London

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

St Thomas’s

Everyone praised the staff of St Thomas’s Hospital during the terrorist attack. My husband of course brought his own fly to put in the ointment. ‘It’s disgraceful,’ he said. ‘They were told about it years ago.’ He was not referring to medical matters but to the spelling of the hospital’s name, attached to the building in letters taller than a man as St Thomas’ Hospital. I mentioned it here in 2008. Now a reader has written to the editor of The Spectator, saying that the jumbo-sized error remains on show. It is undoubtedly wrong. Why can’t people who run a big hospital grasp the simple rules for using apostrophes? Oxford Dictionaries

Monday

Melanie McDonagh

Of course we’re not cowed by terrorism – what other choice do we have?

Stay safe, London. Stay safe, everyone. It’s nice, isn’t it, as a sentiment, which is just as well because it is the motto du jour of every celebrity who has added his or her mite to what passes as debate on the terrorist attack last Wednesday. And, my goodness, they all piled in: JK Rowling, Katy Perry, James Corden, Neil Gaiman; every man and woman of them, you’ll be pleased to hear, against this sort of thing, and urging us all – especially those not actually resident in London – to ‘stay safe’. The other trope is that ‘nothing will divide us’, that this is what terrorists want – Stella

Saturday

Sarah Sands

George Osborne’s Evening Standard job is good news for London

George Osborne has been a good friend to London. He sees the point of infrastructure and I hope he’ll fight hard for Crossrail 2, which has been shunted into the sidings by this government. London business rates are a huge issue, close to Osborne’s heart. He’s a supporter of the arts, with a streak of romanticism missing in David Cameron and Theresa May. It’s good news for Sir Simon Rattle’s concert hall, and Thomas Heatherwick’s Garden Bridge. The mayor Sadiq Khan, who is more than a match for Osborne as a political strategist, will understand what they can jointly achieve as champions of an open, liberal city. The Prime Minister

Friday

Nick Hilton

Labour can only survive by pretending Corbyn has gone

In spite of everything against them, the Labour party scored an historic victory last night in the City of London. Five Labour councillors were elected in wards that are traditionally contested by ‘independents’ (usually retiree residents who are inclined towards the pomp and ceremony). It was their highest ever total. People will, of course, be quick to point out that the City of London is the 325th smallest authority in England, out of a total of 326. It has 25 wards covering the area that would, in most authorities, be designated to a single ward. Labour also only has 5 Commoners (the antiquated term the City uses in favour of

Thursday

Sarah Sands

Diary – 23 March 2017

So I am feeling a bit better about my lack of radio experience. These are exciting times for free movement of labour and with Westminster under the control of Tory and Labour cabals, lovely jobs outside Parliament are tempting. George Osborne is no more qualified to edit the London Evening Standard than Tristram Hunt to run the V&A, but now art and antiquities scholars have dried their tears, that is turning out splendidly. The late Nick Tomalin pointed out that success in journalism requires only ‘ratlike cunning, a plausible manner, and a little literary ability’. The trade is temperament as much as technical skill and Osborne has a journalistic love

Ed West Ed West

Around the world, Westminster is a byword for political moderation

As many people have remarked, a terror attack in the centre of London was expected at some point, although it is no less shocking for that. Aside from St Peter’s Basilica or perhaps the Eiffel Tower, there is probably no other European building as recognisable to Europe’s enemies as the Palace of Westminster. Theresa May wasn’t quite correct when she referred to it as the oldest Parliament – both Iceland and the Isle of Man have more ancient bodies, being descended from those egalitarian Vikings – but it’s certainly fair to call Westminster the Mother of Parliaments, a powerful symbol of representative government. Just west of the city of London

Wednesday

The Spectator

Westminster terror attack: Theresa May’s speech

I have just chaired a meeting of the Government’s emergency committee, COBRA, following the sick and depraved terrorist attack on the streets of our Capital this afternoon. The full details of exactly what happened are still emerging. But, having been updated by police and security officials, I can confirm that this appalling incident began when a single attacker drove his vehicle into pedestrians walking across Westminster Bridge, killing two people and injuring many more, including three police officers. This attacker, who was armed with a knife, then ran towards Parliament where he was confronted by the police officers who keep us – and our democratic institutions – safe. Tragically, one

Ed West Ed West

An independent London would be a Thatcherite dystopia

Tottenham MP David Lammy has been writing in the Evening Standard about how it makes sense now for London to become a ‘city-state’, following Brexit: Over the course of the next two years as the reality of Brexit begins to bite, the economic, social and political cleavages between London and other parts of the country will become more pronounced. London’s status as a de facto city-state will become clearer and the arguments for a London city-state to forge a more independent path will become stronger. I’ve argued before that there is an increasingly strong case for London leaving the union because the aspirations of Londoners and the people of England

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Norse code

Aquavit is a ‘uniquely Nordic–style’ restaurant in the St James’s Market development between Regent Street and the Haymarket. This development — a pleasingly neutral word — is seriously misnamed, for there is nothing of the market about St James’s Market which seems, rather, to have stripped itself of the ordinary bustle of life; it is a shell for a management consultancy that has landed on the already overpolished West End. With its cool stones, tinted window and alarming orange woods, it is, stylistically, a tribute to the international luxury hotel and, is, therefore, a place entirely devoid of culture. It is a glossy blank that harms — and charms —

Thursday

Jenny Coad

Calendar clash

On a Friday evening in May 2018 I am going to see the Broadway show Hamilton. We had to book the tickets two weeks ago. Fair enough, you might say — some theatre tickets sell out long before rehearsals have begun. Nonetheless, it seems a madly long way off and what if I forget about it between now and then? This week I’ve tried to pencil in the cinema with a group of friends — no one was free until April — and Saturday supper with a couple: they couldn’t do until July. Jenny Coad discusses spontaneity with Isabel Hardman: This is far from unusual. My diary tends to be

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 2 March 2017

And the losers are… La La Land was mistakenly announced as winner of the Oscar for best picture before the error was corrected in favour of the film Moonlight. Some other announcements which went terribly wrong: — In 2015 Miss Universe host Steve Harvey announced Miss Colombia as the winner. Two minutes after she had been crowned Harvey came back on stage to apologise that he had misread the card and in fact Miss Philippines had won. — In January 2016 Heart FM newsreader Fiona Winchester mistakenly announced that David Cameron, then prime minister, had died, before correcting herself and saying that David Bowie had died. — In December 2015

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Rich desserts

Ferdi is a café in Shepherd Market; I write about it only to comfort you, because you are not rich, and so you cannot afford to go there, because you would have to pay £140 for two courses without wine. It probably thinks it is a restaurant, wants to be a restaurant, but it isn’t. Its defining characteristic is claustrophobia, and even bad restaurants allow the critic to breathe as they polish their spite. It is a copy, or satellite, of a fashionable café in Paris. The Parisian Ferdi is popular with fashion models and ‘Kim and Kanye’ (Kardashian and West), which is always a terrible sign. Shepherd Market, in

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

London Stock Exchange picked a bad year to join a pan-European project

The marriage of the London Stock Exchange and Deutsche Börse may not be stone dead but that’s the way to bet, as Damon Runyan would have said. This so-called ‘merger of equals’ — with the Germans holding the larger stake and the top job but with the head office in London, at least to begin with — has foundered over a demand from EU competition authorities that the LSE should sell its majority stake in MTS, an Italian bond-trading platform. Having had its alternative proposal (to sell a French clearing operation) rejected, the LSE refused to comply, allegedly without first consulting its German partners. When this deal was announced a

Thursday

Hugh Pearman

Building block | 23 February 2017

What a strange affair it now seems, the Mansion House Square brouhaha. How very revealing of the battle for the soul of architecture that reached maximum ferocity in the late 1980s and which still echoes today. Where developers now jostle to build ever taller, fatter and odder-shaped City skyscrapers, this was a time when it took 34 years to get just one building built. An ambitious bronze tower and plaza by the German-American modernist pioneer Mies van der Rohe was finally rejected in favour of an utterly different post-modern corner block (with no plaza, but a roof garden) by Sir James Stirling. Both were shepherded by a man in search

Thursday

Tanya Gold

American English

Ralph’s Coffee & Bar is in the Polo Ralph Lauren flagship store on Regent Street. It is rare that fashion admits food exists and when it does, it usually does something insane with it, like when the Berkeley Hotel celebrated fashion week by inventing a shoe biscuit, so you could eat your shoe. But Ralph Lauren, who dresses Melania Trump because other designers will not — believing that the withholding of couture equals meaningful opposition to tyranny, a position that makes me laugh even as I place my head in the oven — goes beyond couture and into the weird lands of lifestyle. Don’t know who you are, but want

Tuesday

David Oldroyd-Bolt

London By Night: an amusing homage to Victorian melodrama

Spending an evening watching an homage to Victorian melodrama in the drawing room of a gentlemen’s club sounds like the conceit of a Wodehouse story. That being nothing unusual in my faintly ridiculous existence, I trotted to the Savile Club last Friday to watch London By Night, a collaboration between John Waters and Felix Rigg, a concert pianist-turned-property auctioneer. Spectator columnist Martin Vander Weyer took the villainous lead in this story of mystery and intrigue. Though he is renowned in Yorkshire’s thespian circles, news of his ability to combine George Sanders and Rex Harrison in a most convincing fashion had not filtered down to London until now. Resplendent in top hat, frock coat and stock, and bearing more than a

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Real life | 9 February 2017

The builder boyfriend declared himself very happy with his £65 pee. He insisted it was good value for money because it was reduced from £130 if we paid within 28 days. Some would say that is still extortion, but the BB insisted he was a totally satisfied customer. He was also unfazed by the fact that Transport for London issued me with two fines for stopping on a red route in Elsynge Road for 30 seconds so he could relieve himself. This is because he didn’t have the bother of sorting it all out. The two fines had two different serial numbers so the total cost of the pee might

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Who will be London’s next bishop?

In typical theatrical style, the outgoing Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, he of the sonorous voice and imposing beard, ‘never knowingly underdressed’, ‘the last of the great prince bishops’, attended his final service as bishop at last Thursday’s liturgy at St Paul’s Cathedral for Candlemas — the day on which Simeon spoke the words, ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.’ Some say Chartres has become rather too fond of dining with the royal family recently and has neglected the duller duty of getting to know his lesser clergy; but the general consensus is that, in his 21 years in the post, through sheer charm and force of

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

In this digital age, should we worry about bank branch closures? Yes we should

Almost a decade after the financial crisis loomed, our high streets and town centres are full of life again: who ever thought consumers could sustain so many cafés, bakeries and nail bars? But the revival is being undermined by yet another wave of bank branch closures, leaving small businesses adrift and personal customers at the mercy of call centres and insecure, ill-designed online platforms. More than a thousand branches have closed over the past two years, and another 400 or so are scheduled to go soon. HSBC is showing the way with a savage cull of its network. Oh well, you might say, banking really ought to be a digital

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Real life | 2 February 2017

As if by magic, a sign that I am doing the right thing by moving out of London arrived in the post. And not a moment too soon, for with all the to-ing and fro-ing over arcane anomalies in the floorplan of my flat I had become so heartily sick of the conveyancing process I was almost ready to jack the whole move in. Two identical, suspiciously thin and official-looking A5 sized envelopes arrived at the same time. This is either the Inland Revenue telling me I am going to jail for believing that half-asleep guy at their call centre who told me I shouldn’t worry too much about my