As tributes poured in for Rod Liddle, the Sunday Times and Sun columnist who has died at the age of 66, they were markedly coy and sanitised. Paradoxically, those were the exact deficiencies obituaries praised Liddle for avoiding – they said he shot from the hip and ruffled feathers, remorselessly attacked the liberal establishment and was ebullient. Michael Gove called him “special and brave”. But brave in the face of what? Attacked the liberal establishment how?

This delicacy was particularly noticeable in a segment on Radio 4’s Today programme, of which Liddle was editor in the 90s, between Justin Webb and Amol Rajan. “If there was a golden thread that connected the person you saw back then with the person of a few weeks ago,” Webb said, “it was a distrust of authority.” But Liddle’s targets as a columnist were not the authorities. Often they were Muslims and immigrants, transgender people and chronic illness sufferers, African-Caribbean men from Harlesden. He did not attack the establishment, he attacked the marginalised, constantly.

There is sometimes a dilemma in how we process death. Decently, we seek not to speak ill of the dead, and certainly one hopes to never increase the grief of those who loved them. But does that mean we are also duty-bound not to discuss more uncomfortable issues? Here I feel the dilemma.

I was friends with Rod Liddle in the 90s. He was a different Rod then. The principal target of his satire was himself. He would lampoon guys having affairs, guys who were a shambles, guys who had run out of road. If there was any ethno-caricaturing, it read as a footnote to a worldview in which nobody was........

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