London

On two occasions, sainted members of my family have offered me a car for nothing. Both times, I turned them down — and not out of selflessness or for green reasons. I said no because I knew it would mean me sitting still in a metal box for hundreds more hours every year. If I were the only driver in London, I’d have accepted the free cars in a second. Even if I could have been transported back to 1970s London — when in my memory the streets were largely empty — I’d have said yes. But driving in London — and in British cities, generally — has now got

The bewildering influx of immigrants into London has had one effect that no one could have predicted 20 years ago: it’s making our capital city religious again. We’ve noticed – but only up to a point. Islam is visible: the women in niqabs, the new mosques, the Halal butchers. But the transformation of Christianity in London is harder to spot. If you asked the average Londoner how many Sunday churchgoers in the city were black, I suspect he or she would be startled by the answer: about half of them. My guest on this week’s Holy Smoke podcast is Ben Judah, whose knowledge of the demography of London was picked up by

Margot is an Italian restaurant on Great Queen Street in the still interesting part of Covent Garden. The uninteresting part is the piazza, once the first classical square in London but now a shopping district so devoted to famous brands that it is essentially Westfield in WC2, and WC2 has no need of it, already having a superior culture of its own. Even so, I expect some day to find St Paul’s church a smouldering pile of ash waiting for an Audi concession. Margot used to be Moti Mahal, an unlamented Indian restaurant next to Freemasons’ Hall, which posed as MI5 in Spooks, a BBC drama in which a one-nation

I first ate at the London version of Harry’s Bar in the early 1990s. Back then, Jeffrey Archer and I would give each other dinner about three times a year. It was my turn and he suggested Harry’s, where he was a member but I could pay (on expenses, needless to say). I remember the meal vividly because it was awful. Choosing the same dishes, we started with a risotto, which was just rice plus ingredients. Then there was a leg of lamb for two, grossly over-salted. Had I been the nominal host as well as the real one, it would have gone back to the kitchen with a flea

Last week the Joseph Rowntree Foundation released a report, Monitoring Poverty and Social Exclusion 2016, which revealed that more than seven million people in the UK are living in poverty, despite being part of a working family. Among the identifiable factors behind these figures were the rising costs of private renting, stagnating wages and cuts to benefits, with Helen Barnard, head of analysis at the foundation saying that ‘the economy is not working for low-income families’. As a financial education charity, we would offer another important factor – stubbornly low levels of financial literacy, which affect families from across every social stratum. The effects of this are all around us,

I have agonised over this Christmas review. I ate the Christmas lunch at Harveys Nichols 5th Floor Restaurant, Knightsbridge, next to a roof garden sponsored by Nutella chocolate spread. (The review of that restaurant is 17 words long: don’t go there, especially if you like Nutella chocolate spread, because it will ruin it for you.) The stunt critic dies hard in any writer, for it is easy work laughing at roof gardens. I considered eating in a plastic igloo — an igloo that is not an igloo, but a tent — by Tower Bridge. I even considered visiting whichever Winter Wonderland (‘Blunderland’) that the Daily Mail — the arbiter of

If you’ve missed the endless articles whingeing about pub closures, it must be because you’ve been too blotto to focus. It is impossible for a mediocre drinking hole to close its doors for the last time without some thirsty hack reaching for his collected George Orwell essays and waxing lyrical about the Moon Under Water and the death of the English pub. It’s true that many pubs are closing (27 a week, according to the Campaign for Real Ale) and demographic changes have called last orders for numerous decent pubs — and some gems — in areas where changing populations have seen demand dissolve quicker than a morning Alka-Seltzer. But

I recently had the misfortune of featuring in a BBC documentary that repeatedly breached the corporation’s own editorial standards. I happened to be at the gym when word reached me that BBC Inside Out London wanted to interview me the following day. It was late in the evening, and I was told that the documentary was looking at game shooting and game meat, and the growing popularity of both in London. Not an anti-shooting piece at all, I was assured. Arriving at Regent’s Park for the interview, the team from the Beeb were decidedly furtive. There was much fiddling with phones and muttered conversations between interviewer and producer, in which