Can someone drop a bomb on Rod Liddle please? Just hypothesising

Adding his trademark nuanced analysis to the debate over Bob Vylan’s Glastonbury rabble-rousing, the Spectator‘s Rod Liddle has proposed… bombing the festival.

The rent-a-gob columnist writes in the magazine this week how a “small yield nuclear weapon, such as the American W89, dropped on Glastonbury in late June would immediately remove from our country almost everybody who is hugely annoying”.

“You would see a marked reduction in the keffiyeh klan, for a start, and all those middle-class Extinction Rebellion protestors would find, in a nanosecond, that their rebellion was pointless, because extinction had arrived even more summarily than they expected,” he writes. “Go on, glue yourselves to that, Poppy and Oliver.”

Niftily circumventing a knock on the door from the plod, however, Liddle adds: “I am not saying that we should do this, of course – it would be a horrible, psychopathic thing to do. I am merely hypothesising, in a slightly wistful kinda way.”

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But his inevitable attack on the BBC for airing Bob Vylan’s rants (“It is every bit as simple as flicking a switch, in that all they had to do was flick a switch”) are a little at odds with his other free-speech views on who the Beeb should be giving airtime to.

In a Spectator column earlier this year titled “What has the BBC got against Tommy Robinson?”, he pondered precisely what it could be about the much-convicted, violent football hooligan that was stopping the national broadcaster fawning over him.

“How he’s been treated by the state is what we might expect in Russia, frankly,” he moaned. “And just to go back to the BBC, why do they always say Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, also known as Tommy Robinson? They never say, when they’re introducing a transgender athlete, and this is Laurence Smith, also known as Loretta Jeannie Smith.”

Bob Vylan should have had the plug pulled on immediately; Stephen Yaxley-Lennon should, presumably, have his own prime-time chat show to air his views on immigration and Islam. Could someone drop a bomb on Rod Liddle? Merely hypothesising, in a slightly wistful kinda way.