London

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Soho in Somerset

It is summer and the listless metropolitan thinks of grass. It cannot afford to stay at Durslade Farmhouse, Somerset, a branch of the Hauser & Wirth art gallery that serves food and plays cow noises in a former barn as authentic country folk rip their eyeballs out. Locals talk about Durslade Farm as a child that died. I think it is a Holocaust memorial for cows, but oblivious. Babington House is the country branch, and it is open to members, their friends, and hotel guests. There is a a spa called the Cowshed that sells ‘Lazy Cow’ and ‘Moody Cow’ beauty products (misogyny masquerading as irony), a restaurant and a

Dot Wordsworth

Sadiq Khan’s virtues

The new Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, said he wanted ‘the most transparent, honest and accessible administration London has ever seen’. It sounds lovely, especially if the Underground is cheap too. Mr Khan’s are a very 21st-century triad of virtues, though honest might sound old-fashioned. It would once have appeared on a housemaid’s reference: ‘Diligent, sober and honest’, i.e. not lazy, drunken and thieving. We now grow sceptical of politicians who begin replies by saying ‘To be honest’ (as if this was a rare departure). Honesty once measured outward respectability, as reflected in a Tudor description of Eton as ‘an honest Colege of sad Priestes, with a greate nombre of

Kate Webb

One day, two lonely people

Twenty-four long hours, two lonely people, one city in decline. This is the premise of A.L. Kennedy’s new novel Serious Sweet, a work full of anger at what has happened to London since the Thatcher revolution and concern for the city’s isolated, impotent inhabitants. Kennedy’s representative Londoners are Jon, a divorced and fusty civil servant, a ‘passed over man’ plagued by failure, and Meg, a bankrupt accountant and recovering alcoholic who jokes at her own expense that she is ‘Fine: Fucked-up Insecure Neurotic and Emotional’. The novel takes in many contemporary bugbears — the loss of civility, state snooping on private lives, misogyny and child abuse — but like the

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 5 May 2016

London’s other mayor How many people could name the capital’s other mayor, the Lord Mayor of London? The office, officially renamed the Lord Mayor of the City of London in 2006 to avoid confusion with the Mayor of Greater London, was instituted in 1189 and has been an elected office since 1215 — albeit only by the votes of representatives of livery companies. The current holder, elected last Michaelmas, is Jeffrey Evans, fourth Baron Mountevans, a shipbroker. The mayoralty was Evans’s second election victory last year; in July he won the election to replace the third Viscount Tenby as a crossbench hereditary peer. Top tips The government said it would

Henry Jeffreys

Beware the Lycra louts

Spring is here and the air is alive with the sound of sweaty manmade materials rubbing together, as middle-aged cyclists fill every road, dressed head to toe in Lycra. They whizz along, jumping red lights, weaving in and out of the path of trucks, screaming at pedestrians and taxi drivers; barely evading death three times a morning. Lycra isn’t just a fabric; it’s a state of mind. At work, these often portly, always angry, red-faced individuals might be mild-mannered middle managers who work in marketing. But in their cycling kit they are superheroes who happen to swear a lot. The double Olympic champion Laura Trott was once asked to help

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Tea and honesty

We recently moved -offices from Canary Wharf to Blackfriars bridge. When you move after a long time in one place, you notice the surprising ways in which your behaviour is subliminally affected by your surroundings. On my second day in the new office, someone came from Victoria to meet me. After about 25 minutes of useful conversation, I thanked them and they left. Something about the encounter seemed strange; I suddenly realised that, back in the old office, I’d never had such brief meetings. Instinctively it felt discourteous to give anyone who had made the longer trip to Canary Wharf any less than 45 minutes of your time. This sense

Misti Traya

The axeman next door

When I moved to London, my husband Henry gave me a copy of Kate Fox’s Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour. He was hoping the gift would avoid an awkward conversation about our cultural differences. As an American, I cannot think of anything more English than that. Fox’s chapter about introductions bothered me. The brash American approach: ‘Hi, I’m Bill from Iowa,’ particularly if accompanied by an outstretched hand and a beaming smile, makes the English wince and cringe. I had never known friendliness to be cringeworthy. I felt sorry for Bill from Iowa. I pictured him arriving in my neighbourhood and being scorned for enthusiastically introducing

Monday

Toby Young

Is it ‘Islamophobic’ to draw attention to Sadiq Khan’s links with extremists?

Zac Goldsmith came in for a fair amount of criticism yesterday after writing a piece in the Mail on Sunday that, among other things, pointed out that Sadiq Khan criticised Labour’s decision to suspend Ken Livingstone in 2006 when he compared a Jewish Evening Standard journalist to a Nazi concentration camp guard. Reviewing the papers on Marr, Owen Jones called it ‘another example’ of a ‘poisonous’ and ‘disgraceful’ campaign that had tried to brand Khan as an extremist simply because he’s a Muslim. He called it ‘an attempt to tap into anti-Muslim prejudice’ and urged Conservatives to tackle Islamophobia as vigorously as his own party is tackling anti-Semitism. But is

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Lost in Piccadilly

Batman owned the Criterion in The Dark Knight, but could he do anything about British Telecom? Savini at Criterion, an Italian restaurant, waited four months for an internet connection and telephone line as they prepared to launch this year; when it arrived they gave BT what must be the worst review in the history of telecommunications: ‘This wouldn’t happen in Italy.’ It ruined the launch, they said. They couldn’t invite actors, except by pigeon post. And because actors are, in restaurant marketing terms, signposts — and they do look like signposts, specifically Monagasque signposts — no one knew Savini was there. It has no constituency. It is George Galloway, who

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Polly’s pleb adventure

Down and Out in Paris and London is a brilliant specimen from a disreputable branch of writing: the chav safari, the underclass minibreak, the sojourn on the scrapheap that inspires a literary monument. Orwell’s first book was turned down by Faber boss T.S. Eliot, who received the script under its original title, Confessions of a Dishwasher. New Diorama’s dramatisation brilliantly captures the raffish sleaziness of Paris in the 1920s. Orwell’s crew of thieves, parasites and drifters come across as comradely and charming in this magnificently squalid setting. The austere lighting and the ingenious stage effects are done with tremendous economy. There are flashes of bleak humour too. Orwell’s anvil-faced landlady

Thursday

Robert Hardman

Diary – 21 April 2016

The Queen’s 90th birthday celebrations start this week with the real thing and barely stop until her official birthday in June. What should a grateful nation give Her Majesty? It’s said what she really wants is a thing that has eluded every reigning monarch bar Edward VII: a Derby winner. If the government cannot arrange that, then it can do this. In this midst of this birthday ‘season’, on 18 May, is the state opening of Parliament. I’m told Westminster is considering changes to make the ritual easier for the main player. Politicians could start by excising their jargon from the Queen’s Speech. Last year, people winced at her talk

Alexandra Coghlan

Whose opera is it anyway?

Disguises and mistaken identities are a staple of opera, but usually as part of the onstage, not the offstage, action. So what are we to make this week of a Handel opera that isn’t by Handel at all, and a Mozart opera that was largely composed in 1990? As usual in the opera house, there are good — if complicated — explanations. Every year the London Handel Festival tests the theory that forgotten operas are forgotten for a reason, rooting around the darkest corners of the composer’s output to find some abstruse treasures for their audience. This year they’ve outdone themselves, with a performance by Opera Settecento of Elpidia —

Monday

Laura Atkins

Holborn’s ‘standing only’ escalators create a stairway to hell

Holborn station has today started a six-month trial of ‘standing only’ escalators. As anyone who has travelled on the London Underground will know, standing on the left of the escalator is an inexcusable crime, which will attract tuts from many angry Londoners running late for work. However, if the trial is successful, this could become the norm across more – or even all – tube stations. A previous trial resulted in 30 per cent less congestion, according to Transport for London. This may be great for those who are incapable – but in most cases, simply too lazy — to walk up the escalators. It’s not so great for highly strung Londoners

Thursday

Tanya Gold

The bitter taste of victory

The Parliament Hill Café is a drab glass box at the bottom of Hampstead Heath, near the farmers’ market and the running track. But it is something else too. It is a paradigm. The Corporation of London announced that the D’Auria family, who have run the café for 33 years, would not get a new contract; instead, it would go to a firm called Benugo. This has been reported as a fable with universal meaning, which it is; the café is Cinderella, or the frog, or Anna Karenina. Benugo is Karenin, or consumer capitalism, or the ball. The north London intelligentsia organised a petition and a public meeting. Giles Coren

Steerpike Steerpike

George Galloway’s battle bus fails to rally the troops

George Galloway has stepped up his London mayoral campaign today by taking his battle bus down Whitehall. In an attempt to rally the troops, the Respect candidate shouted through his megaphone: ‘David Cameron, you couldn’t make it up!’ Alas on Mr S’s watch, Galloway-mania failed to kick-in. While he managed to frighten the horses — of the Household Cavalry no less — when it came to supporters, he only seemed able to fill one of the 72 seats on the double-decker bus with a supporter. Vive la révolution!

Thursday

Virginia Ironside

Diary – 7 April 2016

It’s clear that Vladimir Putin has had a facelift, which might explain why Wendi Deng would take an interest in him. But a friend who met him was surprised enough to ask his translator why it was so obvious. ‘Surely he has enough money to get a better one done?’ he said. ‘Oh yes,’ she replied. ‘But here in Russia, a facelift is a status symbol so everyone has to be aware that it’s been done.’ I wonder if the reason American women continue to go for the wind-tunnel effect favoured by Joan Rivers isn’t based on the same social pressure. Wealth and power have their own looks. After nearly 50

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Do the Tories want to lose London?

The Labour plotters who dream of ousting Jeremy Corbyn had high hopes for the local elections on 5 May. They envisaged a moment of humiliation for their leader in Scotland, Wales and England; a moment that would prove beyond doubt that the party’s leftwards lurch had narrowed its appeal and consigned it to the electoral wilderness. A good time, in other words, to stage a coup. Corbyn’s loyalists, for their part, had been preparing to blame the rebels and their constant sniping. Neither side imagined what now looks likely: that Labour might soon be celebrating a stunning victory in London. The party is expecting a sharp decline in its total

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Send in the Alsatians

Islington is a bellwether, and also a joke: the most unequal borough in London, where social housing leans against £4 million terraces (for now, loyal Conservative voters, only for now), and also the holy font of Blairism as it appears in ‘It’s Grim Up North London’. Here, it is said, they sang the Blairite version of the Red Flag: ‘The People’s flag is deepest pink/ It’s not as red as people think/ So raise the scarlet banner high/ The college song, the old school tie.’ No more; the jokes are dust, and Blair, it is rumoured, is living on a jet full time, flying away from himself or, as I

Wednesday

Theodore Dalrymple

Why we need migrants

This is perhaps not the best moment in history to extol migrants from the developing world or Eastern Europe, but the fact remains that without them my life, and I suspect the life of many other people in the West, would be much poorer and more constricted than it is. A migrant is not just a migrant, of course. Indeed, to speak of migrants in general is to deny them agency or even characteristics of their own, to assume that they are just units and that their fate depends only on how the receiving country receives them and not at all on their own motives, efforts or attributes, including their

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Marco Pierre, why?

Wheeler’s is such a dreadful restaurant that I wonder if Marco Pierre White even knows his name is on it. I suppose, for legal reasons, we must assume he does, and was not held hostage in a cellar while they built and fretted and hung inflated photographs of their prisoner all over it, like the bedroom of a starlet in full madness. We must assume that White knows that Wheeler’s of St James’s, which was a famous restaurant, was closed, and reopened inside the Thread-needles hotel in Bank, and it does have his name on it, and this is the worst thing he has ever done; worse than promoting Knorr