ROD LIDDLE
How smoking saved my life
from this state for the environmental dam-
age they cause,’ she instructed, with all the
refulgent sanctimony and humourlessness
of a holy imbecile. I think New Hampshire
— which is indeed lovely — should perhaps
change its motto from ‘Live Free Or Die’
to ‘Don’t Do Anything At All, You Fascist’.
But it was in the end cheering to have one’s
life saved by a cigarette.
The Budget was one of the many annoy-
ances and impositions I absented myself
from by turning my phone off for the entire-
ty of my holiday. The genuinely mental
Jenny Tonge was another. For whom the bell
Tonges, etc. The Liberal Democrat baroness
is perhaps the most fervid of our new breed
of affluent middle-class leftie Jew-haters.When the Israeli Defence Force launched a
major relief effort to aid the victims of the
Haiti earthquake in 2010, Jen accused them
of ‘harvesting’ their organs, thus invoking
the old Jewish blood libel business. And
now, with the murder of 11 worshippers at
a synagogue in Pittsburgh, she wasted no
time in blaming the Israeli state for hav-
ing provoked the outrage. She is a foul and
contemptible woman and quite possibly
unhinged — but in a sense she was doing
only what so many do whenever some hor-
rible event occurs: appropriating it for her
own political agenda.Our readiness to grab hold of anything
to support our own point of view, no matter
how absurd the connection, has been made
more evident by social media, but was not
caused by it. It was always there, one sup-
poses. And it happens, even- handedly, on the
left and the right: everything that happens is
grist to our own little idiotic mill.
I mentioned this polarisation, this reluc-
tance to engage with objective or even
contingent truth, a few weeks back, when
discussing the case of the US Justice Brett
Kavanaugh and his alleged involvement in
the sexual assault of a woman — and the
response to the article online was fairly hos-
tile for the simple reason that I did not say
Kavanaugh is innocent and his accusers are
politically motivated scumbags.
I get the same response on the rare occa-
sions I defend current Labour policies: not a
disagreement about the points made, but the
insistence that, as a consequence, I am use-
less at my job and not worth reading (usu-
ally by people who the previous week were
cheering from the rafters). A similar point
was raised by my colleague Matthew Parris
recently. He is often asked why he contin-
ues to work for a magazine which publishes
stuff by horrible people like James Deling-
pole and me. The notion being, again, that
only one point of view is acceptable and one
shouldn’t associate with people who see the
world differently.
It is a bizarre and numbing conceit and
yet very prevalent. I am delighted Matthew
writes for The Spectator, because he uses lan-
guage beautifully and I value the fact that he
has a different opinion to my own. Because
he may be right. I may indeed be a nincom-
poop. And so might he. That is what we both
share, I hope — a Burkean sense of doubt
and uncertainty. We might not be right.
As soon as I got off my plane back from
the States, I made for Gatwick’s tiny smoking
area. I got into conversation with an elder-
ly chap who told me proudly, as he lit his
fag, that he had been smoking since he was- ‘Good for you!’ I cheered. ‘And all well
now?’ His face fell a little. ‘Well, I have lung
cancer and emphysema. But there we are.’
SPECTATOR.CO.UK/RODLIDDLE
The argument continues online.I
almost got killed this week. I went for
a very early morning walk in a New
Hampshire forest, in the icy rain. Black
coat, black hood, black trousers. And so the
hunter saw this hunched, awkward, sham-
bling black beast, stumbling over sodden
logs, and immediately raised his rifle to his
eye and cocked the trigger. One thing, and
one thing only, saved me. The armed cracker,
looking through his telescopic lens, thought
to himself: ‘Hey, it’s a bear — but it’s...
smoking a cigarette?’ And so, at the last sec-
ond, refrained from pulling the trigger.
I had this brush with death related to me,
with great glee, by the people who ran the
bed and breakfast where I was staying. I’d
been quite oblivious. Word had got round
the village quite quickly about this deranged
Englishman wandering through the birch
and maple in the teeming rain at ten to
seven in the morning, apparently pulling
off a remarkably accurate bear impersona-
tion right in the middle of the state’s official
bear season. My hosts were outraged less on
my behalf than because of the fact that the
bloodthirsty hick with his rifle didn’t have
a licence to shoot bears. That could get him
into big trouble, I was told, by means of con-
solation. Thank Christ I smoke, then.
And praise the Lord too that my choice
of cigarettes is Superkings, which are very
long and thus more clearly visible. They
were the reason I was taking a walk in the
woods, in fact. You can’t smoke in New Eng-
land within about a mile of anywhere people
might be, and so I took to the forest for my
first gasper of the day, thinking this would be
about the only place I could do so without
offending their recently acquired sensitivi-
ties. I was wrong about that, too, though. I
had been walking on Audubon land, an area
managed by conservationists, and smoking
is prohibited there too, presumably in case
the sight or smell of a cigarette upsets the
woodchucks or chickadees and they take
out a class action suit.
The day before all this happened my wife
was buying a drink for our daughter and
made the terrible mistake of requesting a
straw. You’d have thought she’d demanded
the stringing up of all black folk from the
filthy look on the little SJW barmaid’s face.
‘We are in the process of banning straws
I think New Hampshire should change
its motto from ‘Live Free Or Die’ to
‘Don’t Do Anything At All, You Fa scist’‘Actually, I support Brexit but I love the
atmosphere at middle-class protests.’