Toby Young: Please, Boris, don't allow a Waitrose in my neighbourhood

Five years ago I joined forces with some local worthies to object to the opening of a strip joint on Acton High Street. We weren’t successful, but the owner of the club decided to invite us all to the opening night. He claimed we’d got the wrong end of the stick. It wasn’t a sleazy lap-dancing club — oh no — but a ‘burlesque’ club. What this meant in practice is that the dancers had glued feathers to their micro bikinis. Apart from that it was business as usual.

The upshot was that I spent a couple of hours standing in the middle of a strip club trying to make small talk with about 20 middle-aged ladies, most of them Lib Dem activists, as a succession of topless women gyrated on stage. It took every ounce of willpower to maintain eye contact with these bluestockings and not let my gaze drift in the direction of the ‘burlesque’ performers.