The best word for my feelings about Rod Liddle’s death is one that Rod was occasionally heard to use himself. Fuck.
Rod was my editor at the Today programme, the most exciting boss I’ve ever had. He hired me, from a newspaper, to be part of a team he was building because he wanted reporters who would lift up more rocks and break more stories than the mainstream, central BBC correspondents he mostly had to use. ‘They’re spokesmen for the spokesmen, mate,’ he told me. More than one of those people indeed ended up as PRs for the official bodies they’d just been reporting on.
Rod was always going to be too big for the BBC – where, despite his programme’s power, he was a long way down the hierarchy, with the stale breath of about six layers of suits over his shoulder
The spokesmen for the spokesmen – and, to be fair, several much better BBC journalists – hated Rod (and some, by extension, me) because they genuinely felt it was not the BBC’s business to be breaking news, because they were getting less airtime on the BBC’s top show, and because Rod was so spectacularly rude about them.
Today and its TV counterpart, Breakfast News, then shared the same open-plan office at Television Centre, separated only by a row of possibly plastic pot-plants. On my first day, making sure that everyone could hear, Rod stood on Today’s side of the Berlin Wall. ‘That side, television,’ he said. ‘This side, journalism.’ I’m hearing there’s a vacancy for the breakfast TV editorship, I said with mock innocence. ‘I’d rather clean the toilets,’ said Rod, loudly.
It was thrilling to join the intense world of the programme, with its 20-hour days and its news impact perhaps then at its absolute height. Some of the stories I and the other reporters worked on dominated the headlines, won us awards, and sounded early warnings which, now they have been ignored, have helped humble the country (I did a lot of stories exposing the increasingly Potemkin nature of the armed forces, for instance.)
The show’s ruthless demands also gave Rod the ideal excuse for his complex private life. We booked the pre-dawn cars to get people in, so we knew which of his love-nests to collect him from each day, but were strictly forbidden from passing this data to his future wife, who would call in, unconvinced by claims of a sudden editorial crisis. ‘I know where he is! He’s with that bloody [name of current girlfriend]!’ she would shout down the phone at us.
Today’s enemies, external and internal, had their moment when Alastair Campbell, now a claimed apostle of ‘disagreeing agreeably,’ disagreed so disagreeably with a report of mine about his sexed-up Iraq dossier that David Kelly, the man who blew the whistle to me and other BBC journalists, lost his life.
Rod had left the programme the year before, after a column he wrote was deemed to breach BBC impartiality. But at a time when I and the BBC were silenced by our participation in the Hutton inquiry, his was a staunch and powerful voice against the outrage of the affair and of the inquiry proceedings. The judge produced an inquisition of the BBC rather than of the government, and sought to hold journalists, with all the difficulties they face, to a standard that he did not appear to demand of, for instance, government dossiers. Rod’s advocacy was one reason why Hutton’s verdict never commanded public confidence, why Campbell did not get the win he sought, and why the consequences for the BBC, though not nil, were less severe than feared.
Rod was blamed in some quarters for hiring me, but other more perceptive critics noted that as well as being edgy, his Today was also rigorous. Although my story was correct, I made, as I admitted at the time, a slip in an early live interview – a claim which turned out to be true, but which I didn’t have enough evidence for, and wrongly attributed to Dr Kelly. That gave Campbell a handle to clutch, but it probably wouldn’t have happened – a stricter script for this live would have been insisted on – if Rod had been in charge.
Rod was always going to be too big for the BBC – where, despite his programme’s power, and unlike a newspaper editor, he was a long way down the hierarchy, with the stale breath of about six layers of suits over his shoulder. But it’s quite wrong to pigeonhole him politically. The column that got him sacked from Today was written for the Guardian and attacked the Tory party. His only real mission was epater la bourgeoisie, to provoke the priggish. Thankfully, social media created marvellous new fountains of biens-pensants who could be utterly relied on to take Rod’s bait. I shall miss him and so, I suspect, will they.
