‘They have guns’: a Sloane at large in gangsta land

Sonny D. Jalfrezi

Most refreshing and engaging to read a personal, honest take from a young'un on some issues that get statisicated to death by the press and the government.

Lucy

Venetia, are you the girl Jarvis Cocker wrote about when he wrote the song 'Common People'?

Tom

Sparkling, definitely worthy of a cover! The ending - one of the best pieces I've read in ages.

p johns

The difference is of course that you could take your "lean, mean Sloane-scaring machine" to any of the clubs & restaurants in Chelsea. There wouldn't be the slightest problem. However as a white male Londoner, I wouldn't get past the door in your wonderful Harlsden nightclub. I know. I tried. In fact there's all sorts of venues in my native city that I wouldn't be admitted to. Simply because of the colour of my skin.

London Calling

Well then, remind Sebastian when he next snorts his cocaine in the Gentleman's toilet in his Good old Chelsea night club, that the money he spends on his divine decadence pays for those guns+bullets.The grass is not greener on the other side you know, it depends on its origin and the crop. 'one of the best pieces I've read in ages' Per...lease, you guys need to wake up and smell the free trade coffee. :0

Nigel

I'm sorry, but I thought this article was the most vapid and uninteresting that I have read in The Spectator for years. Perhaps it's natural place was in a popular music magazine or one of those free rags you get on the Tube.

Richard

A huge amount of attention has been paid to all things ethnic in the last twenty five years. We do not need a Sloane to gives us a tour 'darkest' Harslsden which is in London not LA. Black criminals are not 'demonised'. The fact is that a very small percentage of the population is responsible for the majority of gun use/killings in this country and have been for decades. There have been thousands of shootings in London alone. Films, TV dramas, novels, special reports and swathes of journalism have been devoted to chronicling all this. Ms Thompsom is one of a long list of parasitic voyeurs

DougS

What a load of tosh, Matt and guys . . . . Good grief! Sloane Ranger goes slumming, so what else is new. And she really finds those guys attractive? Maybe for a one night stand (which is disgusting and stupid in itself, esp. with this type of guy) but for longer? I'm sure they're all great conversationalists and otherwise wonderful men, Venetia. Romanticizing these thugs is precisely what the left had done as part of their program of cultural Marxism that is destroying the West -- in ways large and small. This is small -- very small -- and old, and boring and passes my comprehension as worthy of a Spectator article, let alone the cover. These are disgraceful people; this entertainment is lower than low; and middle class folks like Venetia who PROFESS to enjoy it more than her boring Sloane Ranger buddies and kidding themselves or lying. Decadent nonsense.

Tom

“My friends, most of whom have no idea about these nocturnal habits,” - you write self-aggrandising tripe like this and then try to initimate it’s all a bit of a secret. Have you no shame? Venetia, look at you. You’re vaunting your little trip about like a girl in Sex and the City showing off her new Manolo Blahniks. It’s poverty tourism of a kind we’ve all read before and don’t really want to read about again. And the lingo makes you sound like Mrs Ali G: “one joint on Wandsworth Road — which I have also been known to frequent”. The self-absorption in the last phrase is the giveaway with you, Venetia. It’s not the subject you’re interested in - it’s you.

D Short

Load of old tosh that doesn't belong in serious literary and political magazine. And it's not the first time that daffy women have taken up space here. I don't blame the editor, apart from his 'only taking orders'. It's Andrew Neil's post-andropausal state that's to blame!

Madasafish

People have guns and people get shot! Surprise. A scientist called Darwin wrote about it: it's called survival of the fittest.

James

Seems Venetia Thompson has become a superstar journalist overnight, with her photo making the front page of The Daily Telegraph the other day (illustrating a story about her sacking, which was surely not front page-worthy news), and now her image is on the front cover of The Spectator (alongside images of black people that are - to say the least - highly questionable, and surely not to be endorsed for any reason by the woman who recently claimed in The Spectator that all white support of Obama was intrinsically racist, or some such tosh). How has she seemingly risen so high, so speedily, in the world of journalism, particularly when all she appears to have penned is a couple of uninteresting pieces filled with self-regarding drivel?

Ricky Bobby

Once again, Ms. Thompson manages to wind up the stodgy, uptight part of the cyber readership. Well done! Reading some of the comments (...can people be any more patronising or rude?!) is like witnessing a half-decent gag pass over the heads of a naive audience. Who then boo, hiss and chuck tomaotoes becuase they think they might have been insulted.

Austin Barry

This is the silliest article I've read in a long time. The sub-text of "How brave and happening chick am I" is only slightly less repellant than its conclusion which seems to be expressing an absurd preference for tooled-up gangstas over English upper-class twits. The drawing accompanying the feature though is priceless: it exactly reflects the article: bug-eyed narcissism oblivious to reality.

George

Yes, James, I've found it very odd that someone so dull is suddenly appearing everywhere. I'm sure it's nothing to do with horizontal networking - that sort of thing just doesn't happen in journalism, does it?

D Short

Hey Ricky Bobby, if you want to read this sort of guff, buy FHM or Loaded. You can get your rocks off there on most pages, if that's your thing.

m burgess

I was impressed that you heard about a murder on the 2 March ‘two weeks later’, that is, this coming Sunday (16). While your powers at their zenith, could you please tell me which horse will win the Gold Cup this afternoon? Please hurry; as you will have foreseen, the race starts in two hours.

Tonys

I tried to apply for a job at the Spectator but I unfortunately failed due to the rigid Kizomba dancers only selection criteria. Fair enough I suppose

John Savage

Young woman from a middle class background finds “bad boys” exciting. There, that about sums it up.

Max Kaye

Why does The Spectator publish this young woman's vapid pieces? C'mon Matthew, explain: how did she get the gig? Do you really, honestly, believe that her output is worthy of this august publication?

Upminster Boy

Interesting! I'm an Essex boy, white, born before the onset of WW2, survived the Blitz. As teenagers, back in the '50s, we never went into Romford (much less Dagenham) on a Saturday night without a set of brass knucks, a flick-knife, a cosh and, for the better equipped, a shooter of some sort. But, to the best of my knowledge, nobody ever got damaged. Now weapons of all sorts are illegal, and folk are getting shot on a regular basis. There's a moral there somewhere I'm sure.

Andy Bradshaw

What a smug, self-righteous young woman Ms. Thompson is. She would have made a fine Victorian of a type. Anyone who has spent any time with the "folk" understand that fashion (as in clothing and accessories) is just as big a deal as anywhere else. It's different and she might not recognize it, but it's there. Young men who use a handgun as a status symbol do not do so in place of a wristwatch. Ms. Thompson obviously doesn't understand men. And there are places where these evidences of machismo do not tend to go off so much, or so casually. Her boys were out of control, plain and simple, no excuses necessary. And she stupidly paints these restaurant goers, partiers and drinkers (drugs too perhaps?) as somehow poverty stricken. All that good life takes money (so do the guns). Maybe it's made in a way she's not quick to recognize -- but the amounts might surprise her. So all her talk of powerlessness is nonsense. It's an alternative culture that operates along its own lines, with its own system of status and reward. It doesn't seek to break into the mainstream. If it considers the mainstream at all, it wouldn't want to mimic so much as destroy for the delight of it.

Asmodeus

Call me a boring old so-and-so if ypu like, but why would any intelligent honest citizen (white, black or any other colour) want to spend time or money in such places, whether in Chelsea or Harlesden? As for the shootings, if these fellows wish to kill each other I don't see this as a reason for spending large amounts of hard-earned taxpayers' money and putting policemen in danger to prevent them from doing so.

Rupert Fotherington-Smythe

Don't worry daahling, you'll grow out of it - you're just waiting for the right Sebastian to come along. Meantime: ooh, it sounds such fun!

Dom R

This girl has some serious balls. Love her writing. Keep it coming Venetia. As someone that was about to stop buying the Spec, I am glad it seems to now have a new lease of life and is discovering new writers.

Kiffa

No more Venetia Thompson articles please Spectator please don't tell me she is on a year's contract????

Bulldog

Poor Venetia, she has taken a right good literary kicking. Shame she did not take English lit instead of Russian at the "one of Englands top universitys" that she attended. Still she could always go back to working in the city, as it was the sensational piece she wrote that got her the sack, not her woefull performance on the tradeing floor.

Michael Beaumont

The last line of the article is the lynchpin - 'It is moments like these that make me long to be back in Harlesden.' Now there's actually nothing (other than the usual excuses) to stop dear old Venetia moving there permanently. What do you think the chances of that happening are?

Pete

When I renewed my subscription to the Spectator I wasn't expecting anything as lightweight as this. Come on editor - don't waste my money on nonsense like this.

Lisa

Simon Heffer's dog (the one that sat A-levels) could write better than this. And it wouldn't have the ego that this woman has either. Everybody in the office could pat it and throw it biscuits in tea break. Just a thought. It's a bit cruel to make your staff handle copy like this. Have you run out of budget and had to buy a cheap writer until the new tax year starts? I know how tight money gets at this time of year.

IAN CAMERON

I seem to remember a book specifically about all this in 2005 "Guns and Gangs: Inside Black Crime" by Graeme McLagan.

Ricky Bobby

Hey D Short... thanks v much for the recommendation. I find FHM and Loaded a bit high-brow for my tastes, but the comments on this board are more than enough to sate my apetite for ever-so-grown-up debate. Keep up the good work.

Nick R

I believe that after the St Valentine's Day Massacre, two of the victims were ordinary law-abiding people. They were what is known as "Charabanc Trade" they happened to like the frisson of excitement hanging around with the heavy mob in the underworld. That sounds like you Venetia, trotting off to the NW10. One of my friends who once worked there on a well-known publication had a colleague whose arm was nearly hacked off with a machete- it's really that cool. As for guns, I had one (a Lanchester sub machine gun), when I was 15- it was stolen- one of three by a friend from a compound in Gosport where they were being flame cut as scrap. It cost 15 shillings and was missing a few parts (not the important bits), and I sold it for a £1 so I was very pleased. It was subsequently destroyed. There is nothing pleasant about a world where guns are plentiful. Nice to see that The Spectator is getting good and "trendy".

JimmyJazz

Of course they feel the need to carry guns, the poor dears after the nasty press so wrongly describes the area as the "gun capital". So they have no moral agency of their own? Sounds like patronising, racist claptrap to me and undergraduate to boot. The only reasons I can see it appearing in the Spectator are either the aforementioned "horizontal networking" or that fact that she's realted to somebody important.

Helena

I'll bet the law-abiding families of Harlesden are delighted at yet another spoilt brat swanning through the area to write a piece glamorising the terror they have to live in.

Siobhan McKenna

Beggars belief: when did a rich, white kid hanging out with poor black kids become news – particularly in multicultural England…. Next we will be seeing her swanning around the youth gang-capital of the UK - Lambeth – she won’t be alone with the rest of white middle class London who come looking for drugs and kicks on a Saturday night… Delighted to see this fluff in the Spectator – it will ensure its slide to bottom-feeder position of the magazine world- where it belongs.

Gemma Cliff

Surely this is a fine example of self-parody and shouldn't be taken so seriously?! Since when did readers of the Spectator become so lacking in humour?

prinkipo

can the spectator please stop printing the vapid outpourings of this ditz? reporting is about the facts - which are, she didnt see a gun, didnt speak to anyone who owned one, nor to anyone who had been threatened by one. there are no real people in this story except the author, who feels she is an authority on london's underworld simply because she has been to a few edgy clubs. please, enough of this fatuous rubbish.

Regina Filangi

I'm wondering how many of these vitriolic commenters have actually read the article, or just saw the pic and headline and immediately jumped to conclusions?? The last thing it is is right-on fluff. Look closer and you actually see self-effacement, a different take on the marginalised communities and some refreshing intelligent writing. More please.

Hereford

What a load of snobbish sanctimonious rubbish. I am sick and tired of hearing that young black men have no choice other than to take up arms. Many of us, of all colours, grow up in deprived circumstances with little hope of an uplift from society. How we respond to that is entirely a choice. Do wake up and get real. Stop romanticising violent thugs.

James D

I'm sorry but Harlesden just isn't the ghetto you make it out to be. It's about as 'edgy' as cricket pitch. I'm a public-school-educated, Royal borough-reared, white man with two children (who I send to the local private school â“ yes, there is one in Harlesden!). On my street are people I went to school and university with as well as the odd celebrity (Louis Theroux and KT Tunstall). There is a great depth of ethnic mix and few dodgy characters but that's London (outside of Chelsea).