Rod Liddle Net Worth

Background and career

Roderick Edwin Liddle (1 April 1960 – 2 August 2026) was a British journalist and broadcaster. He was an editor of BBC Radio 4's Today and an associate editor of The Spectator.

Liddle began his career at the South Wales Echo, then worked for the Labour Party, and later joined the BBC. He became editor of the Today programme in 1998, resigning in 2002 after his employers objected to one of his articles in The Guardian. Up until his death, he wrote for The Sunday Times, The Spectator and The Sun, among other publications. His journalism was often the subject of criticism and controversy.

Liddle wrote the short story collection Too Beautiful for You (2003) and the novel Love Will Destroy Everything (2007), along with The Best of Liddle Britain (2007) and the semi-autobiographical Selfish, Whining Monkeys (2014). He also presented television programmes, including The New Fundamentalists, The Trouble with Atheism, and Immigration Is A Time Bomb.

Roderick Edwin Liddle was born on 1 April 1960 in Sidcup, Kent. Aged eight he moved to Nunthorpe, Middlesbrough, and was educated at Laurence Jackson School and Prior Pursglove Sixth Form College, both in the nearby town of Guisborough.

Liddle attended the London School of Economics (LSE) as a mature student, reading social psychology.

Liddle's early career in journalism was with the South Wales Echo in Cardiff, where he was a general news reporter and, for a time, the rock and pop writer. He returned to journalism after graduating from the LSE, and was taken on as a trainee producer by the BBC.

Liddle was appointed editor of the BBC Radio 4 programme Today in 1998. The programme had a reputation for its political interviews, but Liddle tried, with some success, to improve the show's investigative journalism. To this end, he hired journalists from outside the BBC. Among these was Andrew Gilligan, who joined from The Sunday Telegraph in 1999. Gilligan's 29 May 2003 report on Today – that the British government had "sexed up" the intelligence dossier on Iraq, a report broadcast after Liddle had left the programme – began a chain of events that included the death in July that year of David Kelly, the weapons inspector who was Gilligan's source, and the subsequent Hutton Inquiry, a public inquiry into the circumstances of Kelly's death. Liddle defended Gilligan throughout the controversy.

Under Liddle's editorship, Today won several awards: a Sony Silver in 2002 for reports by Barnie Choudhury and Mike Thomson into the causes of race riots in the north of England; a Sony Bronze in 2003 for an investigation by Angus Stickler into paedophile priests; and an Amnesty International Media Award in 2003 for Gilligan's investigation into the sale of illegal landmines, an investigation that attracted a lengthy legal action.

While working for Today, Liddle also wrote a column for The Guardian. On 25 September 2002, referring in it to a march organised by the Countryside Alliance in defence of fox hunting, Liddle wrote that readers may have forgotten why they voted Labour in 1997, but would remember once they saw the people campaigning to save hunting. His column led The Daily Telegraph to accuse Liddle of bias and of endangering democracy. The BBC concluded that Liddle's comments breached his commitment to impartiality as a BBC programme editor, and gave him an ultimatum to stop writing his column or resign from his position on Today. He resigned on 30 September 2002. He said later that, when he was editor, he was ordered by BBC management to sack Frederick Forsyth from the programme, and speculated that it was because of Forsyth's right-wing political views. The BBC replied that the decision was made for editorial reasons.

Following his departure from Today, Liddle began writing regularly for The Spectator in October 2002. He continued to write regularly for The Spectator until his death. He continued to write for The Guardian and became an associate editor with The Spectator. He also wrote for the men's magazines GQ and Arena, and had a weekly column for The Sunday Times.

Beginning in January 2025, he presented a Saturday morning show on Times Radio.

Liddle's columns were often seen as controversial. The Press Complaints Commission (PCC) censured his blog in 2010, making him the first journalist to have a blog censured in the UK. While critics accused him of being racist and misogynist, he defended his work as provoking debate or being satirical.

In August 2009, in his Spectator blog he wrote about Harriet Harman, deputy leader of the Labour Party, in unflattering terms. Liddle began the article by asking: "So – Harriet Harman, then. Would you? I mean after a few beers obviously, not while you were sober." Tanya Gold wrote in The Guardian that it was a "tissue-thin polemic" and pointing out that it was The Spectator's cover story that week. In The Observer nearly two months later, Rachel Cooke recalled finding Liddle's piece "disgusting". Cooke went on to say: "I would still like to do something really unpleasant to the man who wrote [the article]."

Liddle said two months later that the Harman column "was supposed to be a parody of guttural, base sexism", a joke he assumed readers would understand. After the negative response from Gold (and then Cooke, among other female journalists) he continued: "And then I suppose I came to the conclusion – gradually – that I must have got it wrong." In June 2014, he said that of those he had offended, Harman was the one person to whom he would apologise.

Comments on race, religion and colonialism

In November 2009, again for The Spectator website, Liddle offered "a quick update on what the Muslim savages are up to", a brief article about the stoning to death of a 20-year-old woman in Somalia after she was accused of adultery, and the similar death of a 13-year-old the year before. He made remarks, considered sarcastic, that read: "Incidentally, many Somalis have come to Britain as immigrants recently, where they are widely admired for their strong work ethic, respect for the law and keen, piercing, intelligence."

In December 2009, on his Spectator blog, Liddle referred to two black music producers, Brandon Jolie and Kingsley Ogundele, who had plotted to kill Jolie's 15-year-old pregnant girlfriend, as "human filth" and said the incident was not an anomaly. He continued:

The overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community. Of course, in return, we have rap music, goat curry and a far more vibrant and diverse understanding of cultures which were once alien to us. For which, many thanks.

When he was accused of racism, Liddle said he was instead engaging in a debate about multiculturalism. In March 2010, the PCC upheld a complaint against Liddle, who became the first journalist to be censured over the contents of a blog, because he had not been able to prove his claim about the crime statistics. After the publication of London crime figures in June 2010, The Sunday Telegraph suggested Liddle was largely right on some of his claims, but that he was probably wrong on his claims about knife crimes and violent sex crimes.

On 23 May 2013, Liddle wrote about the murder of soldier Lee Rigby near the Royal Artillery Barracks in Woolwich, London. In the original version of a blog article for The Spectator, he referred to the perpetrators as "two black savages". After many objections to his language use, this phrase was modified. Liddle apologised.

In a blog article for The Spectator website published shortly after the death of Nelson Mandela, Liddle wrote that the BBC coverage of his death was excessive, characterising it as "famous nice black man dies" and believing that Mandela had to "bear [the BBC's] entire self-flagellating white post-colonial bien pensant guilt." Richard Garside, director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, described him as an "attention seeking wind-up merchant".

In October 2019, Liddle penned a column in The Spectator commenting on the forthcoming December general election, which suggested that the election should be held on a Muslim holy day to reduce the Labour vote. The column was criticised by senior political figures including Chancellor of the Exchequer Sajid Javid and former Conservative Deputy Prime Minister David Lidington. Liddle defended the content as being humorous. The article also criticised the Labour MP Rosie Duffield's recent speech about her experience of trying to exit an abusive relationship; Duffield described the article as "racist and misogynistic".

Giving a speech at Durham University in December 2021, Liddle said: "It is fairly easily proven that colonialism is not remotely the major cause of Africa's problems, just as it is very easy to prove that the educational underachievement of British people of Caribbean descent or African Americans is nothing to do with institutional or structural racism." Many attendees walked out, with the speech later being described as "transphobic and racist" by the student newspaper.

Independent editor rumour and Millwall supporters' website

The Guardian reported on 8 January 2010 that the expected purchase of The Independent by Alexander Lebedev, a Russian billionaire, would be followed by the appointment of Liddle as editor. Roy Greenslade wrote on 11 January that the reports were provoking a "major internal and external revolt" by The Independent's staff and readers.

In January 2010, the press drew attention to allegedly racist and misogynist comments posted under the username "monkeymfc" – a name Liddle has used – on Millwall Online, a fan club web forum with no official connection to Millwall Football Club. Liddle attributed some of the comments to opposition fans logging in under his name to embarrass him. He later said he had written some of the posts that were being criticised. One post, in which he joked about not being able to smoke at Auschwitz, led to his being asked to explain what he meant in The Jewish Chronicle. While he said in June 2014 that his comments were taken out of context, he said that he did not regret making them. "No. Never. Absolutely not. I thought about my mates at Millwall Online, God I respect them so much more than these other people, these ghastly fucking people."

The stories about Liddle's posts on Millwall Online apparently further reduced the likelihood of his being offered the job. Finally, on 19 February, Stephen Brook of The Guardian reported that Liddle was no longer in the running for the post. Tim Luckhurst, professor of journalism at the University of Kent, argued that Liddle's prospects of editing The Independent were nullified "by the people behind a viciously intolerant campaign of liberal bigotry".

Comments in contempt of court on Stephen Lawrence trial

In November 2011, an article by Liddle for The Spectator suggested the trial of two men accused (and later convicted) of murdering Stephen Lawrence would not be fair. It was referred to the Attorney General Dominic Grieve by the judge for possible contempt of court, and he ordered the jurors not to read it. Having decided that it might have breached a court order, Grieve passed the case to the Director of Public Prosecutions. The decision that The Spectator was to be prosecuted for breaching reporting restrictions was announced on 9 May 2012, with a court hearing scheduled for 7 June, although Liddle as the author was not himself liable for prosecution. Fraser Nelson, the magazine's editor, announced that the prosecution would not be contested, and the magazine pleaded guilty at the hearing. The fine was £3,000, plus £2,000 compensation to Stephen Lawrence's parents and £625 costs.

Comments on disabled and transgender people

In January 2012, Liddle wrote that many people in the UK were "pretending to be disabled" in his column for The Sun, an opinion defended by James Delingpole. Frances Ryan in The Guardian criticised his comments.

In May 2015, the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) upheld a complaint from Trans Media Watch that Liddle had been discriminatory towards Emily Brothers, a blind and transgender Labour candidate at the 2015 general election, in two Sun columns published in December 2014 and January 2015. In commenting in the way he had Liddle had breached two sections of the editors' code.