London

Tuesday

Henry Williams

Move over Royal Family. London’s oligarchs are the new tourist attraction

'And if you look to your left you will see a house once linked to Rakhat Aliyev, Kazakhstan’s former intelligence chief, who died in police custody in Austria while awaiting charges of corruption, torture and murder.' These apartments form the final stop in London’s new unmissable attraction, the London Kleptocracy Tour. The tour is a Beverley Hills-type guide around the houses of the colourful oligarchs of the Former Soviet Union who have bought up London’s super super prime properties with the help of the capital’s lawyers, estate agents and PR firms.

Thursday

Stephen Bayley

Public offence

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/fightingovercrumbs-euroscepticsandtheeudeal/media.mp3" title="Stephen Bayley and Posy Metz from Historic England discuss public artwork" startat=1206] Listen [/audioplayer]There are, as adman David Ogilvy remarked, no monuments to committees. (That’s not quite true; Auguste Rodin’s ‘Burghers of Calais’ — you can find a version in Victoria Tower Gardens — is somewhat collectivist in subject matter.) But there are certainly abundant monuments to the committee mentality, the bureaucratic spirit and art-world groupthink. That is what most contemporary ‘public art’ amounts to.

Tanya Gold

Past Caring

Le Caprice is a monochrome patch of the 1980s behind the Ritz Hotel, in the part of St James’s that looks like Monaco. (There is a car park.) It was, along with Langham’s and the Ivy, the most fashionable restaurant of the Thatcher years, beloved of media slags and wankers; also of Princess Diana (the night after she died, her table was kept empty, which is a unique elegy), Princess Margaret, Mick Jagger and Jeffrey Archer, who ate his first meal here after he left prison, because he too is unique.

Henry Hitchings

Down and out in Park Lane and Plaistow

‘I was born in London,’ Ben Judah tells us early in this vivid portrait of Britain’s capital, ‘but I no longer recognise the city.’ London has become a building site where dirty money is converted into gleaming blocks of bullion. The smartest parts of town are lined with empty houses owned by foreign plutocrats, and London’s spirit is embodied not so much by the bearded hipster brewing your £3 cup of coffee as by the Shard, a soaring monument to wealth and inequality. Judah isn’t all that interested in the well-shod hirelings who lubricate this shiny capitalism. We’re halfway into the book before we encounter anyone who could be described as privileged (other than the widely-travelled, Oxford-educated Judah).

Andrew Lycett

‘Crazy mixed-up Yid’

Even David Litvinoff’s surname was a concoction. It was really Levy. Wanting something ‘more romantic’, he appropriated that of his mother’s first husband. So his elder half-brother, the respected writer Emanuel Litvinoff, informed Keiron Pim, adding that David was ‘an unfortunate character altogether’, prone to ‘inventing roles for himself that didn’t have any reality’. Yet this fantasist is the elusive figure whom Pim has endeavoured to capture in an ambitious book which seeks to resurrect an era as much as an individual.

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Peak

Near Victoria Station in London they began to build a tower-block advertised as ‘The Peak’. I expected it to resemble Mont Blanc. After a few floors, it was finished, and the top of the façade projected like the peak of a baseball cap. I felt cheated. Peak is a vogue word that itself has gone through peak usage. Earlier this month, Steve Howard, Ikea’s chief sustainability officer (yes, the chief one), said in a seminar: ‘In the West we have probably hit peak stuff. We talk about peak oil. I’d say we’ve hit peak red meat, peak sugar, peak stuff, peak home furnishings.’ It was an engaging observation, but poor Mr Howard was mocked as though he were Gerald Ratner.

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Brass tacks

The last time I reviewed a restaurant in Selfridges, a PR man rang up to ask what he could do to change my opinion of Selfridges. Don’t worry, I told him, Spectator readers don’t go to Selfridges to sit in a fake Cornish fishing village, because they are too busy eating the remnants of the Labour party. And they don’t care about shopping. You don’t dress a Spectator reader. You upholster it. I felt guilty about mocking the stupid fake Cornish fishing village so I avoided the next themed restaurant in Selfridges, which was a fake forest on the roof (‘inspired by an autumnal forest’… because who can be bothered to go to a real forest if they even still exist?). But I had to review the revamped salt beef bar in the food hall.

Mark Mason

Girl about town

The old ditty got it wrong: it should have been ‘Maybe it’s because I’m not a Londoner that I love London so’. The capital’s biggest fans, I tend to find, are those who weren’t born there, and Emily Chappell is yet another example. Originally from Wales, she has written more than just an engaging account of her work as a London cycle courier: she has chronicled the way in which the capital provides a home for those who don’t fit in elsewhere. The job itself is a perfect fit for a restless soul: Chappell describes the sweet spot where my body became so attuned to the bike and road that all resistance seemed to melt away … experiencing a strange sense of stillness, as though I had gone so far into motion that I had reached its centre.

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 7 January 2016

A tax on empty dwellings Sir: Both the Conservative and Labour candidates (‘Battle for London’, 2 January) rightly see housing as the big issue in London’s mayoral election this year: Ukip and the Greens would probably say the same. But if one travels along the river at night and observes the large blocks of flats that appear to be almost empty, one wonders if there really is a problem. Anecdotal evidence says that the owners are mostly Chinese (but they could be Arabs, Russians, or others based abroad), who occupy these properties for little more than a week or a month in the year.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 7 January 2016

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, decided to allow ministers to campaign for either side in the referendum on membership of the European Union, once his negotiations had been concluded on Britain’s relationship with the EU. The government said it was commissioning 13,000 houses to be built by small builders on public land made available with planning permission. Junior doctors decided to go on strike after all, starting with a day next week, after talks between the government and the British Medical Association broke down. In an extraordinarily drawn-out reshuffle, Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour party, replaced Michael Dugher as shadow culture secretary with Maria Eagle, who was replaced at defence by the Trident-hating Emily Thornberry.

Tanya Gold

That sinking feeling | 7 January 2016

The Feng Shang Princess is a floating Chinese restaurant on the Regent’s Canal in north London, which flows from Little Venice to the Guardian to Limehouse, and in which they quite often find corpses in shopping trolleys and vice versa. I do not know if the restaurant moves, and could theoretically travel to Paddington. I hope it does. The Regent’s Canal is an ugly stretch of water, which reeks of sexual violence and cheap alcohol and cyclists, and it is desolate; place it near London Zoo and you have a peculiar cognitive dissonance that could only happen in London: a tapir near a canal featuring a floating Chinese restaurant. It is apparently Paul McCartney’s favourite Chinese restaurant, which I found insane until I thought about it.

Cosmo Landesman

Public trans sport

I had just sat down on the top deck of a number 38 London bus when I saw him looking at me. He was black and wore a fake-fur coat and orange leggings. There were glittering rings on his fingers, fake diamonds around his neck and bright red lipstick on his lips. In his large hands, a mauve purse. He looked like the kind of Andy Warhol drag-queen who wiggled on the wild side of life back in the 1970s. He made strange chirping sounds and he batted his heavy eyelashes my way. I couldn’t tell if he was a touch crazy or just over-the-top camp. Then he smiled at me. Uh-oh, I thought. But I decided to be brave, so I gave him one of my big, anxious chimp smiles back. He then came over and plopped himself next to me. ‘Hi,’ he said, with a soft, low American purr.

Thursday

Toby Young

The plot to save our allotments

Since turning 50 I have become a gardening enthusiast. It started with tomatoes, then spread to raspberries and last year extended to French beans. I’ve now run out of space and was hoping to get an allotment in 2016. They’re like gold dust in west London, but one of the perks of living on my street is that the residents’ association has access to the Goldsmith’s Close Allotments, a two-acre plot abutting the backs of our houses. I put my name down when I first moved in and was optimistic one might become available this year. Imagine my dismay, then, when the chair of the residents’ association told me the allotments had been sold to someone called David Parry — a local property developer — and the users had been given their marching orders.

Fraser Nelson

. . . and I won’t be Boris Mark II

As soon as votes were counted in the race to be Tory candidate for London mayor, Zac Goldsmith’s problem became clear. He had won comfortably, but just 9,200 party members bothered to vote — compared with the 80,000 who took part in Labour’s contest. Goldsmith praised his party for a ‘civilised and constructive’ debate, unlike the ‘divisive and vicious’ battle won by Sadiq Khan. But if Labour can call on a machine whose activists outnumber the Tories by nine to one, the Conservative candidate faces a real disadvantage. The size of Khan’s vote, Goldsmith thinks, is deceptive and swollen by trade union members. But in May, he concedes, ‘They will be out en masse, combined with the Corbyn-istas. So yes, they know that this matters.

James Forsyth

I won’t be Corbyn’s man in London . . .

Sadiq Khan has long been known as one of Labour’s most pugnacious politicians: someone who likes to fight, and likes to win. The son of a bus driver, he became a human rights lawyer, entered parliament in 2005 and that same year was named newcomer of the year at The Spectator’s parliamentary awards. He ran Ed Miliband’s leadership campaign in 2010 and led Labour’s fierce — and surprisingly effective —campaign in London last year. Now, his sights are set on reclaiming City Hall for Labour and persuading even those on the right that he is the natural heir to Boris Johnson. ‘I want Spectator readers to give me a second look,’ he says, when we meet in the House of Commons.

Harriet Sergeant

How to spot a charity snake

How do we judge a charity? Very badly, it turns out. Until The Spectator revealed the full horror of Kids Company in July, not even the press had asked hard questions of the charity or its founder, Camila Batmanghelidjh. The subsequent political scrutiny showed our democratic process at its best. When Paul Flynn, a veteran Labour MP, told Batmanghelidjh at an electrifying House of Commons hearing to stop talking ‘psychobabble’ he stripped away in an instant the glitz that had allowed one small charity whose sole qualification was the charisma of its leader to fritter away £48 million of taxpayers’ money. ‘We do not live on the moon,’ Flynn told her. ‘We represent areas that have great problems. We know about them.

Robert Colvile

Bye, George

The race to be London Mayor is the biggest personality contest in politics. And one personality looms largest: George Galloway, back from Bradford and seeking his fortune on the capital’s streets. In his public appearances, the Respect party leader has been on his usual bombastic form. But dig a little deeper, and it becomes apparent that his campaign — and his career — is on the shakiest ground. In 2012, Galloway won the Bradford West by-election by 10,000 votes: a staggering coup. But at the general election this year his party was drummed out of town. Not only did Galloway lose, but Respect’s four councillors (who had only recently rejoined after a spat with their leader) have abandoned it again. Its registered headquarters is now a tanning salon.

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Center Parcs Longleat – a stealth socialist utopia on Lord Bath’s estate

Center Parcs Longleat is a holiday village in a forest in Wiltshire, on Lord Bath’s estate, so you can never be entirely sure that you will not see a man dressed as a wizard having sex up against a tree. I thought it would be a fake forest, like the pines you see wilting from the M25, but it is a proper forest, with shrubs, deer, puddles and lakes. But for the looming presence of Center Parcs, which operates five ‘villages’ in England as emergency respite care for people with young children, it would be paradise. The centrepiece — the altar — is the ‘subtropical swimming paradise’ which floats, like a large watery spider, in the centre of the parc. (I do not know why it is spelled like that.

Anthony Horowitz

London Notebook | 10 December 2015

I’ve spent much of the autumn and winter shooting my new TV series for BBC1. New Blood looks at the so-called ‘Y’ generation and focuses on two 25-year-olds who fight crime but who spend as much time worrying about their university loans, finding somewhere to live, arguing with each other and trying to kick-start their careers. It’s been fun watching our two young stars — Mark Strepan and Ben Tavassoli, watch those names — grow into the parts and I’ve thrown everything at them. They’ve cycled and run miles, been shot at, drugged, kidnapped, drenched, tortured and blown up. They’ve jumped off the roof of a hotel, escaped from a burning car and fought naked in a Turkish hammam. To their credit, they’ve never once complained . . .

Thursday

Dan Hitchens

Send in the street pastors

Martin Surl, the Police and Crime Commissioner for Gloucestershire, has been buying flipflops. Hundreds of them. Not for the police, but for a local Christian volunteer team of ‘street pastors’. Earlier this year, Surl announced a £40,000 grant to cover the group’s training and resources. ‘Some things are better delivered by people who aren’t the police,’ he says. What street pastors deliver is hard to sum up in a few words. When I first encountered them a couple of years ago in their uniform of baseball caps and blue jackets, both with ‘STREET PASTOR’ printed across them, I thought they were going to ask me whether I was saved. But street pastors are not street preachers.