On speaking ill of the dead

Rod Liddle, civility and the limits of posthumous generosity

It is generally considered poor form to speak ill of the dead, and as a general rule I tend to agree. To revel too much in the misfortune of others is a sure sign that, in life at least, the individual in question had a significant hold over your imagination. The obituarist doth protest too much.

Yet I can’t help but notice that we are frequently asked to go even further. Not only is it considered wrong to speak ill of the dead, but the rest of us are expected to look on in stony silence as the deceased is canonised. I can’t be the only person who finds this annoying.

Especially grating are the reminiscences about how somebody shared “many disagreements” with the departed yet still managed to rub along rather well with them. It is supposed to impart the qualities of civility and decency to both the recently deceased and the person doing the sentimentalising. It is, in short, a humblebrag: look how open-minded and civilised I am, unlike the rest of you barbarians.

Yet it is really nothing of the sort. You will almost always notice that the “many things” the two parties supposedly agreed to disagree about were never that important to either of them to begin with. This is especially true of those who choose to embroil themselves in the so-called culture war.

It may be unfortunate that more of us cannot get along civilly despite our political differences. One can find myriad examples of this, especially online, where disagreements about things as trivial as how to butter a slice of toast have a tendency to flare up into lifelong feuds.

But it is only unfortunate up to a point. I for one would not dream of telling a black person that they should “rub along civilly” with somebody who regards black people as genetically inferior.

In the end it is perfectly reasonable to feel some level of revulsion—not to say disdain—toward those whose opinions seem to jar with our own sense of basic decency. To insist on a few fundamental red lines cannot simply be dismissed as a purity test.

What you will usually find amid all the self-admiring prattle about “civilised conversations” is that those using the term agree on rather more of the fundamentals than they let on. They have red lines too. The interesting question is where they choose to draw them. Posthumous backslapping can therefore tell us rather less about the dead than about those doing the backslapping.

All of which came to mind this week while reading some of the oleaginous tributes to Rod Liddle. Liddle, it should be remembered, made a handsome living churning out reactionary agitprop for right-wing magazines and newspapers.

Much of it was nasty, deliberately offensive and plainly designed to provoke an angry backlash. He described black teenagers as “human filth” before informing his readers that African-Caribbean Britons had given the country “rap music” and “goat curry”; mocked Rosie Duffield as “sobbing and oppressed” after she spoke publicly about domestic abuse; and advised sufferers of ME to take a walk and “maybe see a shrink”.

Funnily enough, one of Liddle’s final Spectator columns fantasised graphically about smashing liberals’ throats, yet some of the posthumous tributes are now extolling him as an exemplar of genial disagreement.

This, of course, is how the pundit game works nowadays: you say or write something outrageous and wait for the people taking umbrage to distribute it for you.

One of his prior targets, Rosie Duffield, even penned a column for UnHerd in which she sought to draw attention to the gap between Liddle’s pugilistic public persona and his congenial relations with several gender-critical feminists.

“Once we got to know each other, he never stopped apologising for that column, which I had long forgotten.”

Which raises the question of whether the bylines that appeared in the Spectator and elsewhere were really a reflection of the man’s inner life at all. Perhaps they were: some of the radioactive comments Liddle was caught posting on a Millwall football forum would suggest as much. But if it was all an act, is that really much better? It would mean he spent his days churning out bilious half-truths for money and then apologising for them in private. Yes, he said appalling things publicly, but you should have seen him over lunch. With friends like these, etc.