Rod Liddle, the Sunday Times and Sun columnist who shaped British media debate for four decades, has died at 66 after a short illness. He passed away on a Sunday evening at the James Cook University Hospital in Middlesbrough. The Guardian

At the time of his death, Liddle held positions across multiple News UK titles and the wider British press. He was a columnist for the Sunday Times and the Sun, a presenter on Times Radio, and associate editor of The Spectator. His children, Wilder, Tyler and Emmy, survive him.

Liddle's career covered the full span of British media, from broadcast journalism to print commentary. He edited BBC Radio 4's Today programme, one of the most influential news shows in the UK, until he left in 2002 after a disagreement with then-director general Greg Dyke over a column Liddle wrote for the Guardian. During his time at Today, he hired Andrew Gilligan, whose 2003 report claimed the UK government had "sexed up" its dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction — that is, made the intelligence sound more alarming than it was. The report set off a chain of events that led to the Hutton Inquiry, a judicial investigation into how the government made its case for war in Iraq.

Earlier, Liddle worked as a speechwriter for the Labour Party in the 1980s, giving him an insider's grounding in Westminster politics that would later shape his column writing. He also presented a television programme about infidelity, in which he argued that men were genetically pre-programmed to be unfaithful.

Liddle's commentary career was marked by controversy. In 2010, he became the first blogger to be censured by the Press Complaints Commission, the UK's press self-regulation body at the time, for a Spectator piece in which he incorrectly stated that the "overwhelming majority" of violent crime in London was carried out by young African-Caribbean men. The ruling set a precedent for online editorial accountability, meaning online publications could be held to the same standards as print.

Tributes across the industry reflected how divisive his work could be. Piers Morgan, former Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil, and BBC Today presenter Justin Webb all paid tribute, with Webb describing Liddle as brilliant, kind and funny. Former Sun editor David Yelland said Liddle "morphed into a brilliant and gifted writer" whom Yelland could rarely agree with but always turned to first.

Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News UK, the publisher of both the Sunday Times and the Sun, said staff were "deeply shocked and saddened" by the sudden death. Sunday Times editor Ben Taylor said Liddle had a wonderful way with words and that his column was for years the first many turned to every Sunday. Sun editor-in-chief Victoria Newton described him as a champion of press freedom whose writing was "as funny as it was excoriating."

The broader context here is that the breadth of tributes from figures on opposing sides of the editorial spectrum, and the regularity with which even his critics said they read him first, captures Liddle's particular standing in British media. He functioned less as someone who built agreement than as a guaranteed provocation — a writer whose opinions generated friction whether or not the reader shared them. The 2010 PCC censure and the Gilligan hiring both show the two sides of that coin: a willingness to publish claims others would not, sometimes leading to institutional consequences, sometimes to stories that reshaped national debate.

His departure from the Today programme over a column-writing dispute with the director general also captures a structural tension in British journalism that persists today: the friction between the BBC's institutional impartiality requirements — the obligation to avoid taking sides — and the personal editorial licence its senior figures seek in print. Liddle resolved that collision by leaving the institution entirely.

His trajectory from Labour speechwriter to BBC editor to right-leaning tabloid and broadsheet columnist does not follow a straightforward political arc. What it reflects is a career built on voice and provocation rather than ideological consistency, a profile that the current British media landscape continues to reward but rarely replicates with the same longevity.

His death leaves a vacancy in the Sunday Times opinion pages that, by Ben Taylor's own account, functioned as a weekly ritual for a significant readership. How that slot is filled will be a quieter but telling indicator of where one of Britain's most influential opinion platforms intends to position itself.