London

Thursday

Michael Tanner

Should we watch the second act of Tristan und Isolde (without the first or the third)?

There aren’t many operas from which you can extract a single act and make a concert of it, in fact I can’t think of any except ones by Wagner. I’ve been to Act I of Die Walküre, Act III of Die Meistersinger¸ Act III of Parsifal at the Proms, Act II of Lohengrin, and several times to Act II of Tristan und Isolde. It’s not that Wagner’s acts tend to be longer than anyone else’s, they don’t: Handel’s often last as long, so do Rossini’s. It’s rather that some of Wagner’s greatest acts are so rich in musical and dramatic material, so perfectly shaped and have so powerful an impact,

Wednesday

Alex Massie

A choice for Tories: Goldman Sachs or UKIP?

Hats-off to James Kirkup for noticing that Goldman Sachs have suggested they would “drastically” cut their UK workforce (and operations) should Britain decide to leave the European Union. That is the view of Michael Sherwood, the fellow responsible for running Goldman’s european operations. I am sure eurosceptics will dismiss this as the usual scaremongering just as Scottish nationalists dismiss warnings that some businesses (RBS?) might shift their operations south in the event Scotland votes for independence next year. This is but one of the many ways in which the european and Scottish questions overlap or dovetail with one another. Perhaps it is only scaremongering! But what if it isn’t? In any case, the Tory High Command

Alex Massie Alex Massie

London is different: the government will spend money there

The chart at the top of this post comes from the government’s National (sic) Infrastructure Plan 2013. (Sic because it is largely a plan for England.) You can find it on page 30. You may notice that one rather large part of England is not listed on this chart: London. Perhaps that is because the value of infrastructure spending in London comes in at a nifty £36 billion. Or, to put it another way, spending on infrastructure in London is equivalent to the total amount of infrastructure spending in every other part of England save the south-west. And the south-west’s figure is chiefly so high because of a single project:

Tuesday

Steerpike

Russia’s take over of London is complete

There are so many Russians in London that they are able to pack the Royal Albert Hall for the launch of their own season. Bentleys lined South Kensington for last night’s Russian Debutante Ball. The Royal Philharmonic struck up some tunes, the Bolshoi danced and three of the most famous Russian tenors – Dmitry Korchak, Daniil Shtoda and Vladimir Galouzine – were in fine voice. 75 Russian debs waltzed their way into London society. The take over is complete. The irony was not lost on the ball’s organisers, who nodded to the somewhat frosty relationship between the UK and Russia currently. Mr S’s Russian is a little shaky; but, luckily, he

Monday

Sebastian Payne

Operation Safeway: the Met are on the look out for rogue cyclists

The Met Police took 166 of London’s traffic junctions hostage this morning. After a recent spate of cycling fatalities across the capital, a ‘major road safety operation’ kicked off today, with 2,500 police officers on the streets ‘making busy London junctions safer’. Codenamed Operation Safeway, the Met are watching for anyone committing an offence on the road. In reality, the Bobbies appeared to be targeting cyclists jumping red lights, absorbed in their music and generally misbehaving on the road: Boris Johnson has acknowledged there is much to be done to make London safer for cyclists, especially as more and more people are taking up two-wheeled commuting. But is ‘handing advisory

Friday

Neil Hadden

Housing associations have had to change in order to fulfil their social responsibilities

Regardless of your views on social housing, you’d have to admit there are far more obvious, and natural, targets for people to choose to protest against rising rent levels in London and elsewhere. So it’s with a strong sense of irony that I find myself defending the sector against accusations that have been levelled at us during the course of the last week. As mentioned in this blog, Genesis is part of a group of housing associations known collectively as the G15. Between us we’re responsible for around a quarter of all the new homes that are being built in the capital. Yes, that’s right: social landlords are stepping up

David Blackburn

Did slavery never go away?

There is blanket media coverage of ‘London’s shame’ – the news of the escape of three women who had been held as slaves in Lambeth for 30 years. The women were trapped in domestic servitude, which means that there is no sexual dimension to the crime. I suppose we be must thankful for small mercies; but, as everyone is right to say, a slave is a slave is a slave. Indeed, the incarcerators allowed their captives to leave the house from time to time, which implies that the slaves were controlled by psychology rather than shackles. It’s a sickening thought because it’s difficult for charity workers, law enforcement and ordinary members of the public to

Thursday

Sebastian Payne

24 hour Tubes are on their way — the impact on London will be huge

Ravers of London rejoice — 24-hour tubes at the weekend are finally on their way. TfL has announced today that trains on the Victoria, Central, Jubilee, Northern and Piccadilly lines will run constantly from Friday morning till Sunday evening. The all-night drinkers of the capital have long wondered why it wasn’t possible to keep the Underground running all night. Engineering work has been blamed, while the trade unions have remained bolshie with TfL (I can’t wait for Bob Crow to pop up complaining about this). But by 2015, these lines should be all set for the 21st century. If you happen to live on one of these lines, you’re all set

Harry Mount

The men who demolished Victorian Britain

Anyone with a passing interest in old British buildings must get angry at the horrors inflicted on our town centres over the last half-century or so. Gavin Stamp is wonderfully, amusingly, movingly angry. And he has been ever since the early 1960s when, as a boy at Dulwich College, he saw workmen hack off the stiff-leaf column capitals in the school cloisters. He reserves particular rage for that ‘cynical, philistine Whig’ Harold Macmillan for murdering the Euston Arch. Not that Stamp’s a ranting fogey, reserving his anger only for the demolition of Victorian buildings. A former chairman of the Twentieth Century Society, he is deeply upset by the demolition of

Tuesday

Matthew Plummer

Has local government in London left cycling in the wrong lane?

A couple of months ago I wrote to the Crown Estate about its bike-unfriendly redevelopment of London’s Haymarket area, and was rather surprised when their London team offered to meet me and set out Crown’s cycling credentials. Surprisingly, its new Central London developments have fabulous facilities for bike commuters, with showers, lockers, and ramps that allow you to ride straight into the basement parking space. The past decade has seen an explosion in two-wheeled travel across the capital, while car use has declined. Recent data shows that cyclists make up to two thirds of traffic on certain parts of London’s roads. This is hardly unexpected, given the cost of tube

Friday

Douglas Murray

The Muslim Brotherhood thrives in Britain

The Muslim Brotherhood aren’t doing so well in Egypt at the moment. Happily they are making some gains in Britain. On Tuesday the organisation’s dauphin – Tariq Ramadan, famous Islamist ideas man, grandson of the Brotherhood’s founder and prominent double-speaker gave the Orwell prize’s annual ‘Orwell lecture’. I wonder which direction Orwell’s body is spinning in? And elsewhere, at London’s SOAS (the School of Oriental and African Studies, better known as the School of Organised Anti-Semitism) a speaker who is opposed to the Muslim Brotherhood was chased from the stage by Muslim Brotherhoood supporters. It is worth watching the video of what turned into an Islamist rally just to remind

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Boulestin has nothing to do with Marcel Boulestin — but could entice Mary Berry

Boulestin is a pretty restaurant on St James’s Street, between the posh fag shop (Davidoff) and the old palace, which the Hanoverians thought so ghastly that they moved out to Kensington Gardens, a fresher hell full of squirrels. This is one of the more fascinating West End streets because it is 300 years old and is, as such, the only street in the West End in which the ancient nobility look safe, or even human; you pass tourists, rats and also dukes wafting towards White’s gentlemen’s club, which is duchess-free and where a grown man can be treated like a baby, and not in a perverted way. So Boulestin, named

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Matthew Parris: I’ve been living with a miracle for 60 years

This is probably the most self-indulgent column I’ve written. I hope not to make a habit of it. It’s an ode to — and something of a lament for — my own right arm. I was six when I fell off a small cliff above a disused railway embankment in Nicosia, Cyprus. The blue bicycle I was wheeling was new: a birthday present and my first bike. A novice, I let the back wheel slip over the edge — and if you’re holding the handlebars and the back wheel slides, a bicycle moves in counter-intuitive ways. Mine pulled me with it. I refused to let go. I came to in

Friday

Ed West

Drivers are a menace to society

I hate drivers. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate all of them, just a considerably larger proportion than I hate of the population as a whole. And, like most cyclists, I drive myself, having been bullied into it by my then girlfriend who bought me lessons for my 27th birthday. But generally speaking I feel the same way about them as Rod Liddle feels about cyclists. Although I agree with Rod on almost all things, it would be weird and awkward if I agreed with him on everything, and this is the slither outside the bubble on the Venn diagram. I don’t object to his characterisation of cyclists as

Wednesday

Steerpike

Ho ho no

Parents who have taken their little angels to see Father Christmas in his grotto at Selfridges got a shock: he’s not there this year. No lists, no photos on the knee, no overpriced gift. Uproar has ensued. The store’s PR team tells Mr Steerpike: ‘Selfridges will not be having the traditional Santa’s Grotto this year. We felt a different direction was needed for 2013’. Santa has been downgraded to a roaming personal shopper who ‘advises customers on the perfect, and personalised presents.’ But one source has a different view: the store’s international clientele aren’t bothered about Christmas so the space required to recreate Lapland is no longer economically viable. But, ye traditionalists,

Friday

Fraser Nelson

Northern voters turn against HS2

When George Osborne first announced his plans for high speed rail, I was all for it. I’ve spent too much of my life on broken-down trains between Inverkeithing and London – and, like many Scots, resented the way that most transport money seemed to be spent in the imperial capital. As I say in my Telegraph column today, the key to staying happy about HS2 is not to think about it much further: don’t contemplate the costs, don’t ask if transport can be helped in other ways. This is what Westminster is doing: all its parties have signed up to the project. They won’t have a proper debate about it.

Thursday

Taki

Taki: Ugly people build ugly things — look at New York and London

New York Hot money from China, India, Russia and Singapore is pouring into London; hotter money from the same countries is flooding into the Bagel. London has become unaffordable for the average Joe around Kensington and Chelsea, as has the West Village in downtown New York. Well, unaffordable is relative. There is a delicate social ecology system pointing in the wrong direction in both metropolises, but — like a stock market gone haywire, as at times markets tend to do — when the correction comes there will be lots and lots of empty luxury lots the poor can move into. London is now essentially a tax haven, and New York

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

You’re not as special as you think

My preferred route from the Times’s offices in Wapping on to the main road takes me across a precinct then down a short flight of concrete steps to the pavement below. Across the top step (for reasons unclear to me) a yellow line has been painted behind the step’s edge, like those lines you’re supposed to stand behind on railway platforms. Crossing this, and turning right when I reach the pavement, takes me straight to the right-hand side of the steps. A rational pedestrian seeking to shorten his journey would choose such a route, but not with any precision: one could plot a range of courses down the steps, all

Monday

James Forsyth

Boris’s immigration issue

When you discuss Boris Johnson’s leadership prospects with Tory MPs, one subject nearly always comes up: immigration. The Mayor is a liberal on the subject while most of the party takes a far more sceptical view. Tory MPs wonder how he’ll explain to the electorate why he once backed an amnesty for illegal immigrants. But Boris’s Telegraph column today shows how he can make a better — and more demotic — case for immigration than any other politician. He is prepared to tackle the subject and, what he calls, ‘this sense of indigenous injustice’ head-on. He’s also surely right that the solution to ever-rising house prices in London is to build

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Three cheers for the board at West Ham

What a pleasure it is to bring you a good news story this morning, something uplifting. On Saturday afternoon, West Ham entertained Manchester City, but a substantial number of City’s ticket allocation was not taken up. So the West Ham board, which includes the lovely Karen Brady, decided to give the spare tickets, free of charge, to some “locals” who were not usually habituated to visiting the ground each week. The “locals” took up the offer and came along to Upton Park where they dutifully cheered for Manchester City and entertained regular supporters by dropping to their knees for prayers at half time. You can only imagine how delighted the