London

Saturday

Nick Tyrone

What can Laurence Fox hope to achieve with his bid for London mayor?

As if the politics of the Western world wasn’t well past parody already, this weekend sees Laurence Fox throwing his hat into the ring to be London’s next mayor. Before I start making fun of this idea, let’s try and give Mr Fox the benefit of the doubt. The London mayoral contest, which should have been put out of its misery last May, has been dragged into 2021 on account of the coronavirus crisis. The extra year hasn’t made the contest any more inviting to those of us who live in the capital. We still have an incumbent Labour mayor who is a disappointment on every possible level, but who

Thursday

Ross Clark

Is this a once-in-a-generation chance to invest in central London?

Buy when there is gunfire on the streets, goes the old adage. But could this be a case of the right time to buy being when there is, well, hardly anything happening on the streets? Few investments have been as hard hit by Covid-19 as commercial property in central London. As shops and restaurants have been closed, and office staff made to work from home, landlords have struggled to collect their rent. In the six months to September, for example, Shaftesbury, which owns 600 buildings in the West End including 1.9 million square foot of retail and office space, managed to collect only 41 per cent of what was due,

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

The war on cars is backfiring

For most London-based politicians, there’s a threat that’s worse than Covid. You’ll begin to notice it as we ease out of lockdown. It’s not the Brazilian variant that keeps them awake at night, or collapsing hospitals. Nope. What really worries them is the thought of cars. Watch them pale as they mutter the words ‘car-led recovery’ and marvel at the variety of tortuous schemes cooked up to thwart motorists. You’d have thought, given the teetering economy, that any recovery, car-led or otherwise, would be welcome — especially as pollution plummeted between 2017 and early 2020, and diesel’s the problem, not your average commuter ride. Volvo said on Tuesday that all

Thursday

Anthony Browne

The EU is stepping up its raid on the City of London

It is not usual for the Governor of the Bank of England to ask permission to make a statement about a completely unrelated issue when giving evidence on inflation to the Treasury Select Committee. So we knew it was serious when Andrew Bailey yesterday told us his concerns about Brussels trying to force banks to relocate their euro clearing from London to the EU.  It is not a surprise that the EU wants to do this – France has been pushing for this for years before Brexit, leading to it losing a case to the UK at the European Court of Justice – but what is concerning is the desperate

Wednesday

George Pieri

The problem with renaming London's streets

In Taksim Square, the busy central hub of Istanbul, a large, viril monument stands. In the centre is Mustafa Kemal Attaturk, the father of modern Turkey (although, perhaps not the contemporary one). When Attaturk came into power, he immediately set about changing the country from Empire to Nation. This meant progressive Western values, the alphabet; a dismissal, in some cases, a blanketing of the culture and customs before it. Almost by accident, this sparked a nostalgia for the Empire that is potent in today’s Turkey. In the hotel nearby, the Kurdish receptionist gets to work. ‘Did you see the monument?’ he says to me bleakly. I ask what he thinks

Thursday

Taki

The lost magic of Palm Beach

Gstaad Good old Helvetia. I’m quitting her for the rainy but pleasant land of England. The cows are beginning to resemble chorus girls and the village an Alpine Colditz. Too much of a good thing said a wise man to a friend of mine who wanted to live on the French Riviera all year round. That was long ago. The South of France is a shithole these days — and a very expensive one at that. The real Riviera now lies far away from the coast, up in the hills: Saint-Paul-de-Vence and its environs. The rest of the Côte d’Azur, where Russian and Arab gangsters have bought all the great

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

The cult of London

The phrase ‘rich people’s problems’ has its uses. I once overheard a group in a Knightsbridge restaurant sympathising with a companion in tones fit for a bereavement or life-changing injury. ‘Oh, poor you!’ It turned out that their nanny had been ill for two days while they were in Zermatt, and that Farrow & Ball was temporarily unable to supply an obscure shade of paint. To be fair, there are problems unique to the seriously rich. Take Marci Klein, daughter of Calvin. Not only was Marci kidnapped aged ten, but she later complained that in the midst of any passionate encounter with a new boyfriend, she would suddenly find herself

Thursday

Lucasta Miller

Lives unlived: Light Perpetual, by Francis Spufford, reviewed

Francis Spufford was already admired as a non-fiction writer when he published his prize-winning first novel, On Golden Hill, in 2016. Set in 18th-century America, it was a tour de force of historical imagining, its prose skilfully suffused with the writerly tics of that era yet not overly so, leaving it pedantry-free and compulsively readable. His new book, Light Perpetual, is also a historical novel, but with a difference. It follows the arc of the 20th century through the stories of five working-class Londoners, but its central conceit is a clever counterfactual. The opening scene sees all five, then young children, being killed in an air raid during the second

Friday

Katy Balls

Covid sparks a major incident in London

Is the NHS at risk of being overwhelmed? That’s a question of increasing concern in Westminster as hospital admissions rise. Sadiq Khan has today declared a ‘major incident’ in London — calling the situation ‘critical’ with the spread of the virus ‘out of control’.  With the coronavirus infection rate in London now exceeding 1,000 per 100,000 people, Khan said that the London Ambulance Service was currently taking up to 8,000 emergency calls a day (compared to 5,500 typical for a busy day). It comes as the reported daily death toll on Thursday — 1,162 — reached the highest recorded since April. There’s little, too, to suggest things are about to improve anytime soon. A leak to the Health Service Journal suggested

Friday

Melanie McDonagh

Why did Sadiq Khan politicise London’s fireworks?

It takes quite a lot to make fireworks divisive, no? A roaring display of noise and light and colour, owed to the technical ingenuity of our old friends the Chinese, reminding everyone who’s ever been in a war of the noise of falling shells… it’s a universally popular way of seeing in the New Year. And in all the displays around the world, it’s London’s on the Thames that draws in a global audience. Normally I watch the display from Ireland; this year I could almost see them on the horizon. With the year that’s been, this was the chance to cheer everyone up. It’s been a year of plague,

Sunday

David Patrikarakos

John le Carré’s London of exiles is alive and well

‘I’m an Englishman born and bred, almost.’ So says Karim Amir, protagonist of Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia. If Karim, and by proxy Kureishi, is a funny sort of Englishman – ‘born and bred’ but not quite – then so was John le Carré, albeit in a slightly different way. Le Carré, or to give him his real name David Cornwell, died a week ago and the obits have been flowing ever since. They generally, and correctly, observe that his true subject was never spies but England (and it was always England rather than Britain). Born to a con-man father who sent him to a public school where he

Thursday

Sinclair McKay

City of gold: Peter Ackroyd on the undimmed spirit of London

The silenced city has been, for some, uncanny. Deserted evening streets, darkened pubs, shut shops and the absence of fellow footsteps might suggest that some essential spirit has fled. Yet this is exactly the wrong way to look at it, says the novelist, historian and biographer Peter Ackroyd. For him, both lockdown and winter provide opportunities to see London in a different light. ‘The silence and the empty streets are very appealing,’ he says. ‘This is the time when Londoners get to hear distant church bells,’ he adds. ‘The identity of the city changes enormously in the winter and loses some of its majesty — but it retains its life

Monday

James Forsyth

Hancock warns of a new Covid strain

Matt Hancock has just announced that London and the surrounding area will be put into Tier 3 from one minute past midnight on Wednesday. Hancock said that government scientists had identified a new strain of Covid that they think might be behind the more rapid spread of the virus in the south east in recent weeks. Alarming as this sounds, he did emphasise that it doesn’t seem to cause more serious illness and there’s no reason to think it won’t respond to the vaccine. The news of this strain does raise further questions about the Christmas easing. The risk now is that as people head home for the holidays they

Paul Burke

Of course cycling is right-wing

Three cheers for Jeremy Vine. At last someone has pointed out that cycling in cities is inherently right-wing. Full disclosure: I’m a cyclist. I may not own a square inch of fluorescent or Lycra apparel; I may not terrorise motorists with violently bright and flashing lights but I’ve been riding a bike around London since I was a child. However, whereas Jeremy celebrates the right-wing triumphalism of cycling — asserting that he and other cyclists ‘are acting out of primal selfishness’ — I’m mortally embarrassed by it. Cycling is the exclusive preserve of the very few and the very able. As for cycle lanes, which pander to a tiny and privileged

Thursday

Tanya Gold

A magical field hospital for vegetables: Turnips reviewed

Turnips is an haute cuisine restaurant inside a greengrocer in Borough Market in London. I suspect others will try this conceit soon — it is the sort of dishonest fantasy affluent anti-vax mothers enjoy as they peddle their oblivious self-hatred on smartphones made of minerals hewn by child slaves — but not like this. Turnips is indisputably magical. Perhaps I say this because it is almost completely outdoors but still warm. These are mad times, even for mad times. Borough is a good place to feel the throb of the ancient city; but particularly now. It has the toughness and ennui of a district that says: global pandemic, kids? What

Tuesday

Hardeep Singh

Renaming streets isn't necessarily a bad idea

A few days ago, Ealing Council put out a statement saying that ‘following consultation’ the local authority had decided to rename a street in Southall. Part of Havelock Road, the Labour-led council explained, would be renamed ‘Guru Nanak Road’. It appears the local authority wanted the renaming to coincide with the 551st anniversary of the birth of Sikhism’s founder Guru Nanak and that the London council was planning to ‘celebrate and honour’ this religious figure. According to the pressure group Save Our Statues (SOS), just 16 households of the 345 contacted for their views on the proposed renaming had actually engaged with the process. Of those 16 who replied, just

Tuesday

Ross Clark

Should London be split into different tiers?

What will the new map of tiers look like when England exits lockdown next week? It certainly won’t be the same system we left behind when we went into lockdown on 5 November. For one thing, we have been told that restrictions are tightening and that more areas will be shunted into Tier 3. The epicentres of new infections at the moment are not as much in the cities as relatively low-income suburban and semi-rural areas in Lincolnshire and North Kent. Swale (528 new infections per 100,000), East Lindsey (467) and Boston (433) currently top the infection charts. Liverpool by contrast — the first place to go into Tier 3 —

Monday

Nick Tyrone

Why is Sadiq Khan talking London down?

Sadiq Khan’s powers as London mayor are relatively limited, but part of his remit is to act as a salesman for London. He is there to talk up the virtues of one of the greatest cities in the world. It was surprising then to see him concede at the weekend that we have to ‘accept the fact that there is potentially an existential threat to central London as we know it.’ This surely is the opposite of what the mayor of London should be saying at this moment in time. It also demonstrates why Sadiq Khan deserves to lose the election in May. Sadiq Khan already lost my vote months ago when he

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: How Nicola Sturgeon outdoes Boris

Ask the English Sir: Toby Young rightly criticises the juvenile posturing of the devolved governments of the Union over Covid-19 (No sacred cows, 24 October). Each of these governments has implemented extreme lockdown measures without consideration of their cost to the taxpayer. As 90 per cent of British taxpayers are English, this represents an egregious example of ‘taxation without representation’. In contrast, I watched the Commons announcement of a Tier 3 lockdown in the north of England, which was followed by an opposition reply, and then a reply from the SNP. Surely I wasn’t the only Englishman to ask: ‘What’s it got to do with them?’ Toby Young is right

Thursday

Griff Rhys Jones

London’s war on motorists isn’t helping anybody

Late one evening in Yangon in Myanmar a few years ago, I noticed a grey Morris Minor van patrolling the streets. It had an old-fashioned double–ended trumpet loudspeaker on its roof blaring out an amplified voice. ‘What’s it saying?’ I asked my guide. ‘It tells the people “It’s late! Stop drinking and go to bed! You have a busy day tomorrow!”’ That’s the spirit. We should get some of that in London. ‘Stop eating! Get on your bike! Pedal faster!’ Why has Covid brought out a rash of virtuous bullying? I have lost count of the number of times that Radio 4 has asserted that this plague needs to create