I only met Rod Liddle a few times, though at The Spectator and the Sunday Times I worked alongside him and to a large degree in his shadow. There was an element of reading Rod that was like reading Viz in my teenage years – a little bit naughty, the schoolboy yelling ‘bum’ at a junior school teacher. They were the people doing harm and Rod was the exemplar of his journalistic generation, yelling that the emperor has no clothes. One of my favourite bits of writing by Rod came in lockdown when he recounted buying the second case that week of Sauvignon Blanc. The podium each week was nearly always Rod and Douglas Murray, a similarly clear-eyed figure with a scalpel for a pen, and one other.