London

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Why a City job should be graduates’ last resort

August is the season for conversation about career choices. Every holiday party seems to include new graduates or next year’s graduands in need of grown-up advice. Many yearn to be pastry chefs, having devoted their student years to watching The Great British Bake Off. Some want to be journalists, and I tell them it’s more fun than having a secure job with a decent income. Happily I’ve only met one young man this summer who wants to go into financial PR, the métier in which I believe Satan himself did his first internship. ‘Diplomacy’ is often mentioned, I suppose because there’s a lot of that on the telly these days

Thursday

Tanya Gold

L’Escargot is Soho as Soho sees itself

L’Escargot, or the Snail, is a famous restaurant on Greek Street, Soho, opposite the old Establishment club; the oldest French restaurant in London, they say (1927), and who am I to argue? It is the type of restaurant that non-Londoners have heard of and used to visit. They passed photographs of Larry Olivier and Mick Jagger staring glumly at them as they took off their overcoats in the hallway for a pre- or post-theatre supper; despite this, or maybe because of it, the Snail fell into a long and sad decline. Its green and gold rooms embraced silence. The waiters snarled; the snails wilted. They had been there too long.

Harry Mount

Here comes Boris! The next Tory leadership fight has just begun

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_07_August_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Harry Mount and Isabel Hardman discuss Boris’s parliamentary campaign” fullwidth=”no”] The View from 22 podcast [/audioplayer]So Boris has made his great leap. The blond king over the water has revealed his plans to cross the river, return to Parliament and assume what he believes is his rightful destiny — to be Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The first signs came with his uncharacteristically Eurosceptic speech this week. Yes, he said, Britain could — perhaps should — leave Europe, if it couldn’t negotiate more favourable terms. This set him at odds with David Cameron and sent a ripple of excitement through the Tory grass roots. Next came the

Wednesday

Ed West

Ukip need not fear Boris Johnson

So Boris Johnson is standing for parliament next year, triggering speculation about what would happen if David Cameron lost the election. Could we have Ed Miliband as prime minister, followed by Boris Johnson? Jon Stewart would have a field decade. Boris is easily the most popular Conservative politician around, both inside and outside the party, and is the only one to have genuine appeal with the public. People go up to him to shake his hand in the street, rather than just vomit everywhere, as is the case with most other Tories. Both he and Nigel Farage are jovial figures whose cheery, bumbling persona enables us to forgive any private

Sunday

David Blackburn

Boris Johnson’s European crusade to save the Tory party

The Sunday Telegraph has news that Boris Johnson will give a speech next week in which he will throw his weight behind a report, published by Volterra, calling for Britain to renegotiate its membership of the EU. The Telegraph reports: ‘The capital’s gross domestic product (GDP), currently £350 bn — or just over a fifth of the UK economy — would grow to £640 bn by 2034 if Britain stayed in a reformed EU and adopted policies encouraging more trade with the world’s fastest-growing markets, the report will say.  But if the UK left the EU, while pursuing its own trade-friendly policies regardless, the London economy would still grow to £615 bn over

Thursday

Olda Fitzgerald

Lenin, Hitler, Sloane Square – a Polish noble’s 20th-century Odyssey

If Vincent Poklewski Koziell has really drunk as much as he claims in this book I doubt he would be the spry and handsome 88-year-old to be seen bicycling around Sloane Square that he is today — a slight fall having proved no impediment to his progress. He came from a grand family of diplomats on his mother’s side. She, Zoia de Stoeckl, was clearly ravishingly pretty and became, aged 18, a maid of honour to the last empress of Russia. Vincent’s father derived from what he describes as ‘run-down Polish nobility’ (only 56 peasants); but the family seems to have had an astonishing ability to rise, phoenix-like, from successive

Thursday

Melissa Kite

I bought a tin of dog food and paid £67.50

‘Cydney,’ I have just told the spaniel, ‘you had better enjoy this tin of dog food because it cost me £67.50.’ I hear you ask, ‘How on earth is this possible? Are you feeding foie gras to your cocker?’ I might as well be. It would be cheaper than buying pet food in Streatham after Transport for London has run amok with a red line painter in a deserted street. I had pulled up as normal outside this sleepy little pet shop on the corner of a quiet residential street to get the dog a consignment of Lily’s Kitchen. I parked in the large empty bay outside, which still looked

Anthony Horowitz

Anthony Horowitz’s Diary: Dinner with Saddam, anyone?

I have written a play, but a month after it was sent to half a dozen theatres, I have heard nothing. Either they’re being slow or they’re so shocked that they cannot bring themselves to respond. The play is called Dinner With Saddam and takes place in Baghdad on the evening of the Allied bombardment. It’s a comedy. Is it even possible, I wonder, for an English writer to portray an Arab family in a humorous way without laying himself open to charges of racism? And when all things are considered, was it good or bad timing to send the play out just one day before the Isis forces launched

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

The ambulance service is in a state of emergency

Tom leant back against the bathroom wall, his face streaked with blood from the nosebleed, eyes half shut like an owl. ‘I’m passing out,’ he said. Then his legs gave way and he slumped to the floor. ‘Tom? Tom?’ I shook him but — nothing, no response. His hands began an awful looping tremor. Five minutes before, I hadn’t been much worried, a little bossy even, enjoying playing nursemaid to a friend. It’s only a nosebleed T. Now. Don’t tip your head back, you’ll choke. Lean forward over the sink, pinch your nose. Like this. Here. As Tom lost consciousness, so my reality changed. This was a different world — one

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

The West has drifted away from Israel — and itself

Is Israel drifting away from the West? That was Hugo Rifkind’s claim in his column in the magazine last week. Hugo wrote: ‘Israel drifting away. Never mind whose fault it is; that’s a whole other point. But it’s happening. It’s off. No longer does it exist in the popular imagination as our sort of place. Once, I suppose, foes and friends alike regarded it as a North Atlantic nation, but elsewhere. Then a western European one, then, briefly, a southern European one. When was it, do you think, that Israel stopped being regarded as fundamentally a bit like Spain? Early 1990s? Then they shot Yitzhak Rabin, and Oslo didn’t happen, and

Friday

Steerpike

Uxbridge set to be destination Boris?

Mr S likes a flutter. His eyes were drawn to the latest speculation about Boris’s return to the Commons. Ladbrokes are offering 3-1 that the Blond Bombshell will be selected in Uxbridge, which is to be vacated by John Randall at the next election. Uxbridge is hardly K&C (Mrs S is agin it); but, it is a safe Tory seat in the capital: Ladbrokes have it 1/50 on for the Tories. Perfect for Boris, you might think… Here are the latest odds on Boris, courtesy of Ladbrokes: Where will Boris stand in 2015? 6/4 Does not stand for parliament 3/1 Uxbridge & South Ruislip 7/2 Hertsmere 6/1 South Cambridgeshire 7/1

Thursday

Camilla Swift

Sloane Rangers vs Arabs – the battle for Chelsea

Perhaps you’re aware that it’s Ramadan right now, the month in which all good Muslims refrain from eating, drinking, smoking and sex during daylight. What you might not know is that Ramadan also marks the start of an annual turf war in London; a battle between the tribal Sloanes and the young Gulf Arabs to dominate Chelsea. The skirmish actually begins before Ramadan. The Gulf States heat up to an intolerable degree and their oil-rich young migrate over here in droves to escape both religious censure and the sun. They descend first of all on the department stores in what’s become known as the Harrods Hajj, to flash their cash

Ian Thomson

Why I’m now scared of book clubs

‘Hi Ian!’ the email began. ‘We are a group of mostly females who meet regularly in London to review really good reads. We are currently reading The Dead Yard, and were wondering if you would like to join us as our honorary guest while we fire you (gently) with questions about your book.’ The email concluded: ‘You will be well fed and thoroughly entertained! Kind regards, Phoebe.’ Very nice, but I sensed a danger. My book on Jamaica, The Dead Yard, has earned me a lot of enemies. For good or ill, it exposes a dark side of island life at odds with the ‘paradise’ of travel brochures. Bookshops in

Thursday

Andrew Roberts

From jailbird to social butterfly – the return of Conrad Black

The former proprietor of this magazine, Conrad Black, is in London at the moment with his gorgeous wife Barbara, and I’ve got very bad news for those of his enemies who predicted that he’d be a social pariah when he got out of jail. At lunches, parties and dinners I’ve attended this week in his honour, he and Barbara have been feted by the leader of one of Britain’s largest political parties, a household-name supermodel, a former foreign policy adviser to a revered prime minister, members of the royal family, a senior industrialist, a former Commonwealth prime minister, a former British foreign secretary, several House of Lords colleagues of his

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

‘Dark pools’ are just another conspiracy of bankers against the public

It was at the Mansion House dinner last year that a City gent two seats away announced himself to be the custodian of one of London’s ‘dark pools’. The phrase sounded pleasingly Tolkienian but his first explanation — an electronic exchange in which large share transactions are completed in total privacy — dispelled the charm. My reaction was sharp enough to make the Downing Street spin-doctor between us fiddle nervously with his Twitter feed. If institutional investors can shift blocks of stock on the quiet, without moving public markets, what happens to the normal process of ‘price discovery’ between buyers and sellers? Surely small investors are being ripped off? Sounds

Thursday

Tanya Gold

At the Chiltern Firehouse, smugness should be on the menu

Here then is Gatsby’s house, after an invasion by the Daily Mail. It is called the Chiltern Firehouse. It is a restaurant in a newly opened hotel in a Victorian Gothic former fire station in Marylebone, a proud and grimy district in total denial about its shocking levels of air pollution. The building has a fairytale intensity, with red brick turrets; it is a Roald Dahl prison repointed to its extremities by the man who made the Chateau Marmont in LA. The chef is Nuno Mendes, formerly of Viajante. But what else? Ah — now we are sucked into a wind tunnel of paps and buzz; like so much nonsense,

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

I may not know much about khat, but I know banning it is crazy

Khat is a leafy stimulant chewed mainly, I gather, by Somalis. This week the government banned its possession and sale. And, for the life of me, I cannot figure out why. Not being a Somali (or, indeed, a Russian murderer, whatever the sketch above might suggest) I can’t pretend that my life will now have a khat-shaped hole in it. Dimly, if I’m honest, I can remember a Swiss German hippy once giving me some leaves to chew on an Indian beach once, but they tasted horrid and I spat them out. So if I have taken khat, ever, it was then. Generally, I prefer to buy my leafy stimulants

Steven Mcgregor

Discovering bourbon on Brick Lane

When I was stationed in Kentucky I never drank bourbon. It wasn’t until I came to London that the drink became something special to me. I always passed a bowling alley on Brick Lane with fluorescent lights and unmarked taxis waiting by the door. One night they had two for one drinks, so I went inside. It was just as I suspected: clattering pins and certified drunks. But the barman, Mike, loved bourbon. ‘People here only have this with Coke,’ he lamented, and snuck a drink from a small tumbler without ice or water. Booker’s, an uncut, small-batch bourbon made by Jim Beam, was his choice. But behind him on

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

Young Italians flock to London – for just the same reasons it scares me

Although I live in the country in Northamptonshire, I go to London often — almost once a week — and I find it more and more intimidating. This isn’t just because of the skyscrapers that spring up boastfully everywhere, parading one’s own insignificance, but also because of the aura of terrifying wealth that pervades its central area and now even its inner suburbs. Fifty years ago, when I got married, my wife and I bought our first London house in Kensington Park Road, Notting Hill, for £9,500. I wonder how many millions it is worth now. My parents, who were quite well off if not exactly rich, lived in Knightsbridge

Wednesday

The Spectator

Video: London cabbies, Über alles

What’s upsetting London cabbies? Is it really that Transport for London aren’t fairly implementing the special privileges awarded to Hackney Carriages, or are they simply against a bit of healthy competition? According to some, it’s all Goldman Sachs’ fault, but can the iconic London taxi stem the tide of technological change forever? We sent The Spectator’s intrepid Harry Cole down to the frontline of Wednesday’s London taxi protests, conveniently located outside of 22 Old Queen Street, to find out more.