London

Thursday

Daniel Korski

Cancel the London Afghanistan Conference

In a few weeks time, a slew of foreign ministers will descend on London to attend a conference on Afghanistan. No.10 will use the event to sell Gordon Brown as a statesman, confidently dealing with the nation’s threats. The Conservatives, in turn, will probably try to score the usual points about Britain’s failure, alongside its NATO allies, to make any in-roads in the fight against the Taliban. Together with Tony Blair’s evidence to the Iraq Inquiry, the conference may create one of the few moments in the drawn-out election campaign when the three party leaders stop talking about the NHS and focus on national security issues instead. Too bad, then,

Wednesday

James Forsyth

The NYT: The Detroit bomber was radicalised in London

It is a depressing fact that the Detroit bomber appears to have been radicalised in London. Today, the New York Times takes an extensive look at the bomber’s radicalisation in London. As the paper, which is not prone to hyperbole, says: “Investigators are now, in fact, turning a sharper and retrospective eye to the passage in Mr. Abdulmutallab’s life that began immediately after his summer in Sana, Yemen, in 2005, when he enrolled as a $25,000-a-year mechanical engineering student at University College London. In recent days, officials in Washington and London have said they are focusing on the possibility that his London years, including his possible contacts with radical Muslim

Tuesday

Peter Hoskin

It’s not just the bankers who will be hanged

Oh, Darling, what hast thou done?  There are few more pertinent, or more damning, examples of what the government’s soak-the-rich policies could mean for the country than the news that JP Morgan is having second thoughts about developing a £1.5 billion European HQ in Canary Wharf.  Of course, the bank may still go ahead with it.  But just imagine if they don’t: the work lost for construction workers and a thousand other contractors; the tax revenues lost for the public finances.  The damage won’t just – or even mostly – be to the financial sector. Thing is, I imagine that Number Ten will be fairly happy with the story.  As

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

Mayor Mandelson?

When Mandelson said in his Spectator interview that he plans another 15 to 20 years in politics, what could he have meant? Now that his European career is over, there is only one decent post coming up for a Labour figure in the first half of the next decade – and I float the latest theory in my News of the World column today: that Mandy might stand as Mayor of London in 2012. A bizarre notion, I grant you, but no less bizarre than his CV to date – and Ken Livingstone is certainly taking the prospect seriously. Whoever the Labour candidate, they have a pretty good chance given

Monday

Daniel Korski

What do Muslims think?

Coffee House readers sometimes complain that we do not talk enough about Muslims and Islam. I have certainly shied away from the subject, fearing that emotion and prejudice, rather than argumentation and empirical data, would dominate the debate. I don’t write about Christians, Jews or Buddhists, so why focus on Muslims? At any rate, I don’t like talking about collective groups, much as I prefer not to be talked about based solely on my heritage. But now a new study called Muslims in Europe allows for an empirically-based debate about sentiments across a number of Muslim communities. Based on interviews and surveys in 11 European cities, it presents some interesting

Friday

James Forsyth

How far could Boris go?

At Tory conference a bunch of candidates got together for supper. The conversation turned, as it so often does on these occasions, to who might be the next leader. One candidate was advancing the case for Boris with some gusto, until another interrupted saying, ‘can you imagine Boris representing Britain at the Security Council.’ The table agreed that they couldn’t and so the conversation moved on. Certainly, this perceived lack of seriousness will be Boris’s biggest problem in going further than Mayor of London. Cameron had a point when he said that Boris was stuck in a buffoonish rut from which he would find it hard to escape. But if

Thursday

David Blackburn

Sarko pulls it off

The news that Nicolas Sarkozy has cancelled a proposed flying visit to London, in order to smooth over the fall out from his attack on the City, has got tongues wagging. Adam Boulton reports: ‘It’s claimed Sarkozy asked for this week’s meeting to patch things up. So by implication their (his Westminster sources) argument goes – if it isn’t happening it’s because Brown is snubbing Sarko and not the other way round.’ This line doesn’t convince. According to the Elysee’s diary, Sarkozy is otherwise engaged tomorrow, so the finance cordiale will now take place at…wait for it… the European Council meeting in Brussels next week. Why would Brown give away

Wednesday

David Blackburn

This small man thinks he’s St. Joan

I sympathise with Alistair Darling and his defence of the City. When he’s not contending with Gordon Brown’s suicidal Tobin tax proposals, Darling has to confront Nicolas Sarkozy’s calculated anti-Anglo popular politics. Yesterday, the Elysees’s Puss-in-Boots delivered a deliberately provocative and economically senseless attack on what he described as the “unconstrained Anglo-Saxon market model.” Sarkozy sees the appointment of Michel Barnier as EU financial regulation supremo as a “victory” for France; he expressed himself in those exact terms: “Do you know what it means for me to see for the first time in 50 years a French European commissioner in charge of the internal market, including financial services, including the

Monday

Mark Bathgate

Labour’s free for all

The potentially huge exposure of UK banks in Dubai, depreciating some UK bank share prices again this morning, is a reminder of just how much UK bank lending grew in recent years. The above chart shows the growth in external claims of the UK owned banks around the world over the past decade. The sums lent almost quadrupled to nearly $4 trillion in 8 years.  Anyone interested in discovering which bubbles the UK banks (and now taxpayers) have funded can find the data on the Bank of England website – $1.2 trillion in the United States, $125 billion in Spain, $183 billion in Ireland, $50 billion to the UAE/Dubai. Bank

Saturday

David Blackburn

Outmanoeuvred Brown endangers recovery

The Times’ Ian King writes that Dubai’s predicament presents an opportunity for the City to attract new business. There is no reason why, with attractive incentives, London shouldn’t capitalise on Sheik Mohammed’s momentary lapse of reason. However, the appointment of Michel Barnier, an evangelical protectionist who makes Joseph Chamberlain look like the father of Free Trade, as EU regulating supremo is a disaster for Britain. The appointment raises further questions about Gordon Brown’s acceptance of Baroness Ashton as the EU’s foreign minister. Michael Fallon is no doubt: “Brown has been completely outwitted. We now have none of the three key economic jobs in Brussels. This has all happened at an

Monday

Peter Hoskin

The Tory leadership could be talking like Boris soon

So Boris is attacking the 50p tax rate again – and rightly so.  In his Telegraph column today, the Mayor of London repeats the lines he pushed in April: that the measure will drive business talent away from our shores, that it will damage London’s competitiveness, and that it could actually lose money for the Exchequer.  It all comes to a punchy conclusion: “What Gordon Brown wants to do is therefore economically illiterate.” I imagine a few commentators will see that last line as a veiled attack on the Tory leadership, given that they’re committed to the tax rate too.  But, as Tim Montgomerie says over at ConservativeHome, and going

Wednesday

David Crane

Behind the white face

Has there ever been a more compelling period in London’s history than the first years of the 19th century? Has there ever been a more compelling period in London’s history than the first years of the 19th century? There is, I suppose, a case to be made for the London of Shakespeare, but any city that can boast a Byron to look after its poetry, Sheridan its drinking, Hazlitt its journalism, Nash its architecture and Brummell the cut of its coat would certainly edge it for fun. There was admittedly no Lancelot Andrewes to preach it into sobriety — it would have to make do with Sydney Smith — and

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

Rank desperation

Gordon Brown’s suggestion for a Tobin tax would, if implemented, crucify the City of London. We are the largest foreign exchange centre in the world and that Brown is seriously suggesting hitting this industry is a sure sign he does not expect to be in government after the election. It is the proposal that a British prime Minister should be dying in a ditch to kill off given that the City generates about a tenth of Britain’s economic wealth. The kind of proposal that might be aired by a Frenchman, purely to outrage Britain. It is, of course, a trick: Brown knows it won’t be agreed because it requires the

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

Welcome to London

Visitors to London are now given an extra special welcome when they arrive at our stations, thanks to the Metropolitan Police’s latest advert (pictured). It is advising commuters that, if they hide a gun for someone else, they will go to prison too. That’s told ‘em.   But when I walked past, I did wonder what effect this has on our capital’s image. Sure, the homicide rate is now statistically worse in Lambeth, where there have been 12 homicides so far this year, than it is in the Bronx’s notorious 52nd precinct, where there have been 6. And gun crime continues to rise sharply in the capital. Although last year saw a

Wednesday

Charlotte Moore

All washed-up

Ordinary Thunderstorms is a thriller with grand ambitions. It is set in contemporary London, much of the action taking place on or near the Thames. The timeless, relentless river represents the elemental forces which subvert the sophisticated but essentially temporary structures raised by modern man to showcase his ambition, ingenuity and greed. William Boyd has attempted to write a Great London Novel for our times. His clever interlocking of lives from every stratum of society echoes Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend; hit-men, asylum- seekers, prostitutes, religious charismatics, corrupt businessmen, worthless aristocrats, paedophiles, junkies, exploitative landlords — Boyd’s characters, like Dickens’s, inhabit their city like rats in the hollow walls

Wednesday

Miles Johnson

The great Russian takeaway

That the rise of a powerful coterie of Russian billionaires overlapped with Britain’s transformation into an offshore tax-haven is unlikely to escape the notice of both countries’ future historians. Indeed it is entirely plausible that had successive British governments in the 1990s been less amenable to foreign wealth, this book would have been entitled Genevagrad rather than Londongrad. Mark Hollingsworth and Stewart Lansley raise interesting questions about how the rocketing price of property, contemporary art and even private school fees of early Noughties Britain, fuelled by a steady supply of roubles, contributed to the bubble preceding the bust. While there are several excellent studies of the impact of the oligarchs

Wednesday

Hugh Cecil

Living the pagan idyll

For years an intimate friend of my mother Rachel Cecil, Frances Partridge inhabits my memory from early childhood. Before she reached 50, her dark, delicate skin was already seamed with a thousand wrinkles like a very old woman’s, although she remained youthful all her prodigiously long life, retaining an acute power of sympathy. She would ask one searching personal questions and loved arguing, but good-humouredly, despite her strong pacifist and anti-religious convictions which were hotly contested in my home. Her youthfulness showed also in her birdlike gaze and musical, emphatic voice, the hallmark of the Bloomsbury circle with which she was so long associated. My childhood recollections include also her

Saturday

Sebastian Smee

The invisible man

Bleak, bleak, bleak. Anita Brookner’s new novel, Stran- gers, is unlikely to inspire resolutions to self-improvement or even cathartic tears. But its main character, a retired bank manager called Paul Sturgis, is a brilliant and affecting creation by a writer whose empathy runs deep, and whose pitch is perfect. Sturgis, 72 years old, is in good health and financially well off. His trouble — and it is deep — is of another kind. He lives in a well-kept but dark and depressing flat in London. He has no children — only a distant female relative who lives on the other side of town and for whom he has no particular

Saturday

William Brett

Loved and lost

Iain Sinclair is as dark as London scribes come. Engaged in a lifelong literary project, he records his own psychic and physical travels around the city, identifying what he calls ‘disappear- ances’ — people, buildings, spaces that no longer exist, but that haunt the present. While Peter Ackroyd is in thrall to London, revelling in its labyrinthine past and bounding enthusiastically over its landscape, Sinclair instead seems tortured by the place, lost in an infinity of connections and coincidences, and made paranoid by the ghosts that he unearths. Nowhere, it seems, is this paranoia more intense than in Hackney, his home borough for the last 40 years. This book is