How do you produce the type of person who cares deeply while seemingly not giving a damn? With great difficulty, it turns out. Plenty of people imagine that they can say what they think, but very few do. For most people, some real or imaginary social punishment lies on the horizon: a dinner they won’t be invited to; a club of which they fear they will never become a member.

Rod Liddle was one of the happy few who was free. He was free to say what he thought. He was free to voice unpopular opinions and – often harder – he was free to voice popular opinions. When the whole world seemed to be falling on his head he had a perfectly contented attitude towards it. I remember a few years back when there was a Rod storm (always caused by people who don’t read The Spectator taking some line – usually a joke – out of context), I asked him how he was doing. If I remember rightly the evening news had actually done a segment in which an interviewer had read out portions of Rod’s latest column to people on the street, gauging their reactions. These were almost universally bewildered or appalled, because that is what the broadcaster wanted them to be.

In a society in which everyone is meant to say the same thing, the person who refuses to do so is at a premium

In a society in which everyone is meant to say the same thing, the person who refuses to do so is at a premium

Anyway, Rod was fine, of course. Though he did tell me that his latest way of realising he had set off the........

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