Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Goulash and whiplash

So why does the Gay Hussar seem so cheerful?

Ed is a plank. He was always a plank — and now he is in Ibiza being a plank. Plankety–plankety-plank: goodbye to our most recent terrible leader — and who will be the next? I, meanwhile, am in the Gay Hussar, choking on my own grief, hearing ‘Crying in the Rain’, weirdly, in my head, trying to forget the images that flicker mercilessly across my eyes, disrupting my view of a book that says, in capital letters, for emphasis — tony blair (now that’s a leader, eh!) — Clegg, dry-eyed with realisation at the breadth of his failure, Ed Balls hauled down like an -Easter Island statue, Samantha Cameron’s victory dress, which was a bullet-proof vest on the front and a high-vis jacket at the back. Well, it was a long -campaign.

When a certain sort of leftie weeps, as I did on Friday, mournfully saying ‘The left is shattered’ to -passers-by in Westminster, who couldn’t give a toss, because they are Tory anyway — it has to be the Gay Hussar, a shabby Hungarian restaurant on Greek Street, Soho. The Gay Hussar has sheltered north London metropolitan geeks (OK, Jews, we can say it now?) from their own idiocies with duck and cake since 1953. It fell from fashion when Blair rose, because Blairites apparently ‘wanted salad’; salad and war. But still it is comforting, a tiny postage stamp of red near the hookers, the gays and the -oblivion; it has faint mirrors and wobbling tables and leftie-themed souvenirs, which create an air of dining inside a sort of politicised London Dungeon. ‘labour victory’ says a newspaper by the loo. (The date is 1974.) The last time I came here it was empty, and my friend — a Tory barrister — said: this is a Tory restaurant.

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