Words Dept.: entry

I saw Rod Liddle going on about immigration on Question Time last night. He made reference to 

employees from Poland and Romania and Moldavia and all throughout the Eastern Bloc

entering the UK to work.

Hang on a minute… Moldavia? Turning to Google, as one must at such moments, I discovered that unless some crazy Eastern European has invented a time machine, it’s unlikely the Moldavians will be troubling Rod or his friends in the near future.

As Wikipedia points out, Moldavia is

An initially independent and later autonomous state, it existed from the 14th century to 1859, when it united with Wallachia as the basis of the modern Romanian state…

In fact, there haven’t been any other mentions of Moldavia in British national newspapers since the Mail on Sunday referred to the place in a travel piece about Romania on January 27, so it doesn’t appear to be a hotbed of trainee plumbers, as far as I can work out.

I previously used the word “twatosphere” to describe the clueless band of pundits, such as Jon Gaunt, who make a living out of talking utter bollocks across the 24-hour news media spectra. With his superb grasp of geography, as applied to the complex and sensitive topic of immigration, I nominate Liddle as an honorary member. Well done, Rodders!

It was also entertaining to see Liddle, in the same programme, taking the piss out of Nick Clegg over Clegg’s recent boast about making sweet Lib Dem love with up to 30 women.

Liddle’s gist was that Clegg can’t keep his sausage in his slacks. He joked that Clegg could even have had sex with Liddle himself

without my knowing anything about it.

But it’s perhaps worth recalling that Liddle has had similar problems controlling his own “honorary member”. In 2004, he left his wife of six months because he was shagging his 22-year-old secretary. Liddle, like Clegg, then gave an ill-advised media interview. In it, he compared his young mistress to Keira Knightley.

His soon-to-be-ex-wife, Rachel Royce, issued the following quote to the Observer at the time:

Frankly it’s only because he’s bloody famous that a 22-year-old girl is going out with him anyway. I wouldn’t have dreamt of going out with a 44-year-old man when I was 22. I liked someone my own age with a nice taut body, not a flabby fucking beer belly.

Only because he’s famous? But Rachel, surely you are forgetting Rod’s expansive knowledge of Eastern European geography! Not to mention his honorary member.