London

Thursday

Joan Collins

Palace Notebook

The day of my investiture at Buckingham Palace dawned bringing freezing rain and fierce winds, which lashed at the windows as I regarded the outfit I had painstakingly planned — a lightweight, cream wool suit. A little damp didn’t bother me, so I didn’t care if I’d be shivering as Prince Charles pinned the medal on to my cape. No — it was the fate of the hat that worried me most. Designed by milliner Philip Treacy, it was a frothy creation of white grosgrain, chiffon flowers and delicate veiling, and I was concerned about the wind whipping it off. My best friend Judy Bryer said soothingly, ‘Philip has put so much

Wednesday

Steerpike

Revealed: Why the Tories have a big London problem

This afternoon something rare will happen in this election campaign. David Cameron will campaign in London. While bus-ing and jetting all around the four countries that make up the United Kingdom, the capital has all but been forgotten by the Prime Minister during the short campaign. Like so many aspects of this general election campaign, Wednesday’s event will be closed to journalists. So what’s going on? Tory worries in the capital are growing. Polls have Labour out ahead by double digits, and many of Miliband’s expected gains will likely come from greater-London marginals. Mr S is repeatedly hearing complaints from Tory activists that the data they have in London is massively skewed

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Real life | 16 April 2015

By and large, I’m not really sure the world is ready for me to join the steering committee of a community project in Lambeth seeking Lottery funding. It sounds like I might end up punching someone who is left-wing in an argument over how to spend public money. That said, I was mildly inspired when a disused cricket pavilion in my local park went up for tender and some stalwarts of the community started to have worthy ideas for its future use. They approached me to help and so I am considering how I could safely (for all concerned) become involved. I should explain, unless you happen to remember, that

Jack Wakefield

Boris’s London legacy

Overseeing Boris Johnson’s futuristic office, with its spectacular view of the increasingly culinary skyscape of the City of London with its Gherkins and Cheesegraters, is a bust of Pericles, distinctive in his helmet. It is no surprise that the Mayor should hold himself up to the gaze of the Athenian general and politician because he instituted the greatest programme of public works in the ancient world in Athens in the middle of the 5th century bc. Since Boris was elected Mayor in 2008 there has been an enormous amount of development in London. The demand that fuels growth is ever present. The south bank of the Thames is bristling with

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Sharing Caring

The Ivy Chelsea Garden is a restaurant inside an Edwardian house disguised as a Tudor house on the King’s Road; it was formerly the fetid Henry J. Bean’s American Bar and Grill, which was a sort of magnet and sex market, with cheeseburgers, for Chelsea teenagers. It sits in a row of babywear shops and artisan bakers — why Chelsea needs bakers I know not, because no one here is fat enough to eat bread. Perhaps it bespeaks a psychic insecurity that even the rich of SW3 feel — for the bread is the life? It is the third instalment of Richard Caring’s growing Ivy franchise, because Caring — catering’s

Andrew Taylor

A mingling of blood and ink

Historical fiction is sometimes accused of being remote from modern concerns, a flight towards nostalgia and fantasy. It’s not an accusation you can reasonably level at M.J.Carter’s historical crime novels. The first, The Strangler Vine, was set in an unsettling version of colonial India. Its sequel, The Infidel Stain, takes place three years later in 1841, in a London that Dickens would have recognised. The story follows the subsequent careers of her two main characters — the louche and mysterious Jeremiah Blake and his far more respectable young friend Captain William Avery, now retired from the East India Company’s army. Blake is making his living as an inquiry agent. Viscount

Thursday

Andrew Marr

Diary – 9 April 2015

So far, what an infuriating election campaign. We have the most extraordinary array of digital, paper and broadcasting media at our fingertips — excellent political columnists, shrewd and experienced number-crunchers, vivid bloggers and dedicated fact-checkers. There has never been a general election in which the interested voter has had access to so much carefully assembled and up-to-the-minute data. And it’s unpredictable, and it matters: the recovery on a knife edge, the future of the UK, our future in Europe — all that. It ought to be thrilling. So why is the campaign proving so tooth-grindingly awful? Simply because the parties have chosen to refuse to tell us what we need

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Airport wars: why I’m betting on Gatwick

Easter is a good time to talk about airports — or perhaps a bad time, if you bought your Spectator in the shopping labyrinth that impedes your path to the departure gate after a maddening wait in the security queue, where only a quarter of the scanners are working. I’m with you, and not just in spirit: in fact, that’s me being led away by men with machine guns, after an altercation over the contents of my wash-bag. It’s a curious fact that no one has ever succeeded in imbuing airport terminals with the romance, dignity and passenger satisfaction quotient of 19th-century railway stations. At best they are soulless, at

Ian Thomson

‘I will call the police!’: My close encounter with ‘revenue protection’

‘Make yourself a happy bunny this Easter with cheap tickets and egg-cellent deals!’ chirped the Abellio train company advert. I use Abellio’s Greater Anglia service regularly from London and was looking forward to a nice fluffy ride to Norwich. I was late for the 9 a.m. train but the Liverpool Street station Abellio assistant smilingly informed me I wouldn’t need to pay extra for the later train. I bought a cup of coffee and presented my ticket to the barrier staff at platform 11. A dignified-looking man of African origin with ritually scarred cheeks seemed to be unusually officious. Tapping my ticket with the sharp end of a pencil he

Thursday

Alexandra Coghlan

Why we should revel in the empty virtuosity of Handel’s pasticcios

Before the jukebox musical, back when Mamma Mia!, Jersey Boys and Viva Forever! were still dollar-shaped glints in an as-yet-unborn producer’s eye, there was the pasticcio opera. Literally a musical ‘pastry’ or ‘pie’, these brought together arias from different operas, often by different composers, in a single work, designed as a way of feeding an 18th-century public whose appetite for opera was greater than composers’ ability to sate it with new music. Everyone did it — Vivaldi, Mozart, Haydn, and of course that ultimate musical pragmatist Handel — but that didn’t make the practice any the more respectable, as one satirist’s pasticcio ‘recipe’ makes clear. Pick out about an hundred

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Kitty Fisher’s: proof that the PM has good taste in restaurants, if not in friends

David Cameron is too cowardly, or too cynical, to debate with Ed ‘Two or Possibly Three Kitchens’ Miliband — which depends entirely on the breath of your own cynicism — or is he perhaps just too busy eating? (Here I address Sarah Vine, or Mrs Michael Gove, the Daily Mail columnist who analysed the smaller of the so-far-discovered Miliband kitchens and decided that Labour is, on the basis of its contents alone, moribund. Sarah, you’re an idiot, an anti-journalist, a pox.) The Prime Minister’s adventures in restaurant-land are a moveable feast, and changeable; he has, in his years of power, visited ‘Jewish’ Oslo Court, like a wasp drowning in a

Douglas Murray

Is London’s ‘diversity’ to blame for its ‘unprogressive’ views on homosexuality?

I have been most interested in recent posts here by Alex Massie and Matthew Parris.  Here is a poll which might interest them both. YouGov recently carried out a survey in the UK which sought primarily to judge public opinions on the issue of posthumous pardons to people convicted of homosexuality. So far so hip, cool and with the beat. But the poll also asked respondents whether they think in general that homosexuality is ‘morally acceptable’ or ‘morally wrong’.  What do you think the figures were?  Well in most regions of the UK those people who thought homosexuality ‘morally wrong’ sat at around 15 per cent.  About what one might

Ed Cumming

Game of Thrones premiere at the Tower of London, review: the pride before the fall

Television is in a golden age. Or at least so we are told. If you weren’t able to tell from the quality of the programming, the decadence of the parties would give the game away. With the vast budgets of HBO, Netflix and the like – the box-set barons that have usurped the grand Hollywood studios – big series now mean serious hospitality. This kind of pride usually comes before a fall, or at least some lukewarm reviews. Things are getting out of hand. The House of Cards premiere last month involved a whole hotel and a room full of pudding. Never to be outdone in matters of size, the

James Mcconnachie

Dickens’s dark side: walking at night helped ease his conscience at killing off characters

In England, walking about at night was a crime for a very long time. William the Conqueror ordained that a bell should be rung at 8 p.m., at which point Londoners were supposed to put their fires and candles out and their heads down. Again and again, until modern times, Matthew Beaumont tells us, specifically nocturnal laws were promulgated against draw-latchets, roberdsmen, barraters, roysterers, roarers, harlots and other nefarious nightwalkers — including those ‘eavesdroppers’ who stood listening in the close darkness where the rain dripped from a house’s eaves. Beaumont reads such laws as being designed to exert political and social control. To walk the city streets at night, by

Monday

Steerpike

Is Ian Katz plotting a return to ‘snooooozepapers’?

With Katharine Viner guaranteed a final round interview to be the next Guardian editor-in-chief after winning a staff ballot, rumours are circulating that her former colleague Ian Katz is the other horse left in the race. Hot goss: final two in race for Guardian editorship are now @iankatz1000 and @KathViner, insider tells me. — Paul Waugh (@paulwaugh) March 13, 2015 Katz left his role as deputy editor of the Guardian to join the BBC as Newsnight editor in 2013. At the time, it was reported that he had grown tired of waiting for Alan Rusbridger to step down as editor. If it is the case that Katz is in the final two, his interview with the

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Won’t someone please unleash the challenger banks?

In my Yorkshire town of Helmsley the NatWest branch, originally an outpost of Beckett & Co of Leeds, has closed down — collateral damage of its crippled parent RBS’s continuing struggle for viability. Our branch of the Australian-owned Yorkshire Bank, descendant of the West Riding Penny Savings institution, became an antique shop some time ago. HSBC, formerly Midland, is now a hairdressing salon. When they arrived a century ago, all three were ‘challenger banks’ of their day. But now they have gone, no challengers have ridden in to replace them — unless we count Handelsbanken, the progressively old-fashioned Swedish retail bank that has a thriving franchise down the road at

Hilary Spurling

John Aubrey and his circle: those magnificent men and their flying machines

John Aubrey investigated everything from the workings of the brain, the causation of winds and the origins of Stonehenge to how to cure the fungal infection thrush by jamming a live frog into a child’s mouth (you hold it there until it — the frog — suffocates, then replace it with a fresh frog). He seemed half-cracked as often as not to less empirical 17th-century contemporaries, and for most of the next 200 years posterity forgot him. His astonishing renaissance in the last century owed much to two novelists: Anthony Powell, who published a biography, followed by a selection of Aubrey’s Brief Lives in 1949, and John Fowles, who brought

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Yes, Scotland does receive an unfair share of public spending. Probably

Gulp. But what about England? That’s one of the questions to be asked in the aftermath of the latest Scottish spending and revenue figures, published today. The figures do not lie. Even when North Sea oil figures are taken into account – a geographic accident that, while welcome, remains an unearned accident – England (as a whole) subsidises other parts of the United Kingdom. This is a good thing. This is the way it is supposed to be. But – double gulp – shouldn’t Scotland be subsidising other parts of the UK too? Identifiable spending per capita in Scotland is a bit higher than in Wales, London and north-eastern England,

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Is the Dorchester the designated grand hotel for fat people? The portions at its new grill say so

The Dorchester Hotel, Park Lane, is a cake floating in space. All grand hotels create a parallel universe in which their guests are returned to some great gilded and unnatural womb with mini-bar and floristry, but the Dorchester feels particularly remote; has it overplayed its myth? Or is it a combination of the traffic (Park Lane has eight traffic lanes, three roundabouts, one set of unicorn-themed gates and a monument to the dead animals of war), the net curtains (the decorative equivalent of blindness) and the strange completeness of the building? What does the Dorchester, with its curved beige frontage and yellow awnings, actually look like? Bournemouth. Or any retirement

Tuesday

Mark Gettleson

Suburban legends: Why London’s property boom seems set to help Labour win seats

Economists have for some time spoken of a ‘great inversion’ of London, whereby property price hikes in inner London, often linked to gentrification, has made suburbia comparatively more affordable. These changes, marked in the five years since David Cameron became Prime Minister, could have a profound effect on how the general election result pans out in the city. This is especially the case given the ability of such changes to affect the social and demographic makeup of London, as people from poorer backgrounds, the young and ethnic minorities are more likely to be susceptible to price increases in the private rental market. In some ways, this is nothing new, with