Rod Liddle: 'I've never had a go at Muslims, only Islam'

After preparing chocolate and cinnamon French toast for his children's breakfast and before popping out to a delightful Wiltshire village pub for some lunch, Rod Liddle is explaining why he enjoys racist jokes so much more these days.

Humour that he found "staggeringly unfunny, offensive and bovine" in the Seventies, now raises a laugh with Liddle because the shock released by such a punch line is so powerful in these more politically correct times. "I find racist jokes funnier now than I did 30 years ago because it's so socially unacceptable," he says.

Such sentiments will no doubt provoke nods of recognition among Liddle's liberal critics, who might also look knowingly at a childhood picture of the former Today programme editor, on display in his kitchen and showing him as a three-year-old, clutching a Golliwog and wearing a Golly badge of the sort no longer given away with Robertson's jam. It is, notes the star Sunday Times columnist, doubly in breach of the PC code.

Liddle, 48, has enraged sections of the liberal intelligentsia with his repeated and outspoken attacks on Islam, both in the Sunday Times and his weekly columns for The Spectator. Neither is he averse to taking the rise out of the disabled, telling readers of Disability Now not to overreact when made the subject of jokes: "Shrug your shoulders...if you have any."

Like Ricky Gervais and Chris Morris, two of the comedians he most admires, he will tackle taboo subjects to make a point. And, like them, he can be very amusing, one of the funniest writers in British journalism.

Unusually for a former high-ranking BBC executive, he is a former punk rocker, having sung for a Middlesbrough band called Dangerbird during his teens, playing alongside such names as Generation X, The Ruts and The Only Ones, who have since become friends and played an acoustic set at his second wedding. Even more unusually for a writer in the right-wing prints, he used to sell the Socialist Worker and frequents the South Stand upper at Millwall's New Den.

He chooses to live in rural Wiltshire partly because of his love of watching wildlife and taking country walks but also because it helps distance him from the media elite. Most other columnists he regards as "self-obsessed, narcissistic and not especially good at what they do". He'd rather hang out with Millwall fans.

"It's funny, y'know, quite a few of my friends would be inclined to vote BNP, and I don't think they're racist. Their objection is far less to the immigration than to what they see as the white liberals who have genuflected before this immigration, their annoyance is at things like positive discrimination," he says, stressing his own distaste for racial discrimination and sparking up another cigarette.

"I used to be called a racist. I did a piece for The Spectator two years ago about a golden crescent in London from which we are ruled and where for example immigration means a cheaper plumber, a cheaper nanny, and a couple of nice shops on the high street. That's not the reality for most people I know. Immigration for them means they are no longer plumbers, because they are priced out of the market, it means there's violence on the streets, it means their neighbourhood has been changed beyond recognition. I don't see that it's wrong or racist to point that out."

The criticisms from the "golden milieu of columnists" had begun a couple of years earlier after Liddle had attacked Islam in print. He also produced a speech under the heading "Islamophobia: count me in." His beef is with the ideology itself, which he sees as oppressive, rather than those who practise it and he was livid at suggestions that he had been controversial just for the sake of it.

"I've never had a go at Muslims, I've always had a go at Islam," he says. "I believe absolutely in the right of Sheikh Abu Hamza al-Masri and Hizb ut-Tahrir to believe what they believe and to proselytise without being persecuted by the state. I think there has been the most appalling persecution of individual Muslims because they subscribe to a particular form of Islam, as if the Government were Koranic experts."

His writing, he says, does not outrage Muslims like it does sections of the commentariat or indeed some Christians. "When I write things about Islam I get letters and emails from Muslims, which with great politeness and erudition explain why they think I'm wrong and wish me the best. When I write about evangelical Christianity I get death threats, I get told that I'm going to burn in hell for all eternity and so are all my children."

Nonetheless, he is currently working on a documentary on the links between Zionism and evangelical Christianity, one of a series of projects with Juniper television that he is discussing with BBC Two and channel Five. It follows previous religious documentaries Liddle has made for Channel 4 on Christian fundamentalism, atheism, the Bible, and the Middle East. He could do more telly but "I'm a sack of shit to look at and I'm not sure I'd like to look at myself on television".

His young wife Alicia, the mother of the youngest of his three children, comes into the drawing room of their 18th-century rented country house, carrying some photographs of Liddle. "God, you've aged me," he says, looking at the pictures. "She stopped me dyeing my hair."

"Because it's incredibly naff and embarrassing to be living with a man who has more hair products than I do."

"I used to dye it Midnight Auburn by Clairol, because I'm worth it."

Given his concerns over his looks, and a burkha not being an option, radio offers an attractive broadcasting alternative. Liddle is working on a Radio 4 special called Debating Animals, in which he examines the relative merits of "Dogs versus cats, red squirrels versus grey squirrels, mink versus otters. It's a series about anthropomorphism in a way."

He can't discuss the subject for long without returning to politics. "Cats took over from dogs as Britain's most popular pet in 1997, just as [Tony] Blair was elected. Cats are metropolitan, insular, sexually deviant. Dogs are family, conservative, heterosexual. I've got neither, but I don't like cats and have always been pro dogs."

And race. "I'm interested in the BNP tendency within Britain's conservationists – 'It's a foreign animal, kill it!' We exterminated the coypu in East Anglia, a very ugly rodent which was introduced from South America for its fur, escaped and set up base in East Anglia where it caused damage to riverbanks. So they shot 'em all. The RSPB said recently shall we shoot all those parakeets because they're not British. 'They come over here with their green wings...'"

Born in south London and raised partly in the North-east ("working/lower middle"), Liddle started his journalistic career on the South Wales Echo before leaving to work for the Labour Party in the office of the shadow secretary of state for Wales.

He returned to the media as a junior producer on Today, later becoming editor ("the most intellectually demanding job I will ever do"). He remains a fervent supporter of the BBC, thinks "we need to keep it with a big licence fee", says there is growing public support for such collectivism and claims that a re-nationalisation of the railways would also have popular backing.

Such views might jar with his readers and colleagues at The Sunday Times and Spectator, but Liddle says he was employed as an "in-house lefty" and that he remains. "I got a reputation three or four years ago for being very right wing. This was always bollocks, I've never been right wing," he says. "The truth is I'm a fundamentalist liberal, I'm probably worse than all those other people."