London

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Which behaved worse: callous Thomas Cook or cynical Barclays?

Which is worse, morally and reputationally — to be Thomas Cook, shamed by its refusal to show proper human concern, for fear of being taken to admit responsibility, over the death of two children by carbon monoxide poisoning from a faulty boiler while on holiday in Corfu; or to be Barclays, fined almost $2.4 billion (heading a list of banks fined more than $9 billion between them for similar offences) for conspiring to manipulate the foreign exchange market over a five-year period? Ethicists could agonise over that one for weeks. But in terms of customer response, it’s clear that the travel agent — whose mistake was not to reject legal advice

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Boris Johnson makes his first intervention in the House of Commons

Boris has finally spoken. Intervening on his Tory colleague Cheryl Gillan, who was complaining about a lack of funding for rural public services and transport, the new MP for Uxbridge said ‘Will she not agree that in fact her constituents get a superb service from Transport for London?’ He thanked the government for its continued investment in London transport. Boris will continue to work as Mayor and focus on these duties. But it will be interesting to see what non-London interventions he makes before stepping down in 2016.

Monday

Tarek S Arab

Why GPs are the London cabbies of the NHS

GPs are the very personification of the description ‘jack of all trades, master of none’. Following so-called ‘specialist’ training, they emerge as the ultimate generalists, requiring additional input to manage any kind of medical complication, lacking the in-depth knowledge and experience required to manage comprehensively many of the common medical conditions. And they’re a drain on the public purse thanks to their six-figure salaries. They barely spend more than a few minutes with each patient, don’t usually work nights or weekends and then complain when those patients express dissatisfaction with said service. They are also responsible for a glut of hospital referrals – particularly to cancer services where they divert resources from

Sunday

Steerpike

Picture exclusive: James Bond crew take to the Thames to film for Spectre

Forget the riveting excitement of the Labour leadership contest, Westminster was shut down on Sunday night for a different type of race. As part of filming for the new James Bond film Spectre, an extensive helicopter and speed boat chase took place along the Thames. Bond and a mystery blonde sped along the river from outside MI6 HQ in Vauxhall, with 007 firing his gun at a helicopter as they approached Parliament: With filming set to take place on the river for the next three weekends, expect the scene to be a dramatic part of the the film, which is released in November. Better still, after the previous Bond film was

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Goulash and whiplash

Ed is a plank. He was always a plank — and now he is in Ibiza being a plank. Plankety–plankety-plank: goodbye to our most recent terrible leader — and who will be the next? I, meanwhile, am in the Gay Hussar, choking on my own grief, hearing ‘Crying in the Rain’, weirdly, in my head, trying to forget the images that flicker mercilessly across my eyes, disrupting my view of a book that says, in capital letters, for emphasis — tony blair (now that’s a leader, eh!) — Clegg, dry-eyed with realisation at the breadth of his failure, Ed Balls hauled down like an -Easter Island statue, Samantha Cameron’s victory

Zoe Williams

Diary – 14 May 2015

For the 2005 general election, I had a party featuring a gigantic cheesecake with differentiated segments by allegiance. It contained no purple, which you could call leftie bias, but it genuinely didn’t seem necessary. It certainly wasn’t because I couldn’t think of a purple fruit. The Lib Dems did badly out of that, but mainly because you should never put banana on a cheesecake; they did fine in 2010, when I represented them with lemon macaroons. No colourful theming for 2015; the stakes were too high, and I decided that it was a waste of soft fruit. Just booze and crisps and, by 10.15, depressed people; exactly like 1992, in

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Full employment, Prime Minister? What exactly do you mean by that?

‘Two million jobs have been created since 2010 — but there will not be a moment of rest until we have reached our goal,’ said David Cameron in a Telegraph article a fortnight before the election: ‘Two million more jobs; or full employment in Britain.’ It was a bold statement. Indeed you might think, given unemployment at 1.84 million in the winter quarter, that the target for new jobs was actually an error on the part of who-ever drafts the Prime Minister’s prose. Either way, it drew little attention amid the smoke of battle. But now the air has cleared it merits revisiting, because it connects all the key themes

Nick De Bois

London can be Blue again

In the midst of a glorious election night for the Conservatives on 7 May, London stubbornly resisted the swing across the rest of the country and went a darker shade of red. Why is that and why does it matter when overall we have a majority Conservative government for the first time in 18 years? The loss of four London seats (including mine) to Labour may have been offset by the high profile gain of Vince Cable Twickenham, and by us retaining Labour’s number one target of Hendon after a spectacular result from Matthew Offord. But to ignore what is going on elsewhere would simply put future working Conservative majorities

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Labour must estrange its awful voters

And so now we have to suffer the epic delusions, temper tantrums and hissy fits of the metro-left. They simply cannot believe how you scumbags could have got it so wrong last Thursday, you morons. You vindictive, selfish morons. That has been the general response from all of the people, the liberal middle-class lefties, who have cheerfully contributed towards making the once great Labour party effectively unelectable. You lot voted Tory out of fear — because you are stupid, stupid people. The Conservatives ran a ‘negative’ campaign and, because you are either simply horrible human beings, or just thick, you fell for it. That’s been the subtext of most of the

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Servants of the super-rich

‘Let me tell you about the very rich,’ said F. Scott Fitzgerald. ‘They are different from you and me.’ Indeed they are. They can afford to live in London. Just how different became clear when The Spear’s 500 — ‘the essential guide to the top private client advisers’ — landed at the office. (We assume Spear’s sent it by mistake. We write for love here at The Spectator, and would be insulted if the editor offered us anything so vulgar as money.) Still I was glad to read it. Spear’s paints the best portrait I have seen of a world beyond our means and comprehension. Do you have a starstruck child

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Why won’t the lefties show London a little more love?

London is a bad thing. Everybody knows this now. Britain has had enough of London. Ed Miliband failed in part because he was ‘too north London’ (euphemism) and Chuka Umunna would fail just the same because he is too south London (euphemism). According to one commentator, Britain’s capital is now a ‘Guardianista colony’; filled with the ‘petty moralism’ of the ‘cultural’ elite. According to another — in the Guardian no less; no fan of his own colony, this guy — this is a city of glass and steel, so different from northern cities of ‘brick and hard stone’, and it produces in his northern soul a sense of ‘cultural alienation’.

Thursday

Mary Killen

Your problems solved | 7 May 2015

Q. As a writer I find working at home too distracting. I am a longstanding member of the London Library where rules and conditions allow one to concentrate in perfect peace. My problem is that the library has become so popular recently that, to secure one of my favourite desks, I have to arrive at St James’s Square almost as the doors open in the morning. I find the whole palaver of getting out of the house on time with everything I need and then travelling heavily loaded by tube or bike so draining that I am too exhausted to work by the time I get to my quiet desk.

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Why estate agents aren’t dying out

I don’t like to make business predictions, but — barring some apocalypse — I suspect there will be plenty of estate agents around in 2065, and occupying prominent high-street shopfronts just as they do now. This may seem an absurd prediction: after all, almost no one now uses an estate agent to find a house: we go to property websites instead. And, since we all assume the purpose of an estate agent is to find buyers for a house, a role usurped by Rightmove and Primelocation, we think the remaining days of the estate agency are few. However, perhaps the principal role of an estate agent is not to find

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

My nominee for politician of the year: the honourable member for Athens B

After the heat of battle: the accolades, the recriminations, the telling of history by the victors. It’s six months early for our Parliamentarian of the Year shortlist, but my nominee for this year’s top award is… the honourable member (or one of them) for the constituency of Athens B, Yanis Varoufakis. Last week, the grandstanding Greek finance minister was declared to have been ‘sidelined’ from his nation’s on-the-brink debt negotiations, following a more than usually stormy meeting with fellow European finance ministers in Riga. ‘They are unanimous in their hate for me; and I welcome their hatred,’ he tweeted, quoting Franklin Roosevelt. How we journalists sighed at the prospect of

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

In praise of the pit bull

Last night I saw a woman dancing with a pit bull terrier. It was about 9 p.m. and her curtains were open, lights on. Music must have been playing, though I couldn’t hear it through the glass, because she was singing as she danced the dog about, leaning back to balance his considerable weight. Her arms made a seat for him, as you might carry a child, his paws on her shoulders. The woman gazed down lovingly at the dog, who looked embarrassed but patient, as if this wasn’t his first dance and wouldn’t be his last. I watched them for a while, standing unseen in the street, half-wondering whether

Jane Kelly

Victim status

I was riveted to read about Ione Wells, an Oxford student, aged 20, who was savagely attacked on a London street. She then wrote about the experience for her university paper and has now hit the national news, prompting other students to write about their experiences too. Ione has kick-started her career as a journalist, and discovered that a woman reporter can often do well by cannibalising her own life, as long as she is a good writer, which Ione seems to be. Her story was interesting to me because in 1982, just after I came to London, I was attacked while walking home in south London. It was a

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Square meal

The Portrait Restaurant lives at the top of the National Portrait Gallery, London. It is fiercely modern, but likeable. You ride an escalator into a void, glimpse the raging faces of the Plantagenets and take a lift upwards, away from dead kings and film characters walking the streets. (Downstairs, by the entrance to the National Gallery, two competing Yodas from Star Wars are posing for photographs. One is too tall to be a convincing Yoda. Tourists inhabit a different city.) In this long bright room there is no such anxiety; only clean windows to Trafalgar Square and happy women having lunch in a secret glade of stone and brick. You

Dot Wordsworth

Quarter

‘No quarter given,’ yelled my husband as he stabbed at a cushion with his stick, spoiling the cavalier effect a little by catching his foot in the loose rug, about which I have told him twice (not the hundred times he likes to claim). He made his inadvertently slapstick attempt at humour because I had reported to him the appearance of a new commercial sign ‘Royal Quarter’ not far from the former Army & Navy Stores in Victoria. Apart from the presence of Buckingham Palace round the corner, there is very little royal about the area, which is identified by its proximity to Victoria station. Then I came across the

Harriet Sergeant

Mansion migrants

This election will see me up all night until the last results are in. It will have me knocking on doors, handing out leaflets and driving old ladies to the polling stations. All this is a first for me — and for the many others I find myself doing it with. Why does this election galvanise like no other? One issue has made it up close and personal — Labour’s mansion tax. As one neighbour canvassing with me yesterday remarked, ‘It is landing us in the shit.’ We are all of a certain age. We range from the comfortably off to the quite poor. We have lived in our houses

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

Tinder feelings

Through some freak accident of PR, I was invited to an event organised by Tinder. If you’re over 40 or have become prematurely married, you might not know what Tinder is. It’s the mobile-phone app that facilitates courtship by allowing people to signal their interest in other users within a certain radius — you can set it to just a mile, if you’re in a real hurry to ‘connect’. It’s the modern human version of mating calls and frog croaks. A million Londoners are said to use it. But Tinder is now under threat. Trendy dating apps such as Happn or Hinge, which present themselves as a bit less nakedly