Every death leaves a hole in someone’s life. But it’s a rare death that leaves a hole in public life. Rod Liddle’s does. His passing has robbed us of the finest, funniest and most sardonic chronicler of the absurdities of the 21st century. His writing was brilliant: sometimes brutal, always truthful. He was the only newspaper scribbler of our times whose name could be justly uttered in the same breath as Swift’s. You can feel his loss already. You just know the next time something mad or ridiculous happens, you’ll find yourself thinking: What would Rod have written about this?

He died on Sunday evening after a short illness. Until about six weeks ago – when he backed out of work – he’d been a prolific, heroic columnist. He wrote for the Spectator, the Sun and The Sunday Times. He hosted a Saturday morning show on Times Radio, which I loved appearing on. He was once a speechwriter for the Labour Party. He made TV documentaries and wrote books – my favourite was The Great Betrayal, his stirring defence of the ‘uneducated thickos’ who voted for Brexit against those posh twats malingering in the ‘Brexit Derangement Syndrome intensive care ward, wired up to saline drips, attended to day and night, occasionally afforded a few thousand volts of ECT when things get really bad, but still foaming, still beside themselves with apoplexy’.

His journalism career included four years as editor of the Today programme on Radio 4. A man who went from editing the morning show beloved of the Beeb’s leafiest listeners to being nominated for Islamophobe of the Year Award by the nutters of the Islamic Human Rights Commission (sic)? Truly we shall not see his like again. He and I were nominated for that award in the same year, and we often shared our dismay that neither of us won, not least since the prize-giving ceremony was at the Holiday Inn in Wembley, which would have been a great night out.

It was for his columns – dry, acerbic, profound – that he became best known. His prose sparkled like a jagged diamond in a media world dominated by privileged pricks more interested in being ‘correct’ than candid, honest or funny. He was the only columnist who could make you laugh out loud on the Tube. He once said the Severn Bridge between Wales and England connects Wales to the ‘First World’. Back in 2018, when even many feminists were going along with the trans lunacy, he temporarily identified as a ‘young, black, trans chihuahua’. Hilariously, Pink News published a thundering editorial accusing him of ‘dehumanising trans people’ illustrated with a split pic of Liddle and a black chihuahua.

He was an implacable foe of what most people call ‘woke’ but which he called ‘wank’. He heaped derision on the fake left that dominates our institutions. He once said the reason he used the term ‘bien-pensants’ is because it’s more acceptable than ‘cunt’. He ripped the piss out of leftish elites who are ‘aloof from the country’ and understand neither ‘its aspirations’ nor ‘its gripes’. Like many of us, he was heartened by Brexit, which he viewed as a ‘rebellion of the poor’. ‘One can be on the wrong side of history until history suddenly and rather capriciously switches sides, as it did on 23 June [2016]’, he said of the EU referendum and the working classes’ wrestling of the historic narrative from the bien-pensants / cunts. I once gave a talk on Brexit in Kent and heard wheezing whoops of approval from the audience: it was Rod.

Naturally, he fell foul of the tyranny of literalism. When Islamist extremist Anjem Choudary said radical Muslim Brits should become suicide bombers, Liddle agreed – so long as ‘they blow themselves up… a decent distance from where the rest of us live. Tower Hamlets, for example.’ The media fury was intense, as if he were literally inciting suicide bombings rather than, you know, making a joke. When he wrote a column wondering whether he’d sleep with Harriet Harman, a Guardian columnist said his ‘diatribe’ was ‘so disgusting’ that it caused her to ‘flush violently all the way from my breastbone to my forehead’ until she ‘looked like [she] had German measles’. Rarely had the narcissistic insanity of cancel culture been so starkly on display.

What ‘progressives’ really hated about Rod is that he met their earnestness not with indulgence but with scoffing. He was the nation’s cocked eyebrow. He was the irreverent guffaw of everyday Britain. He was a bawdy iconoclast of the northern working class, wielding his unflashy, quite Methodist scepticism against the crank ideologies of the rich and dumb who had colonised the left. The fools called him ‘far right’ but he was more properly left than any of them – a lifelong Thatcher sceptic and devotee of the Social Democratic Party who longed for the restoration of the common sense of our once great kingdom.

To my mind, his ribald humour and natural-born non-conformism made him the heir to the likes of John Wilkes, the pamphlet-publishing tearaway of the 18th century. He carried a flickering candle for the great English traditions of satire and ‘lower-class’ heresy in an era in which you could find yourself cast out for saying lesbians don’t have todgers. Rod worried about lesbians. He once told me that, courtesy of the trans madness, lesbians seem to be an endangered species, like red kites. Truth is, the likes of Rod were the true endangered species: Englishmen who speak as they see, and damn the consequences.

A little-known fact about Rod is that he was kind. He was fantastic company. His throaty laugh could carry an entire night. He was a great friend of spiked, often appearing on our podcasts and bigging up our writers. He and I were due to speak about anti-Semitism in Leeds just six weeks ago. He messaged me to say he couldn’t do it, because ‘I’m not in a good way’. ‘Get well’, I replied, and now I wish I’d said more. Everyone at spiked is deeply saddened by his death and we offer our heartfelt condolences to his wife, Alicia, and his children, Wilder, Tyler and Emmy.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.