Spectator's 'bomb Glastonbury' rant is toxic. Who will call it out?

The National

9 hours ago

WHEN you're a washed-up relic of British journalism, there's one way left to get some of the attention you so desperately crave: puke up some bile and hope people hear the hacking.
Enter Rod Liddle, the tabloid fossil and professional outrage merchant.
Due to a willingness to spit hatred – and having predictably weathered repeated storms around his racism and misogyny (they were all just jokes the rest of us were too stupid to get) – Liddle's slop is still being pumped out into the public sphere by various right-wing outlets: The Times, The Sun, The Spectator.
His latest diatribe is aimed at the quarter of a million people who dare to attend Glastonbury festival.
One on Glasto, one on Brighton, and the UK would soon begin its recovery.
✍️Rod Liddlehttps://t.co/wpoRmSsKBm — The Spectator (@spectator) July 3, 2025
Whether Liddle has ever been to the event which has become a cultural institution is unclear. It is also irrelevant.
Reality be damned. Liddle is perfectly capable of imagining exactly what it's like, thank you very much – and he wants to bomb it.
Whipped into a froth by his own imagination and enamoured with his own perceived brilliance, his latest outburst – printed in The Spectator – sees the former BBC man suggest dropping a 'small yield nuclear weapon' on Glastonbury festival.
That, Liddle claims, would 'immediately remove from our country almost everybody who is hugely annoying'.
Spectator editor Michael Gove has admitted to taking cocaine on 'several occasions', but is not the type of 'druggie' which Rod Liddle is talking about
Apparently forgetting his own editor Michael Gove's proclivity for a line or two, Liddle suggests that bombing Glastonbury would rid the UK of 'druggies', 'liberal politicians', and 'tattooed blue-haired hags', along with a much longer list of people he views as undesirables.
Of course, this is actually high satire, don't you know.
No doubt for legal reasons, he does offer a fig leaf, writing: 'I am not saying that we should do this … I am merely hypothesising, in a slightly wistful kinda way.'
You can tell by the spelling of 'kinda' that he is being wistful.
Who among us hasn't longingly day-dreamed of rounding up hundreds of thousands of people and killing them in one fell swoop? Satirically, of course.
READ MORE: Glasgow locals give verdict on Keir Starmer's Labour after one year in power
Yet, when you next hear the predictable lament that social media has become 'too toxic', the debate 'too polarised', the misogyny too much for young women to brave entering the political scene, it is a safe bet you won't hear anyone so much as whisper that any blame could be laid at Liddle's door, let alone the publications that print his unfiltered hatred.
No. The Times, The Sun, The Spectator, Liddle himself. None of them will get so much as a mention – despite his casual description of women as 'hags', or the racially-charged suggestion that a BBC staffer without the 'merest vestige of sentience' would be someone with a name like 'Ayesha'.
As long as Liddle's hatred is directed at the right people – his suggestion that Brighton should also be bombed hints at exactly who that is – the British media will continue happily plodding along, pointing fingers at everyone but themselves for the world's wrongs.