FUTONS AND FUTILITY...

When Rod Liddle first tasted success he decided to invest in a futon. ‘What’s a futon?’ asked his working-class dad. Liddle explained: ‘Well, Dad, it’s a sort of wooden platform, on top of which you lay a very densely stuffed thin mattress. It’s from Japan.’ The phone line seemed to go dead for a while. Then Liddle’s dad, sounding incredibly sad, said: ‘Why don’t you ****ing live in the real world?’

Part-autobiography, part-polemic, part state-ofthe-nation-address, Liddle’s

Selfish, Whining Monkeys is a howl of rage and despair at what has happened to Britain between his dad’s wartime generation and his own futon generation.

How did the nation that defeated Hitler become so needy, self-indulgent, hypochondriacal, spendthrift and easily offended? Why can’t our children just be content with one crappy, mildly disappointing toy at Christmas, like they used to be in the good old days?

At times, his views are so reactionary it’s hard to believe he’s a Labourvoting Millwall fan. Children do better when their mother is at home rather than at work; teachers should be treated with more respect and the best education requires both rigour and competitiveness; lax divorce laws bought us more freedom but at a terrible cost to social stability.

But the great thing about Liddle is his politics are wildly inconsistent and therefore delightfully unpredictable. When he talks about tax, welfare or foxhunting, he sounds like a hard-Left campaigner. When he talks about the law – he agrees with Shakespeare’s Dick The Butcher: ‘Let’s kill all the lawyers’ – he could almost be an anarchist.

He makes remarks he knows will get him into trouble. But he says he just can’t help it. Besides, it’s his knack of pushing his columns to the edge of appalling taste which makes his journalism so compulsive.

Wait till the anti-paedophile crusaders read what he says about the sexual mores of the Seventies (‘Stuff happened. And the fact that 99.9% of it was entirely consensual – I would guess – should be discounted?’)

This book more than justifies Liddle’s status as one of Britain’s funniest, most daring columnists.