confirmation that Arday really is dead. What has been confirmed, though, is a plan to erect a statue of him in the quad of the Cambridge college which made him by some distance the longest-dreadlocked faculty member in the university’s even longer history. ‘Ever since students at Oxford started protesting about a statue of Cecil Rhodes,’ said a tearful Jesus College spokesperson, ‘Cambridge has been looking for a way to show the world that as well as usually winning the boat race, we’re also better at decolonising the curriculum. In recognition of Professor Arday’s exemplary work ethic and the university’s commitment to net zero, this statue will be made entirely from recycled paper responsibly sourced from other people’s PhD theses.’ Okay, I made that up. But I like to think it’s how Rod Liddle would have wanted this column to end.
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