London

Fischer’s is like visiting Vienna without having to go to Austria (thank God)

Fischer’s is Austria made safe for liberals, gays, Jews and other Untermenschen riffraff, because it is a restaurant, not a concentration camp, and because it is in Marylebone High Street, not Linz. It is the new restaurant from Chris Corbin and Jeremy King, who opened the Wolseley, the Delaunay and Brasserie Zédel, and it is more profound and lovely than any of them. There is always a clock in a Corbin and King restaurant, a big old clock from some fairytale train station, poised over the clientele as they stuff and age; for remembrance of mortality, I guess. Or maybe they just like big clocks? In any case, the guests

Martin Vander Weyer

Rona Fairhead will be good for the BBC – but who was so keen to nobble her rival?

Hats off to Rona Fairhead, the former Financial Times executive who will succeed Lord Patten as chairman of the BBC Trust. It requires a brave spirit to take on this poisonously politicised role — and Fairhead starts with the disadvantage that everyone thinks they know the roll call of candidates who might have been preferred but declined to apply, including her own former boss Dame Marjorie Scardino, for whose job as head of Pearson, the FT’s parent, Fairhead was passed over last year. But a mole tells me she’s ‘as steely as she’ll need to be’; and leading ladies of the non-executive circuit (she’s on the boards of HSBC and

My ‘fare-dodging’ hell

At least every other time a ticket inspector boards a train or bus I’m on, I pretend I can’t find my ticket or Oyster card. I then miraculously find it at the very last second before my stop. Why? Pure revenge. I hate this nasty group of sadistic jobsworths and, having been stung by them myself, take great pleasure in distracting them for long enough to allow those who are fare dodging to get away without being spotted. The smugness of ticket inspectors becomes unbearable in the face of the chronically bad service on London transport. My blood boils when I spot a bank of uniformed inspectors, flanked by police officers, when disembarking

The false paradise of Metroland | 29 August 2014

Gaily into Ruislip Gardens runs the red electric train… Near the end of the Metropolitan Line, where London dwindles into woods and meadows, stands a Tudor manor house, built within the moat of a motte-and-bailey castle. Now a quaint museum, charting the history of the farms that once surrounded it, this modest landmark shares its name with the local Tube station, Ruislip Manor. A century after they built it, the railway that runs through here still feels out of place. There are fields on one side, suburban semis on the other. Welcome to Metroland, the bizarre no-man’s-land between town and country, created by the Metropolitan Railway, which celebrates its 150th

Will we learn to love our ugly houses?

What are the root causes of Britain’s housing crisis? The Philosophers’ Mail – which has copied the format of MailOnline but I suspect is not aiming at quite the same demographic – recently offered an alternative to the usual explanations. That most people are opposed not to building more houses, but to building ugly houses, and that this accounts for most of what we dismiss as a nimbyism that prevents much-needed development. As they put it: ‘Most of the large housing developments built in the South East of England in the last 25 years share one common and (in this context) generally undiscussed feature: they are very ugly. Or, to be more

The nun who took down an Isis flag – and stands up for east London’s Muslims

Not so long ago disaffected youngsters would take to a life of crime and hard drugs, a trajectory which would often kill them. These days, some young men from our Muslim community sign up instead to the so-called Islamic State, and the dream of a distant Caliphate. Why? Well, forget theology or even the prestige which comes from being a warrior — if Sister Christine Frost is right, it all comes down to housing. Sister Christine has worked on the Will Crooks Estate in Poplar, east London, for over 40 years. She accidentally got into the news in early August when she removed the black flag of radical Islam which

Who cleans skyscrapers?

Tough at the top The clocks on Big Ben were cleaned by abseiling window-cleaners. Some other big cleaning/painting jobs: — Repainting the Forth Railway Bridge used to be a metaphor for never-ending work, but a new coating completed in 2012 is estimated to have a life of 25 years. — Sydney Harbour Bridge was, for the first 80 years of its life, cleaned by hand, but last year it was done for the first time by robot. — The world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, is cleaned by a team of abseilers, with all 24,000 windows taking three months to get through. — Most New York skyscrapers are

A.N. Wilson’s diary: The book that made me a writer – and the pushchair that made me an old git

Like many inward-looking children, I always doodled stories and poems. Knowing one wanted to be a writer is a different matter altogether. That moment came when I read Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria. I was sitting in the Temple Reading Room at Rugby. The final paragraph, in which Strachey imagined the dying Victoria at Osborne House, sinking out of consciousness as the scenes of her past life flitted through her brain, struck me as one of the best pieces of writing I had ever encountered. Fifty years on, an unworthy successor, I am about to publish my own life of Victoria. Mine is not hagiography but, like Strachey, and like almost

Our boys in the Islamic state: Britain’s export jihad

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_21_August_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Douglas Murray and Shiraz Maher discuss Britain’s jihadis”] Listen [/audioplayer]It is the now familiar nightmare image. A kneeling prisoner, and behind him a black-hooded man speaking to camera. The standing man denounces the West and claims that his form of Islam is under attack. He then saws off the head of the hostage. Why did Wednesday morning’s video stand out? Because this time the captive was an American journalist — James Foley — and his murderer is speaking in an unmistakable London accent. The revulsion with which this latest Islamist atrocity has been greeted is of course understandable. But it is also surprising. This is no one-off, certainly no anomaly.

Jihadi John – a very British export

It is the now familiar nightmare image. A kneeling prisoner, and behind him a black-hooded man speaking to camera. The standing man denounces the West and claims that his form of Islam is under attack. He then saws off the head of the hostage. listen to ‘Terror’s London accent’ on Audioboo

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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’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

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

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