London

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Real life | 3 November 2016

For three months after I move to the country, I am told, I am going to be in the most almighty panic. I will ask myself repeatedly what on earth I have done. I will have sleepless nights worrying that I should never have left London. I will wake in a sweat in the early hours gripped by the idea that I cannot possibly survive now I am not ten minutes’ walk from the Northcote Road. And then, magically, one day, about three months in, I will wake up in my country cottage and look out of my bedroom window at the sea of green and say, ‘This is the

Toby Young Toby Young

Looking after Leo

I’ve just spent a day looking after our one-year-old vizsla and, to be blunt, I have some sympathy with Michael Heseltine’s decision to strangle his mother’s alsatian. Not that my wife is out of town. Rather, I’ve just got a new job as director of the New Schools Network, a charity that helps groups set up free schools, and Caroline argued that because I’ll now be spending so much time away from home I am morally obliged to take on the lion’s share of dog duties before I start. My responsibilities began with a walk in Gunnersbury Park. Now, to be fair, this isn’t a monumental chore. Gunnersbury Park is

Martin Thomas

Vicar, can you spare a dime?

‘I am a Messianic Jew,’ says the jittery young man at the rectory door. He is pale and drawn, with a close-shaven scalp and several days of bristles on a sharp chin. The bloodshot eyes search for me swimmingly. ‘A Jew, a Messianic Jew,’ he emphasises. I should have a clever rejoinder, but I am assessing if he has a knife so I only manage, ‘Ah yes, and how can I help?’ ‘Is this you?’ is thrown back at me, as he jabs his finger at the screen of his phone and then holds it up to my face like a mirror. I admit my identity (an image from our

Saturday

Martin Vander Weyer

The Big Bang did more harm than good

As the 30th anniversary of Big Bang loomed, I found myself back at the scene of my City demise. Ebbgate House — headquarters of BZW, the investment banking arm of Barclays where I worked until one fateful morning in 1992 — fell deservedly to the wrecking ball a decade ago. It was replaced by Riverbank House, and there I was last week, hovering above where my desk used to be, talking about ‘why no one listens to the City any more’ and reliving the P45 moment that released me into the happier world of journalism. Personal echoes apart, this was also a moment to revisit Big Bang, the Thatcherite reforms

Friday

Fraser Nelson

Rent increases are a problem in London – but not, really, for the rest of Britain

When I made my Dispatches documentary about generational inequality for Channel 4, I was struck by how many of the established facts in this debate fell apart upon scrutiny. Yes, there are many legitimate grievances – which I covered in the film. But some of the supposed ‘nationwide’ problems are, in fact, no such thing. Take the national rent crisis, which led Ed Miliband to fight an election campaign which pitted the supposedly wicked exploitative landlords against tenants. He lost that election, in part because he had allowed himself to be sucked down rabbit hole of social media – and one of Londoncentricity. There are a great many problems facing people

Thursday

Taki

High life | 27 October 2016

I was not on the winning side of the debate, despite giving it the old college try. Thank god for my South African friend Simon Reader, who coached me just before I went on. Mind you, my side felt a bit like Maxime Weygand, the French general who, in June 1940, was happily smoking his pipe back in Syria when he got the call to take over the French army. The Germans had already taken Holland and Belgium and had breached la Ligne Maginot, Gamelin had thrown in the towel, and Paul Reynaud had called for a fresh face to stop the mighty Wehrmacht. ‘Gee, thanks a bunch,’ said Weygand,

Melissa Kite

Real life | 27 October 2016

Coffee shops are becoming impossible. I had been standing in the queue at Caffè Nero on Battersea Rise for nearly half an hour behind a man ordering a round of coffees that were so complex, so detailed and intricate, so different from each other, so bespoke and unique, that it would have been quicker to get served if I had been standing behind a man ordering a helping of weapons-grade plutonium and a custom-made Range Rover. I had nipped in to buy a coffee and a croissant. Silly me, for wanting a coffee and a croissant. The man in front of me was ordering something like, from memory: ‘One regular

Toby Young Toby Young

In defence of Zac Goldsmith

I’m baffled by the reaction to Zac Goldsmith’s decision to resign as the Conservative MP for Richmond Park. It is being interpreted, even by MPs on his own side, as an act of opportunism, a chance to rehabilitate himself with the metropolitan elite after his bruising defeat in the London mayoral election. Surprisingly few people seem willing to entertain the idea that he might be acting on principle. Exhibit A in the case for Zac’s defence is the fact that he’s the MP for Richmond Park in the first place. Zac could have applied to be the candidate in any number of safe Conservative seats in 2010 and, given his

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

No place like Rome

Roma sells ancient-Roman-style food near Fenchurch Street station at the east end of the City, near Aldgate. It is, therefore, a themed restaurant in a conventional, ebbing financial district, a cursed place in need of Windolene; and this is something to applaud, at least theoretically, because it is ambitious. Who remembers ambition, which is more interesting than greed? The last themed restaurant to open in these parts was Fable, a repulsive fake library and fusion destination for lawyers on Holborn Viaduct which I hope has burnt down, or at least been sued for copyright infringement by-makers of fairy tales everywhere. It was as magical as date rape, and the fairies fled.

Saturday

Charles Moore

We should be flattered not threatened by France’s bid to take on the City

The French are trying to seduce the British to come and work in Paris. A video hymns the delights of La Defense, the Gallic Canary Wharf. It is a healthy Brexit effect that the French now feel that they can no longer fight the City of London solely by trying to regulate it, and must try persuasion instead. The prospect of British departure reawakens the spirit of competition in a continent which had largely replaced it with bureaucracy. By leaving, Britain ought to win first-mover advantage in this contest, but even if we don’t, we will have done a service to our neighbours which we could never have managed if

Thursday

Mary Wakefield

How clever are ravens? I asked at the Tower

On Tower Hill, by the east wall of Beauchamp Tower where Robert Dudley was imprisoned for a year, a raven called Merlin hides behind a yucca plant. I know she’s there because the Ravenmaster told me. He knows she’s there because Merlin (a female) and he are bonded and they keep tabs on each other throughout the day. As he walks across Tower Green, he whistles to her, and in reply, from the shadows, comes a low, metallic, caw. Ravens pair up for life, for the most part, and Merlin, who dislikes the other ravens, has chosen Chris, the Tower of London’s Yeoman Warder Ravenmaster, as her mate. As he

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Some like it posh

Daphne’s serves Italian food in South Kensington. (I like the name because Daphne was the name Jack Lemmon chose for his female self in Some Like It Hot, although Tony Curtis — Josephine — wanted to call him Geraldine. I know no one else called Daphne, and I do not need to. Lemmon sated me.) This district, you may recall, is currently a building site, as residents try to dream their houses bigger and their noses smaller; it is a tangle of cranes, personal trainers, tax avoidance, lipstick, adultery and Ferraris swamped with parking tickets. And so Daphne’s, which was a 1980s mini-series restaurant wrought from assorted Nigel Dempster columns

Emily Rhodes

Words on the street

A white van pulls up outside St Giles in the Fields, an imposing 18th century church in central London, around the corner from Tottenham Court Road station, for a couple of hours every Saturday afternoon. St Giles is known as ‘The Poets’ Church’ because it has memorials to Andrew Marvell and George Chapman, but this humble van makes the nickname more fitting. It’s a library. To be homeless is to have no fixed address, which means you can’t borrow books from a public library — but it doesn’t mean you’ve no desire to read. Quaker Homeless Action set up this mobile library in 1999, making runs into London twice a

Wednesday

Steerpike

Conference party round-up: Theresa’s kiss is put on hold

After four days of speeches and panels at Tory conference, there is now at least a little consensus over what Brexit means Brexit means and much concern over the quality of Philip Hammond’s jokes. However, while a number of conference speeches proved dry, Mr S is glad to report that the after hours soirees were free-flowing. At the Sun‘s conference party — where guests were offered teetotal May Day cocktails — tributes were paid to two men who were unable to make it to Birmingham this year. The paper’s editor Tony Gallagher recalled what David Cameron and George Osborne had said to him ahead of the paper backing Brexit. ‘David and George took us aside

Friday

Ed West

Foreign investors aren’t to blame for London’s housing crisis

I hate gentrification; my area was so much cooler when there were people openly selling drugs on the high street, my neighbours’ house had a mattress outside and the nice restaurants needed bouncers so the diners weren’t constantly harassed by crack addicts. Now it’s all just nice coffee shops, other broadsheet readers and arthouse cinemas. But don’t worry, for the Mayor of London is on the case, launching an inquiry into how much London land is being bought up by overseas investors and, as the Guardian reports, ‘the scale of gentrification and rising housing costs in the capital‘. Sadiq Khan says there are ‘real concerns’ about the surge in the number of homes

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Pens, sex and potatoes

I hoped that Bronte would be filled with Victorian writers licking ink off their fingers and bitching about Mrs Gaskell being a third-rate hack; but it is not to be. (Do not think I am vulgar. My description is accurate. Wuthering Heights is a rude novel, and Jane Eyre is worse. St John Rivers, its Christian Grey, is surely a Spectator subscriber). It is, instead, a finely wrought and glossy restaurant off Trafalgar Square, designed, I suspect, for advertising executives. It used to be the Strand Dining Rooms but it died and now there’s this. It is named for Horatio Nelson, the Duke of Bronte. His title, it is believed,

Will Cohu

The fallen Angel

Ashraf Marwan was an Egyptian-born businessman, a son-in-law to Nasser and a political high-flyer in the administration of Sadat, who fell off the balcony of his flat in Carlton House Terrace, central London, in June 2007. His death was watched with incredulity by business colleagues assembled in an office across the road, who recalled seeing two burly, possibly Middle-eastern figures framed in the tableau. Investigations were inconclusive. Marwan, then in his sixties, wasn’t well, but hadn’t seemed suicidal. On the other hand, he had been afraid, and with good reason, because plenty of people wanted him dead. Marwan had been a spy. That seems to be the most concrete element

Ian Sansom

All work, many plays

‘Krapping away here to no little avail,’ writes Beckett to the actor Patrick Magee in September 1969. To ‘no little avail’, note, not to ‘little or no’: there is a difference. It’s the difference that Beckett makes — I can’t go on, I’ll go on, and all that. This final volume of Beckett’s letters contains much krapping away to both no little and little or no avail. ‘Perhaps my best years are gone,’ remarks Krapp in the play, ‘But I wouldn’t want them back.’ Well, here they are, like it not: 9,000 pages of letters whittled down to just under 800 pages of text by a quartet of editors —

Wednesday

Steerpike

Conference party round-up: Corbyn-mania hits Liverpool

As Labour conference draws to a close for another year, over the past four days there has been plenty of drama played out in both the conference hall and the fringe events. However, the after hours soirees have also proved eventful. At Sky News‘s bash, attendees got to choose whether they were a champagne socialist or a prosecco socialist thanks to a well-stocked bar. While Owen Smith was nowhere to be seen at the event — perhaps still smarting from his leadership defeat — he can take heart that he was deemed important enough to have his face decorate a cupcake. Alas, out of the four cake options available — Smith, Jeremy Corbyn,

Thursday

Laura Freeman

The Victoria and Albert

Thomas Hardy, while still married to his first wife Emma, but arranging assignations in London with Florence, his second-wife-to-be, used to ask her to meet him at the Victoria and Albert Museum by the great, towering plaster cast of Trajan’s column. Really, Thomas? Trajan’s column? How obvious can a man be? Knowing what I know about Hardy’s column, and with the added burlesque of the modesty fig leaf that was cast for Michelangelo’s plaster David, I cannot now keep a straight face in the Cast Courts at the V&A and have to take myself off upstairs to look at silver salt-shakers the minute I get the sniggers. What a lot