Who coined the name ‘Londongrad’?

Thamesky Prospekt

Who first coined the place name ‘Londongrad’? The name was used in a BBC sitcom called Comrade Dad, written by Ian Davidson and Peter Vincent, and first broadcast in 1984. It was set in a Britain of 1999 when the Soviet Union had annexed the country. However, the first use of the term has been traced to an obscure columnist, Senator Soaper, writing for the Montana Standard in 1931. Ridiculing George Bernard Shaw’s fondness for communism, he gave Shaw’s address as ‘Whitehall Courtsky, Londongrad’. Whitehall Court, on the Embankment, has become a favourite of Russian investors. Igor Shuvalov, deputy prime minister of Russia between 2008 and 2018, is believed to own two apartments in the building.

Diminishing returns

How long will oil prices remain high? Balance between global production and supply in million barrels per day.

Production  / Consumption

2020 93.87 / 91.98

2021 95.55 / 97.48

2022 (forecast) 101.00 / 100.61

2023 (forecast) 102.97 / 102.55

The US Energy Information Administration, which collated the figures, predicts that oil prices will fall from an average of $117 per barrel in March to $102 per barrel in the second half of 2022 and to $89 per barrel in 2023, while noting that sanctions against Russia make the situation highly uncertain.

Home from home

How many UK properties are owned by overseas-registered companies? According to the Land Registry, there are 97,000 properties whose owners are companies registered overseas. Together they are worth £55.1 billion, and 44 per cent of them are in London. Twenty-three thousand of them are owned by companies registered in the British Virgin Islands, followed by Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man.

Source: Land Registry

Chucking in work

Have older people used the pandemic as an excuse to retire? The ONS records that the number of ‘economically inactive’ people was 522,000 higher in the last quarter of 2021 than two years earlier.