London

Saturday

Kate Chisholm

The making of the modern metropolis

Why in 1737 did Dr Johnson choose to leave his home in Lichfield in the Midlands and travel to London to make a fresh start as a writer, asks Jerry White in his encyclopaedic portrait of the 18th-century capital. It’s a good question. London was dangerous, it was dirty, you could die of ague in a matter of hours, be robbed, crushed to death by the mob, thrown into jail for unpaid debts, and, no matter whether you were rich, poor or of the middling sort, suffer the scourge of bed bugs through every waking hour. To live comfortably (without domestic cares) you needed to earn enough money to employ

Saturday

Peter Hoskin

The battle over Downhills takes another turn

Remember Downhills Primary School? This was the underperforming school in Haringey that became a political battleground towards the end of last year. On one side was Michael Gove and the coalition, proposing that Downhills — and schools like it — become academies, as that’s how to boost academic performance. On the other was the local MP, Labour’s David Lammy, as well as the school hierarchy and various union types, all apoplectic at having academy status ‘imposed’ from above. Harsh words were traded, meetings were convened, and little was resolved by it all. I mention this now because, late yesterday afternoon, something was actually resolved in Haringey: Downhills was put in

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Livingstone will get away with it, of course — because he’s on the ‘left’

When is a homophobic comment not a homophobic comment?  When it is spoken by somebody on the ‘left’ of course. Ken Livingstone has just reminded us of a prevailing rule in British politics. His comment that the Conservative party is ‘riddled’ with homosexuals ‘like everywhere else’ would have earned him a sacking if the parties had been reversed and a Conservative politician had talked of the Labour party in this fashion. In the same way, if a Conservative had made the kind of smearing racial generalisation that Diane Abbott recently twittered, they would have found themselves sent beneath the bottom rung of the political ladder. And I dread to think

Sebastian Payne

Ken’s gaffe and what it tells us about his campaign

We now have the first major gaffe of the 2012 London Mayor race and to everyone’s surprise it wasn’t Boris. Ken Livingstone granted an extraordinary interview to the New Statesman, where his comments on the incumbent mayor, Margaret Thatcher and his work ethic have caused a decent stir. However, it is the thoughts on homosexuality in the Conservative Party – ‘the Tory party was riddled with it like everywhere else is’ – that have prompted outrage. He was claiming hypocrisy, but instead came off bitter and twisted. The pro-Boris politicos are delighted – Ken’s true colours have been exposed, they say, and Labour should deselect him at once. But they

Friday

Douglas Murray

Push off now, Press TV, and take your conspiracy theories with you

A week that began with an insane decision from the European Court of Human Rights has come to an end with a sensible decision from Ofcom. The Iranian government’s propaganda channel in London, Press TV, has just had its license to broadcast revoked. Insomniac Islamists will no longer be able to enjoy their weekly dose of programmes presented by the likes of Lauren Booth, Tariq Ramadan or Derek Conway. And of course they will now forever miss The Real Deal with George Galloway. On that show you could see such treats as Galloway interviewing ‘President’ Ahmadinejad. It is a wonderful interview, not least thanks to Galloway’s thoughtful attempt to lay out the terrain

Thursday

Jonathan Jones

Boris’ poll lead evaporates

It looks like the May’s election for Mayor of London will be a close run thing. A new poll today from YouGov has Ken Livingstone two points ahead of Boris Johnson – a big turnaround from the eight point lead Boris had in June: Ken shouldn’t be popping any champagne corks yet, of course. His lead is well within the poll’s margin of error, and there’s three and a half months to go before election day. But he’s certainly looking more likely to topple Boris than he did seven months ago. So why the change? YouGov’s Peter Kellner has a good article on the poll’s details here, but two key points jump

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Boris puts on a performance for the 1922 Committee

Boris Johnson was very well behaved this evening when he appeared before the 1922 Committee of Tory MPs. He stayed off the topics of Europe and tax and instead confined his remarks to London, saying that he wanted the capital to be an example of ‘cost-cutting, one nation Conservatism’. Those MPs inside the room say the performance was classic Boris, as one put it ‘he left no erogenous zone unstroked’.   Afterwards, Mark Reckless, a north Kent MP, asked the Mayor a sceptical question about his plan for a new airport in Kent. In the questions, I understand that Boris also took the chance to express his support for Rebecca

Peter Hoskin

What Boris Island tells us about Cameron

He already has his bikes and his buses, but might Boris get his island too? Today’s Telegraph reports that David Cameron is going to announce a consultation into building a new airport in the Thames estuary, as was first proposed by the London Mayor. The PM will wait until that consultation is over before making a final decision, but he’s said to be ‘provisionally supportive’ of the plan at the moment. Nick Clegg, by the sounds of it, is more provisionally negative. Even the very prospect of Boris Island is a triumph for the Mayor, and not least because Cameron and George Osborne were previously opposed to it. It also

Saturday

Richard Shone

The past is another city

This absorbing book is — in both format and content — a much expanded follow-up to the same author’s very successful pictorial anthology Lost London of 2010. It replicates some of the photographs that appeared there and contains many new ones, all in captivating detail. The photographs are ones of record. There is little sense of artful composition or a striving for special effects. Many are of great beauty in their direct simplicity, as though the images were breathed onto the page with no human intervention. But of course the presence of a photographer with his cumbersome equipment in a slummy alley or dead-end court was bound to attract attention;

Tuesday

Matthew Sinclair

A green-light for HS2 — but the coalition’s political instincts should tell it to stop

Earlier today, the Government announced that it is still planning to go ahead with a new high-speed rail line that will reach Birmingham by 2026, and then be connected to Manchester and Leeds. And it’s doing so in the face of widespread scepticism among the public and business leaders. When we at the TPA commissioned YouGov to test public support for different cuts in public spending, 48 per cent of the public supported cutting the project against just 34 per cent opposed. While organisations like the CBI back high-speed rail, the Institute of Directors (IoD) actually asked their members and found that 38 per cent thought HS2 would represent poor

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Ed Miliband is No Teddy Roosevelt

This is, I know, a statement of the obvious but Ed Miliband is no Teddy Roosevelt. There are two reasons to be thankful for this. First, TR was really a ghastly man; secondly, if Ed Miliband were able to muster a quarter of Roosevelt’s brio he’d be faring rather better than he is. In the present circumstances, the opposition should be thumping the government every day. Granted, this requires more credibility than either Mr Miliband or Mr Balls can boast but the fact remains that a) George Osborne’s economic hopes have been vanquished by events and b) there is little substantive difference between his proposals and those made by Alistair

Monday

Alex Massie

Newt Gingrich is Not John Kerry. That’s His Problem.

In the end your view of the battle for the Republican party’s presidential nomination comes down to the degree of confidence you have that Republican voters, especially but not exclusively in the early primary states, remain capable of remembering that the election that matters takes place in November, not the spring. If you doubt they can manage this then you probably think Newt Gingrich is the bona fide front-runner; if you think they can then you’re liable to think Newt’s resurgence is just another teenage crush that will fade as swiftly as it developed. I’m in the latter camp, for what it’s worth. There have been improbable Presidents before (some,

Tuesday

Alex Massie

The Only Thing You Actually Need to Read About the Riots

Three cheers for Bagehot for this superb post on the Guardian/LSE’s abject justification for inquiry into this summer’s riots. Mr Rennie puts it exceedingly well: Now, put me in many contexts, and I am quite the hand-wringing bourgeois liberal. Watching Newsnight yesterday evening, I fear I came over all Judge Dredd. The researcher’s contention, in a nutshell, is that the rioters were not criminals who ran amok for a few days in August, losing their moral compass when they realised their actions would probably be without legal consequences. Instead, we are asked to believe, they are angry young people who hate the police and believe that they were taking revenge

Saturday

Mark Mason

The Ritz in the Blitz

‘It was like a drug, a disease,’ said the legendary Ritz employee Victor Legg of the institution he served for half a century. There’s something magical about London’s grand hotels. Even those of us who usually experience them only when we nip in for a five-star pee know that. Matthew Sweet has tapped this glamour to tell tales of the human dramas the hotels hosted during the second world war. It’s surely the variety of people gathered together in one place that explains the fascination held by the Ritz, the Savoy, Claridge’s et al. The good, the bad and the clinically barking all share the same address for a night,

Friday

Peter Hoskin

From the archives: A nation ablaze

A more recent gem from the archives than we would normally mine, but with the forthcoming government report into the riots — and with Fraser’s and David’s recent posts — we reckoned you might care to (re-)read Harriet Sergeant’s piece from this summer. It formed the centrepiece of an issue largely dedicated to those fiery disturbances, and which also included thought-provoking articles by Theodore Dalrymple and Ravi Somaiya. Here it is: These rioters are Tony Blair’s children, Harriet Sergeant, The Spectator, 13 August 2011 On the third day of the London riots I received a telephone call from Mash, a member of a Brixton gang who I befriended three years

Saturday

Molly Guinness

Chagrin d’amour

The horror of love: Nancy Mitford’s first fiancé was gay; her husband, Peter Rodd, was feckless, spendthrift and unsympathetic, and her great amour, Gaston Palewski, was endlessly unfaithful. She met him during the war in London and was in love with him for the rest of her life. Palewski was Charles de Gaulle’s right-hand man. He organised the French Resistance in London and commanded the Free French forces in East Africa. After the war, he was appointed De Gaulle’s chief of staff and he became known as the sinister éminence grise behind De Gaulle’s presidency. He and Nancy shared a love of France, beauty and jokes. He was never faithful

Tuesday

Alex Massie

George Osborne Slays the Tobin Tax

George Osborne was filmed laying into the idea of a Tobin Tax on financial transactions at today’s Ecofin meeting in Brussels. As he says: if you want to tax bankers, tax them but don’t create a tax that will only be paid for by their customers. Here’s Osborne: All this is well said (transcript here) and is, incidentally, a revealing glimpse into parts of euroworld that are rarely broadcast. Also, calling this a “Robin Hood Tax” is perverse: in fact it’s a Sheriff of Nottingham ploy that appears to target the rich while actually being paid by the poor. It’s equally worth observing that Osborne’s position is broadly the same

Monday

Nigel Jones

The building of our history

Athens, for all its current woes, still has the Parthenon. Rome has the Colosseum, Paris the Louvre, Berlin the Reichstag, Beijing the forbidden city, Moscow the Kremlin and Washington the White House. But where in London is there a structure that sums up and encapsulates the sweep of  English History from 1066 and all that, to the Second World War and beyond? The answer is certainly obvious to the 2-3 million mainly overseas visitors who flock to the Tower of London every year, making it easily Britain’s top tourist attraction. What makes the Tower such a magnet is surely the sheer multiplicity of functions it has fulfilled over the centuries,

Sunday

Douglas Murray

The paucity of the “99 per cent”

A week may be a long time in politics, but it is no time at all in protest. As the inhabitants of Parliament Square have demonstrated, even a decade is as nothing so long as you have a constantly morphing cause, a council with no balls, and a small but steady stream of acolytes. Last weekend I watched a bridal party sneak in through the side entrance of St Paul’s Cathedral. This weekend I went back, curious to see whether the protest that had kept them from entering through the main door had located a point yet. Walking up from Fleet Street the first sight that greets the visitor is

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Health & Safety: What Would Jesus Do? Weep, Obviously.

I hold no particular brief for the people “occupying” the London Stock Exchange but whatever one may think of their aims it’s evident that in closing the cathedral this week the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral and his colleagues have behaved like total ninnies. Then again, this is the Church of England so a certain measure of hand-wringing may be part of the job description at St Paul’s. Who knows? What we do know, thanks in large part to this splendid, exhaustive, post by David Allen Green is that the so-called “health and safety” concerns are so feeble they could almost be a parody of CoE hopelessness. Among the “possible”