43 Facts About Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle was an editor of BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

Rod Liddle's published works include Too Beautiful for You, Love Will Destroy Everything, The Best of Liddle Britain and the semi-autobiographical Selfish Whining Monkeys.

Rod Liddle has presented television programmes, including The New Fundamentalists, The Trouble with Atheism, and Immigration Is A Time Bomb.

Rod Liddle became editor of Today in 1998, resigning in 2002 after his employers objected to one of his articles in The Guardian.

Rod Liddle currently writes for The Sunday Times, The Spectator and The Sun, among other publications.

Rod Liddle was born in Sidcup, Kent, the son of a train driver.

Rod Liddle was educated at the comprehensive Laurence Jackson School in nearby Guisborough and the adjacent Prior Pursglove College, where he formed a punk band called Dangerbird.

Rod Liddle attended the London School of Economics as a mature student, where he read Social Psychology.

Rod Liddle's early career in journalism was with the South Wales Echo in Cardiff where he was a general news reporter and, for a time, the rock and pop writer.

Rod Liddle worked between 1983 and 1987 as a speechwriter and researcher for the Labour Party.

Rod Liddle courted controversy discussing the public and police's response to child pornography and highlighted the Pete Townshend case as a means to highlight problems with enforcing the law.

Rod Liddle was appointed editor of the Today programme in 1998.

The programme had a strong reputation for its political interviews, but Rod Liddle tried, with some success, to improve the programme's investigative journalism.

On 25 September 2002, referring to a march organised by the Countryside Alliance in defence of fox hunting, Rod Liddle wrote that readers may have forgotten why they voted Labour in 1997, but would remember once they saw the people campaigning to save hunting.

Rod Liddle's column led The Daily Telegraph to accuse Liddle of bias and of endangering democracy.

The BBC concluded that Rod Liddle's comments breached his commitment to impartiality as a BBC programme editor, and gave him an ultimatum to stop writing his column or resign from his position on Today.

Rod Liddle said later that when he was editor he was ordered by BBC management to sack Frederick Forsyth from the show, and speculated that it was because of Forsyth's rightwing political views.

Rod Liddle's Immigration Is a Time Bomb was broadcast by Channel 4 in 2005.

Rod Liddle visited Bethlehem, Hebron and the Israeli settlement of Tekoa.

Rod Liddle sought to examine whether Israel was a true liberal democracy in light of its treatment of the Palestinians.

Rod Liddle appeared in Channel 4's alternative election night episode of Come Dine with Me along with Edwina Currie, Derek Hatton and Brian Paddick.

Rod Liddle continued to write for The Guardian, and became a team captain on Call My Bluff.

Rod Liddle writes for the men's magazines, GQ and Arena, and a weekly column for The Sunday Times.

In December 2009, on his Spectator blog, Liddle referred to two black music producers, Brandon Jolie and Kingsley Ogundele, who had plotted to kill Jolie's 15-year-old pregnant girlfriend, as "human filth" and said the incident was not an anomaly.

When he was accused of racism, Rod Liddle said he was instead engaging in a debate about multiculturalism.

In March 2010 the Press Complaints Commission upheld a complaint against Rod Liddle, who became the first journalist to be censured over the contents of a blog, because he had not been able to prove his claim about the crime statistics.

In October 2010, Rod Liddle called for the abolition of the Welsh language TV channel S4C as a result of the 2010 Comprehensive Spending Review.

Rod Liddle later admitted he had written some of the posts that were being criticised, including one in support of the BNP excluding Black and Asian people from the party.

In January 2012, Liddle wrote that many people in the UK were "pretending to be disabled" in his column for The Sun, an opinion defended by James Delingpole who thought "Rod's point is well made".

On 23 May 2013, Rod Liddle wrote about the murder of soldier Lee Rigby near the Royal Artillery Barracks in Woolwich, London.

In May 2015, the Independent Press Standards Organisation upheld a complaint from Trans Media Watch that Rod Liddle had been discriminatory towards Emily Brothers, a blind and transgender Labour candidate at the 2015 general election, in two Sun columns published in December 2014 and January 2015.

In commenting in the way he had Rod Liddle had breached two sections of the editors' code.

In December 2013 in a blog article for The Spectator website published shortly after Nelson Mandela died, Rod Liddle wrote that the BBC coverage on his death was excessive.

Rod Liddle appeared on the BBC's Newsnight to discuss Brexit on 15 July 2019, debating anti-Brexit activist Tom Baldwin.

An investigation by the BBC Executive Complaints Unit upheld the complaints against Maitlis, agreeing that she had been "persistent and personal" in her criticism of Rod Liddle thus "leaving her open to the charge that she had failed to be even-handed" in the discussion.

In October 2019, Rod Liddle penned a column in The Spectator commenting on the forthcoming December 2019 UK general election, which suggested that the election should be held on a Muslim holy day to reduce the Labour vote.

In 2003, Rod Liddle wrote a collection of short stories, Too Beautiful For You.

Rod Liddle said he has always wanted to be a writer, and saw journalism as a cop-out.

Rod Liddle is the author of Love Will Destroy Everything and the co-author of The Best of Liddle Britain.

In July 2019 Rod Liddle published The Great Betrayal, a book about Brexit.

Rod Liddle met Rachel Royce, a television presenter, at the BBC in 1993, and the couple soon became romantically involved.

Six months later, Rod Liddle moved in with Alicia Monckton, a 22-year-old receptionist at The Spectator.

Rod Liddle admitted the offence and accepted a police caution, but asserted later that he did so only because it was the quickest way for him to be released, and that he had not assaulted her.