The Pen and the Poison

Rod Liddle has died at 66. The tributes call him brilliant, provocative, inimitable. They are silent on the twenty years he spent making British Muslims the punchline — and on the industry that decided this was a style, not a record.

Rod Liddle died on Sunday evening at James Cook University Hospital in Middlesbrough, aged 66, after a short illness. Within hours the tributes had arrived. Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News UK, called him “an inimitable journalistic force, brilliant, provocative and immensely talented.” The Spectator, which carried his column for twenty-four years, said he had “shocked, delighted and entertained” its readers with work that “lampooned and satirised the great and not-so-good.”

Not one of those tributes mentioned Muslims.

That silence is not an oversight. It is the same editorial judgement that sustained his career — the conviction that what Liddle wrote about British Muslims was a matter of style rather than a body of work with consequences. I want to argue the opposite, and I want to do it now, while the eulogies are still being written, because the sanctification of a record is how the record gets repeated.

His talent was real. He was a former editor of the Today programme, a genuinely funny writer with an ear for the absurd. That is precisely the problem. The damage was possible because of the talent, not despite it.

The record, dated and quoted

This is not a matter of interpretation. The columns exist, they are dated, and they were defended at the time.

• 19 November 2009 · The Spectator
  “Somali savages update”
  Writing about a stoning in Somalia, Liddle described “Somali Muslim savages,” then closed with the observation that Somali immigrants to Britain are “widely admired for their strong work ethic, respect for the law and keen, piercing, intelligence.”
• March 2010 · Press Complaints Commission
  Censured — the first UK journalist ruled against over a blog
  The PCC upheld a complaint over a separate Liddle post claiming “the overwhelming majority” of London street, knife, gun and sexual violence crime was committed by young African-Caribbean men. He could not substantiate it.
• 3 May 2016 · The Spectator (Coffee House)
  “An ingrained part of their unpleasant ideology”
  “For many Muslims the anti-Semitism is visceral, an ingrained part of their unpleasant ideology.” He was subsequently suspended from the Labour Party, the stated ground being Islamophobia.
• October 2018 · The Sunday Times
  “Tower Hamlets, for example”
  On Anjem Choudary’s release: “I don’t really mind if they don’t leave the country, so long as they blow themselves up — somewhere a decent distance from where the rest of us live. Tower Hamlets, for example.” The borough’s then mayor, John Biggs, called it “utterly appalling” and demanded an apology. None came.
• November 2019 · The Spectator
  A polling day when Muslims cannot vote
  “My own choice of election date would be a day when universities are closed and Muslims are forbidden to do anything on pain of hell, or something. That would deliver at least 40 seats to the Tories, I reckon.” Sajid Javid, then Chancellor, called it “not funny and not acceptable.”

Read consecutively rather than one every few years, the pattern is unmistakable. A community is described as savage; its politics is described as an unpleasant ideology; its geography is nominated as an acceptable site for a bombing; its franchise is treated as an inconvenience to be engineered around. Each was individually deniable. Together they are a position.

What “it’s satire” actually did

Satire has a target and a direction. It works by aiming upward, at power, and it earns its licence by taking a risk. Suggesting that a general election be scheduled to disenfranchise a religious minority does not aim upward. It aims at roughly four million people who hold, on almost every measure, less structural power than the columnist, his editor and his readership.

The defence nonetheless worked, repeatedly, because it did not need to persuade anyone outside the building. It only needed to give an editor a form of words. To his credit, Spectator editor Fraser Nelson eventually conceded the 2019 piece “should not have been published in the form that it was,” and assistant editor Isabel Hardman said publicly that she was “hugely upset” by it. But the concession came after publication, after the reach, and after the signal had been sent. Nobody lost anything.

That is the mechanism worth naming, because it long outlived him:

The regulator that could not act

Stage three deserves particular attention, because it is a design choice rather than an accident. When the Tower Hamlets column appeared, IPSO received complaints under Clause 12 (discrimination) and Clause 3 (harassment). It could not proceed. The Editors’ Code protects individuals from discriminatory reference; it does not admit complaints made on behalf of a group. As Hacked Off observed at the time, an article may plausibly incite hatred against an entire community and remain formally beyond the regulator’s reach.

The one occasion a Liddle column was tested under Clause 12 — a 2018 Sun piece asking whether the Labour MP Kate Osamor and her mother would hold their positions “were it not for the colour of their skin” — IPSO rejected the complaint, reasoning that the code should not prevent debate about whether a characteristic confers privilege. The lesson editors drew was straightforward: write about a group rather than a person, and nothing happens.

The magazine that carried him is the worst offender in Britain

Here the argument stops being about one man. In March 2026 the Centre for Media Monitoring published the largest study of its kind ever conducted in the UK — 40,913 articles across 30 outlets, covering the whole of 2025. I analysed its findings in detail earlier this year. Seventy per cent of all articles associated Muslims or Islam with something negative, up from roughly 60% in 2018–19.

The outlet that performed worst across all five bias measures was The Spectator. Not marginally worst: 26.3% of its Muslim-related output was rated “Very Biased,” nearly double the next title, with 93% carrying negative associations and 53% trading in generalisation.

Liddle did not create that culture single-handedly, and it would be lazy to claim he did. But he was its most conspicuous licence-holder for two decades, and he wrote simultaneously for three of the titles in this dataset. What he demonstrated, column after column, was that the reputational cost of this material was zero — and an industry that watches one of its best-paid writers pay nothing draws the obvious conclusion.

What it costs, in numbers

Media effects are notoriously hard to isolate, and I am not going to pretend a single column produces a single assault. But the ambient conditions are measurable, and they have deteriorated sharply. In the year to March 2025 the Home Office recorded 4,478 anti-Muslim religious hate crimes in England and Wales — 45% of all religious hate crime, and a 20% year-on-year rise, at a point when antisemitic offences fell by 18%. Tell MAMA verified 6,313 anti-Muslim cases in 2024, its highest annual figure since it was founded, with street-based incidents up 120% since 2022 and a 103% rise in attacks on visibly Muslim people.

Those numbers are the environment in which a joke about which borough deserves a bombing lands. Not among Spectator subscribers, for whom it is an amusement, but among the people who have to walk through Tower Hamlets in a hijab afterwards.

The obituary he will not get

What survives Liddle is not a set of opinions. Opinions are cheap and they die with their authors. What survives is a demonstration — that a writer of real ability can spend twenty years describing a minority as savage, ideologically diseased and legitimately expendable, and finish with a national radio show, three columns and a warm send-off from the chief executive of News UK.

The commentary that followed him has learned the lesson and improved on the method. It has largely dropped the slur, which was always the crude part, and kept the premise. The register now is clinical rather than gleeful: civilisational incompatibility, demographic anxiety, integration failure, security risk. It reads as analysis. It is harder to complain about, harder to regulate, and considerably more effective. CfMM found contextual omission — the quiet exclusion of the facts that would complicate the story — in 44% of everything it analysed. That is not a shock-jock’s technique. It is an editorial one.

I have no interest in dancing on a grave, and there is nothing to celebrate in a man dying at 66. His children have lost their father. But an honest reckoning is not an indecency, and the alternative — a fortnight of tributes in which the most consistent theme of his journalism goes politely unmentioned — is how the industry absolves itself. It is possible to say that Rod Liddle was talented, funny, and a serious writer. It is necessary to say what he used it for.