I can't abide Rod Liddle. I might agree with him sometimes, but there's something about his self-consciously laddish personna which grates.

That said, his piece in this week's Spectator on media flim-flam is well worth a read - not least for this great story:

Many years ago I was a youthful producer on BBC Radio Four’s World at One; it was a good time to be a journalist because the world was in joyous tumult with the end of the Cold War. I was extraordinarily proud of myself to have secured for my programme an interview with Georgi Arbatov, head of the Soviet Institute for American Studies and an adviser to every Soviet president from Khrushchev to Mikhail Gorbachev. What a coup! As the Soviet Union dissolved and geopolitical relations were being turned on their head, I had tracked down and persuaded one of the five or six most crucial and significant people in the world to talk to us live on air, in the lead slot. It was a good interview, too. Georgi said he wanted better relations with the USA and was in favour of world peace and disarmament. ‘We must all now be frentz, yes?’ he asked at the end, with benevolent rhetoric. His broadcasted comments were duly written up in the following day’s broadsheet newspapers.

But as I discovered when I spoke to him after the interview, they were not the views of Georgi Arbatov, close adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev, but the views of Georgi Arbatov, an insurance salesman from Minsk. Thank God, I mused later, reading the delighted reaction to his comments from Western politicians, that he was not a hawkish insurance salesman from Minsk: the missiles might have been leaving the silos.