‘The food is as good as you will find in London’: Saison at Raffles London, reviewed

The Old War Office (bad acronym OWO) on Whitehall is now a Raffles hotel: you can stay in Winston Churchill’s office if that helps you sleep at night. I’m not sure I could, but this is the rational endgame of privatisation: you can sleep inside British history, which is quite close to sleeping through it. War isn’t the jolly marketing riff it was five weeks ago, and the atmosphere in the OWO reflects this. Even so, you need the money of a (fleeing) Tory donor to stay here, and perhaps they won’t notice that pre-war is outside their door in the form of children setting off fireworks and picking fights with the police during marches ‘for’ Palestine.

I watched an ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionist child stand nearby while non-Jewish people posed for photographs with him, as if he were Darth Vader. Perhaps they will rethink the name. Or perhaps they will restyle it like a second world war variant of the Jorvik Viking Centre. They should. It is pleading to be a themed hotel.

It is as gilded as the Empire it was built for – its date is 1906, its form neo-Classical – and the Hinduja Group that renovated it because they believe people can, and should, relax this close to the centre of the British state. I never could. I would need Nembutal to sleep here, Churchill’s ghost with paintbrush or no. The doormen are red-coated and bowler hatted: their view is of a statue of HRH Prince George, Duke of Cambridge, with horse.

The hallway has a princely staircase and a chandelier for giants. The corridors are vast, and white: institutional still, and heavy. As with all such buildings, the visitor resents the present as the past is more interesting.