London

Monday

Alex Massie

The saga of Ed Miliband and White Van Man reveals a politics based on grievance and cowardice

Say this for the current state of British politics: it keeps finding new lows. A while back I made the mistake of suggesting voters might already have priced-in Ed Miliband’s shortcomings. The leader of Her Majesty’s loyal opposition might be a doofus but we know that and, if not exactly tickled by the thought, can cope with it. Reader, I think I may have been mistaken about that. Recent events suggest Miliband’s haplessness exists on a higher plane than anyone previously thought possible. One can only assume he secretly doesn’t want to win the next election. This, at any rate, seems the only sensible verdict to reach based upon the

Thursday

Bruce Anderson

The real French embassy is a restaurant

Semper eadem. There is some basement in a Mayfair street that is forever France. It is not far from the American embassy, a strong candidate for the all-time monstrous carbuncle award. Bad enough that it should ever have been built: worse still, some ‘architects’ want to preserve it. Its menacing hideousness has made a significant contribution to the growth of anti-American sentiment in modern Britain. Only a hundred yards away, there is an unpretentious building. No disrespect to successive French ambassadors in London, who have made heroic efforts to put the best possible gloss on a failed state, but Le Gavroche has done more than diplomacy ever could to justify

Ross Clark Ross Clark

London’s real Olympic legacy: paying to build the stadium twice

In 2006, on the day that the government’s estimated cost for the 2012 Olympics was jacked up from £2.75 billion to £4.25 billion, I promised to eat my hat on the steps of the Olympic stadium if the bill came to less than £10 billion. Although the official figure now stands at a mere £8.92 billion, it is a feast I am going to postpone, because we haven’t heard the last of Olympic overspending. Two weeks ago, the London Legacy Development Corporation announced that the value of the contract with Balfour Beatty to convert the stadium for use by West Ham Football Club is to be increased from £154 million to

Monday

Philip Sidney

Why the Guardian is wrong to attack the Tower of London poppies

The furore over Jonathan Jones’s criticism of ‘Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red’ (or the Tower of London poppies, as they’re more familiarly known) has been both understandable and unsurprising, an early foray in what promises to be a four-year-long argument over how best to commemorate the dead of the First World War. Jones’s article caused outrage by condemning the memorial as ‘prettified and toothless’, symptomatic of ‘the inward-looking mood that lets Ukip thrive’. It didn’t help that the original article (Jones has since published a further defence of his position) gave a supercilious and rather unpleasant account of the people who had come to see the installation: loftily, Jones

Friday

Digby Warde-Aldam

Our verdict on the North Korean embassy’s art exhibition: ‘I’ve seen worse’

What’s your favourite of Kim Jong Un’s photo opportunities? I like the pictures of the cuddly psychopath inspecting a lubricant factory. One of them has Kim rubbing his hands with glee as pipes squeeze lube into an oil drum. Classic stuff. As one who keeps a close eye on the Dear Leader’s state visits, I was a bit put out when the Dear Leader of the very, very Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea disappeared for six weeks. There were reports of regime change, gout and epic cheese binges. It was a relief, then, when business returned to usual. This week, Kim appeared in his most impressive propaganda shots to date, walking

Thursday

Barry Humphries

Barry Humphries’s diary: The bookshop ruined by Harry Potter

Do fish have loins? Last Tuesday, in a pretentious restaurant, I ordered a ‘loin of sea trout’. It looked just like an ordinary piece of fish — a bit small, as is usual in pretentious restaurants — on a plate sprinkled and drizzled as though the chef had perhaps coughed over it rather violently or vigorously scratched his head before giving it to the waiter. In Australia, I was once offered a shoulder of some other fish, so I suppose one might even be able to enjoy a rump of whitebait or even a saddle of flounder. But generally speaking I don’t mind loin when applied to the loinless, and

The Spectator

Say no to devolution without democracy

Imagine if, in one of her first acts as First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon announced that, in spite of the result of September’s independence vote, Scotland was to declare independence anyway, on the basis that opinion polls now showed a majority of people in favour of independence and therefore there was no need for the decision to be approved in a referendum. David Cameron and his government would surely treat it as an outrage. Why, then, has the Chancellor this week seen fit to announce that the people of Greater Manchester are to have a directly elected mayor? Two years ago the very same question was put to the

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Ukip is a party for people who hate London. That’s why Labour should be scared

It is interesting that neither Scotland nor Wales have been much bitten by the Ukip bug. The supposedly sensible view is that both of these countries are more kindly disposed towards the European Union than are the English — and that Ukip’s contempt for the European Parliament and its politicians is seen as another example of that rather too familiar English jingoism and xenophobia, commodities which are not terribly popular either north of Berwick or west of Monmouth. It is also sometimes mentioned that immigration is far less of an issue in Wales and Scotland — unless we are talking about English immigration, which does indeed tend to make the

Wednesday

Anne Jolis

Lame duck unleashed – Bulgarian in London asks ‘what next’ on US immigration

London Careening through the city in a minicab last night, en route to a pub in Bloomsbury that had promised to screen US election results, the mustachioed driver confirmed my accent and inquired: ‘So, what will happen after the elections?’ I issued the run-down: left-ish Democrats lose control of the Senate to right-ish Republicans, who also expand their House majority. The Republican gains won’t be enough to have too much fun (for instance, re-reforming health care) without meeting the President‘s veto pen; but should prove enough to justify more executive action from the White House, bypassing Congress in areas such as immigration and border control, if Mr Obama’s pre-election promises can

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Want to shake hands with your dinner? Beast is your kind of restaurant

Beast is next to Debenhams on Oxford Street and it is not conventionally beast-like; rather it is monetised and bespoke beastliness, which is not really beastliness at all. It is something worse. The outside is Dead Animal Inc: glassy, corporate, bland. The reception has a 10ft bronze bear covered with swirls which look like paisley or some photogenic skin disease. A woman presses the button inside the lift for you, should you be too stupid or lazy to do it yourself. And downstairs, as the lift opens and you peer into the dark, you see a fridge full of hanging beef with labels flickering in a cold synthetic wind. They

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

How Italy failed the stress test (and Emilio Botín didn’t)

Continuing last week’s theme, it was the Italian banks — with nine fails, four still requiring capital injections — that bagged the booby prize in the great EU stress-testing exercise, followed predictably by Greece and Cyprus, while Germany and Austria (with one fail each) fared better than some of us had feared. The most delinquent European bank turned out to be the most ancient, Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, which was judged to have a capital shortfall of €2.1 billion as a result of a very modern set of problems. Founded in 1472 as a kind of charitable pawnbroker, the bank which eventually became Italy’s third largest had a

Tuesday

Anne Jolis

My generation can’t afford to buy a house in London; so what?

The UK Land Registry today released its latest report on house prises, showing the ticket-cost of an average home in England and Wales down 2.2 per cent to £177,299 in September from a peak of £181,324 in November 2007. No, that still doesn’t mean that underpaid Westminster interns can afford to buy a home in central London. Per the Land Registry, average house prices in the capital rose 18.4 per cent since this time last year. Cue the New York Times with an opinion article composed by a young writer, cavilling about the matter: ‘Without capital, those of us who do not own property resign ourselves to running in an

Thursday

Griff Rhys Jones

Griff Rhys Jones’s diary: I am now less of a celebrity than my daughter’s dog

In order to promote the Dylan Thomas in Fitzrovia festival, I am trying to persuade Jason Morell, the director, that he must help me come up with stunts. ‘It’s stunts that will get us into the meeja,’ I tell him. So we launch the ‘Dylan Thomas Fitzrovia Breakfast Challenge’. Gary Kemp, Tom Hollander, Owen Teale and myself swallow a glass of beer with a raw egg in it — the great Celtic bard’s preferred nutritional morning kick-off. We are supposed to film it and challenge three others to do the same in aid of inner-city charities, and thus news of our festival will spread like a west African disease. Nobody

Jeremy Clarke

Hello trees, hello sky, hello armoured riot police

What a beautiful day, I thought, as I nodded to the porter in the bowler hat and stepped out of the Westminster hotel into October sun and wind, with a dramatic, fast-forwarding sky overhead, and the dry crackle of leaves underfoot. Lovely London. Solid, masculine, powerful, exciting London. Beautiful London. Outside Westminster Abbey the pavements were thronged with tourists pointing their cameras and smartphones at anything and everything, from the traffic cops to the decorative spikes on the railings. Pret à Manger was packed with riot police in full battledress queueing nicely for their mid-morning caffeine fix. I crossed over the road into Parliament Square and passed a statue of

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The best navigation idea I’ve seen since the Tube map

I stopped using London buses when some coward put doors on them. Twenty years ago, you could board any bus headed in the right direction and when it diverged from your intended route you’d jump off and board another. You didn’t need to understand bus routes at all. Now, when bus doors open only at specified stops, an absurd level of research is needed. It takes five minutes to work out where to wait and which route to take. Worse, buses use the dippy Paris Métro approach (Diréction Porte de Clignancourt) where only the final destination is on the front. This demands unrealistic knowledge of the outer suburbs. Where the

Harry Mount

It’s time to shave that beard: the decade of the hipster is over

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_23_Oct_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Harry Mount and Aleks Eror discuss hipsters” startat=1572] Listen [/audioplayer]Calling all hipsters, it’s time to get the razor out! You have hit peak beard. You’ve had a decade of getting away with those narrow, short trousers and the studiously thought-out socks; with the Victorian archdeacon beards and the shaven sides to your heads. It wasn’t even that good while it lasted. Like gay fashionistas — but without any humour or bite — the hipsters stood in front of the wardrobe for an age every morning. And then proceeded to pick out random combinations of clothes straight from the £1 reject basket in a rural Norfolk branch of Help

Simon Baker

While Holmes is away

Careful Sherlockians, on returning in adulthood to the four novels and 56 short stories that they devoured uncritically in their teens, tend to notice an endearing vagueness on the part of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle when it comes to details. There is Watson’s old war wound, for instance, which journeys absent mindedly between shoulder and leg. And there is Doyle’s inability to remember dates or even his own characters’ names. In ‘The Creeping Man’ the client, Trevor Bennett, is met by his fiancée with a gushing, ‘Oh, Jack, I have been so dreadfully frightened.’(Watson himself has form here. In ‘The Man With the Twisted Lip’ his wife calls him James

Wednesday

Kasia Maciejowska

The best of Frieze Art Fair was free

Frieze and its ever-multiplying layers – some fantastically rich, others disappointingly dry – has expanded into a millefeuille so dense that you wonder whether organisers Matthew Slotover and Amanda Sharp have ever heard of museum fatigue. Today, 30 to 45 minutes is apparently the concentration cap – the point at which you can no longer bring yourself to give a shit yet keep walking past the frames. Knowing this, the majority of London’s public might feel they had been spared the ordeal of entering the tents in Regent’s Park, where half an hour will get you through almost nothing of the fair. By some freak of programming the best of the works

Steerpike Steerpike

Gunpowder, treason and caviar – selling out in Westminster, Guido style

If you’re going to sell out to the establishment, you might as well do so on an industrial scale. As the PM told the Guido Fawkes blog’s ten -ear anniversary party at the Institute of Directors last night, via video link, ‘what better way’ to celebrate ‘rejecting’ the cosy political classes than a posh dinner of caviar and champagne in the heart of Westminster. Guy Fawkes would have been turning in his grave, as cabinet ministers including Francis Maude and Liz Truss, and mysterious billionaires such as Michael Hintze and Lord Ashcroft, along with 200 of Westminster’s finest, came to pay homage to a decade of sniping from waspish troublemakers.

Tuesday

Anne Jolis

Moscow may not need London, but does London need Moscow?

According to an adviser to Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov, sanctions-hit Moscow intends to slowly move the finance of state companies and political players away from London, Zurich and Frankfurt toward Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore. ‘We think we can match what we lose from the West with what China offers,’ the adviser told Politico. The Cameron government hit back with anonymous quotes in the same Politico story, dismissing the notion that Chinese financing could replace Western money: ‘The Chinese cannot and will not give them this money.’ Carl Bildt, who also spoke to the magazine, seconded the emotion, noting the ‘great fanfare’ when Russian officials land in Beijing,