Rod Liddle (1960-2026) I knew him as a youthful anti-racist
Rod Liddle, a columnist for the Murdoch Sunday Times and the Spectator, has died at 66.
Liddle’s journalism in recent years has been sexist, laddish etc. His Islamophobia is well known.
One might be tempted to ask where it all went wrong for Liddle. After all he worked for the Labour Party as a speech writer between 1983 and 1987 and Edited the Today programme on Radio 4 until he departed after the BBC complained about the (left-wing) politics of one of his Guardian articles.
I knew Liddle as a teenager when he lived in Nunthorpe a well to do area of Middlesbrough. He and some mates had formed a punk band, Dangerbird, and he appeared at the local SWP branch meetings occasionally to see if the band could get involved with Rock Against Racism. I was then student organiser of the IS/SWP on Teesside, and hence probably more in touch with what he wanted to do than some in the meetings. He claimed in The Guardian (5th June 2002) that he was briefly a member of the SWP. Memory suggests ‘supporter’ would have been more accurate.
At the start of punk a band playing on Teesside would have struggled to find, perhaps not an audience, but people prepared to try and sort out gigs. I think I heard Dangerbird play but have no memory of what they were like. I suspect that means they were at least not terrible or I would have remembered. However Liddle in the Guardian article claims they were awful, and so did a helpful post from a Labour Party member who recalled a gig at the local Labour Club.
My memory of Liddle was that he seemed quite pleased with himself, but then he was young and confident, and perhaps to a degree entitled to be so, given he had taken the initiative to start a band.
Of course he’s far from the first person to have had a left-wing youth and turn into an unpleasant right-winger in later years. It’s a well-travelled path. It reflects the pressures society exerts on people who want to ‘get on’ but it also underlines how difficult the left find it in most generations to hold on to talented young people before they end up turning sour in older age.
Kmflett's Blog 
If he was SWP, he was a Trotskyist and there are plenty of stories of opposition to actually existing socialism and right pivots from that group (Melanie Phillips, Christopher Hitchens). Still sorry you lost a friend.
I don’t remember Liddle’s band. Mind you I can’t remember most of the Teesside punk bands- The Barbarians for sure and the band that had a single called TV Pox- I think they played upstairs in the Empire a couple of times and certainly played the RAR day festival somewhere in Redcar.