I am having lunch at the Regency with my great friend Dr Rosy Carrick, when my phone starts going ping in my pocket at a crazy rate. I am currently trapped in a WhatsApp group for a party I’m probably not going to go to so at first assume it’s that but the frequency of notifications is beginning to suggest urgency, and it might be something else.
It is. What is happening is that friends across the country are alerting me to the fact that Rod Liddle has died. Dr C, who is clearly not as familiar with my work as I would like her to be, generates an AI summary of the situation.
“Rod Liddle and Nicholas Lezard”, begins the response, “are British journalists known for a long-running, one-sided public animosity.” It went on to give some details of the feud, correct insofar as they went, but missing out on some of the details, and much of the scope: it fails to mention, for instance, that Liddle once called me – I forget the exact words, but these are close enough – “the most stupid person in the world”, which in a sense is an honour no one can take away from me.
Anyway, Liddle is no longer in a position to retract it, and nor would he wish to if he were, I hope. “Lezard has occasionally referenced the ongoing hostility in his columns,” Google AI goes on to say, “noting that recalling Liddle’s dislike for him remains a source of amusement.” Well, no longer, except with the soft, sad smile of retrospect. No longer will he break the hacks’ convention of never even threatening to sue a fellow hack; no longer will he be able to remind me that he had many, many times more readers than I do. (I would retort that only 40 people saw the Sex Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester in 1976, but that they all went on to form bands.)
This makes me feel strangely bereft. I can’t say I liked him – except when I first met him, not long after he’d been sacked by Radio 4’s Today programme for expressing a political opinion – about the Countryside Alliance, if I recall correctly, and their being so ghastly that they reminded you of why you voted Labour. This was not the Liddle he turned into, when, for reasons we can only speculate about, he began making outrageous statements – that it was impossible for a cartoonist to draw a black person without being racist, or that he’d sleep with his female students if he was a teacher, for example. My retort about the cartoonist point was to remind him of Franklin, the black cartoon character in “Peanuts”, who does not exhibit any racial characteristic except the shade of his skin. As for his remarks about sleeping with schoolchildren, the internet reacted en masse to that, not that either of our reactions hurt his career in the slightest.
I was writing a radio column for the Independent on Sunday at the time of Liddle’s dismissal, and I stuck up for him; when I met him, shortly afterwards, he thanked me and said he owed me a drink, not a promise he followed up on but such promises are not necessarily meant to be. It was interesting, and instructive, to watch him shift his political position.
But he is gone, and I feel that something is missing. Who is Batman without the Joker, Holmes without Moriarty, Tom without Jerry? Also, there is the non-trivial matter of a death before its time, and the creation of a widow and now fatherless children. He was 66 which, as they say, is no age. Apparently he didn’t look after himself; neither do I, if it comes to that, and there is every chance I shall be joining him on the celestial editorial spike soon enough.
Reaction among my friends differed widely: there were those who maintained that someone who went out of his way to court approval by using outrageous provocation against the bien-pensant does not earn the traditional de mortuis nil nisi bonum treatment; there were those who said now was not the time to pile on his memory with scorn; and there were even a few – two of them very good friends – who said he was a brilliant writer and that they will really, really miss him.
As for me, I think it is possible to hold two contrary opinions in your head at the same time. True, he loathed me, but the way he expressed that loathing was so ludicrous that it was impossible to be wounded by it. In a similar vein, I was recently accused of “cupidity” by someone who really ought to know better. To save you the bother of looking it up if you don’t know the word, it means “love of money”, and although it is true I have been known to cadge the odd lunch, or even pint, this hardly makes me Elon Musk.
Later on, another friend, who knows my work and life very well, rang to tell me a story about the time she was engaged by Liddle in conversation, and it soon became clear that he was giving her the glad eye. She worked out who he was and said: “I think I ought to tell you I used to go out with Nicholas Lezard.” This story is so perfect I can scarcely believe it’s true. She says this remark took the wind out of his sails somewhat. And, for the first time in my life, and too late, I felt sorry for him.
[Further reading: Before Count Binface, there was Catmando]