Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle (born 1 April 1960) is an English journalist, and an associate editor of The Spectator.

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

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

Although Liddle considered becoming a teacher, he decided against it on the grounds that he "could not remotely conceive of not trying to shag the kids".

Liddle also 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.

Liddle instead returned to journalism after graduating from the LSE, and was taken on as a trainee producer by the BBC.

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

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

At 16, he was a member of the Socialist Workers Party, remaining a member for about a year, and was a supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) around the same time.

He attended the London School of Economics (LSE) as a mature student, where he read Social Psychology.

His 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.

Liddle was appointed editor of the Today programme in 1998.

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

To this end he hired journalists from outside the BBC.

Among the most controversial was Andrew Gilligan, who joined from The Sunday Telegraph in 1999.

Under Liddle's editorship, Today won a number of awards: a Sony Silver in 2002 for reports by Barnie Choudhury and Mike Thomson into the causes of race riots in the north of England; a Sony Bronze in 2003 for an investigation by Angus Stickler into paedophile priests; and an Amnesty International Media Award in 2003 for Gilligan's investigation into the sale of illegal landmines, an investigation that attracted a lengthy legal action.

While working for Today, Liddle also wrote a column for The Guardian.

On 25 September 2002, referring to a march organised by the Countryside Alliance in defence of fox hunting, 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.

His column led The Daily Telegraph to accuse Liddle of bias and of endangering democracy.

The BBC concluded that 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.

He resigned on 30 September 2002.

He 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.

The BBC replied that the decision was made for editorial reasons.

His published works include Too Beautiful for You (2003), Love Will Destroy Everything (2007), The Best of Liddle Britain (co-author, 2007) and the semi-autobiographical Selfish Whining Monkeys (2014).

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

Liddle began his career at the South Wales Echo, then worked for the Labour Party, and later joined the BBC.

Gilligan's 29 May 2003 report on Today—that the British government had "sexed up" the intelligence dossier on Iraq, a report broadcast after Liddle had left the programme—began a chain of events that included the death in July that year of David Kelly, the weapons inspector who was Gilligan's source, and the subsequent Hutton Inquiry, a public inquiry into the circumstances of Kelly's death.

Liddle defended Gilligan throughout the controversy.

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

The complaints that followed it included that he should not have allowed British National Party leader Nick Griffin to speak unchallenged.

Ofcom adjudicated that the programme was fair, and the complaints were dismissed.

In The New Fundamentalists, a programme in the Dispatches strand broadcast in March 2006, Liddle, a member of the Church of England, condemned the rise of evangelicalism and Christian fundamentalism in Britain, especially the anti-Darwinian influence of such beliefs in faith schools; and criticised the social teaching and cultural influence of this strand of Christianity.

The documentary was criticised by David Hilborn of the Evangelical Alliance, and by Rupert Kaye of the Association of Christian Teachers.

In The Trouble with Atheism, Liddle argued that atheists can be as dogmatic and intolerant as the adherents of religion.

Liddle said, "History has shown us that it's not religion that's the problem, but any system of thought that insists that one group of people are inviolably in the right, whereas the others are in the wrong and must somehow be punished."

Liddle argued, for example, that eugenic policies are the logical consequence of dogmatic adherence to Darwinism.

Liddle subsequently argued, after Griffin was acquitted in February 2006 of two charges of inciting racial hatred, that the charges were "too ephemeral, too dependent upon the mindset and political disposition of the juror, and upon what is happening outside of the courtroom, on the streets."

In April 2007, Liddle presented a two-hour-long theological documentary called The Bible Revolution where he looked back in history to William Tyndale's translation of the Bible in English and the effect this had upon the English language.

On 21 May 2007, he presented an hour-long documentary, Battle for the Holy Land: Love Thy Neighbour, about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.

He visited Bethlehem, Hebron and the Israeli settlement of Tekoa.