London

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Ukip wars: Party’s London MEP blasts ‘undemocratic’ Mayoral and GLA selections

From our UK edition

Ukip’s selection procedure for its London Assembly and Mayoral candidates is ‘undemocratic’, the party's own MEP for London has told Coffee House. Gerard Batten has refused to take part in the selection procedure because it is ‘undemocratic’, with the party’s London membership getting no vote on the candidates. He said: ‘If Ukip is a democratic party, then it should allow the London members to select the candidate. Ukip is nothing if not a grassroots party. Activists who are not allowed to vote for a candidate may not feel motivated to campaign for that candidate. Ukip talks a lot about the undemocratic nature of the European Union, so we should practise democracy in our own party.

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

Could a row with Uber be taxi for a London mayoral candidate?

From our UK edition

One of the striking things about the contest in Labour for the mayoral candidacy is how many of the candidates are keen to admonish private taxi firm Uber. Sadiq Khan has described it as a ‘problem’ and said he is ‘on the side of the back cab driver’, Tessa Jowell is ‘enormously concerned’ and doesn’t have an Uber account, while David Lammy wants to ‘protect the institution that is the black cab’ and wishes there had been a confrontation between the Mayor and Uber as there had been in Paris. But perhaps these candidates should take heed of what has happened to another mayor who confronted Uber. Bill De Blasio picked a fight with Uber in New York earlier this year, and lost.

Anne Williams

Last orders | 27 August 2015

From our UK edition

Lant Street would be easy to miss, if you weren’t looking for it. Charles Dickens lodged on Lant Street as a child, during his father’s stay in Marshalsea debtors’ prison nearby. The Gladstone Arms is about halfway down, doors open to the narrow street on a warm afternoon in August. Inside, an old man nurses a pint in late summer light that falls through mullioned windows. The grain of the oak floors has a dark patina of London grime. There is nothing spiffed-up about the place. But it’s beautiful, and in decent nick. A black and white cat sits on the piano. This tiny place is also a live music venue, and even has an in-house label for bands that play there regularly. CDs are for sale at the bar.

Katy Balls

Powder to the people

From our UK edition

It’s Notting Hill Carnival this weekend. Two days of skanking, dutty dancing and daggering (the dance, rather than the weapon). No carnival experience would be complete without rum punch and jerk chicken, or for that matter crime, cannabis and cocaine. Drugs are part of the fun at Europe’s biggest street festival. There were 76 drug arrests at the festival last year, and 88 arrests made before the party even started as part of a dawn raid seizing machine-guns and crack. Not that partygoers are about to let a little thing like the law get in the way of their bank holiday. A survey earlier this summer from the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs claimed London is the city with the highest concentration of cocaine in sewage in Europe.

D.J. Taylor

Spirits of the Blitz

From our UK edition

If the early Martin Amis is instantly recognisable by way of its idiosyncratic slang (‘rug-rethink’, ‘going tonto’ etc) then the later Pat Barker can be similarly identified by its finely wrought accounts of physical trauma. ‘Afterwards, it was the horses she remembered,’ runs a specimen sentence from the new novel, ‘galloping towards them out of the orange-streaked darkness, their manes and tails on fire.’ Noonday’s Blitz-era setting — the horses are in flight from a bombed-out brewery — gives Barker ample opportunity to do what she does best: intent descriptions of splayed limbs that are sometimes engaged in the act of love, occasionally the subjects of paintings or, more often, casualties of war.

Monday

Sebastian Payne

An evening with Andy Burnham and his conventional Labour supporters

From our UK edition

Andy Burham’s rally this evening had only one similarity with Jeremy Corbyn’s last week: it was held in a place of worship. At the St Pancras Parish Church in London, close to 1,000 people turned out to hear Burnham and take part in a Q&A session. There was no socialist magician, folk singer or rock band — just a few politicians and a lectern. It was a throwback to how Labour politics was done before Corbynmania blew onto the scene. [caption id="attachment_9223902" align="aligncenter" width="620"] Sir Keir Starmer speaks at an Andy Burnham rally at St Pancras Parish Church, 24 August 2015.[/caption] Keir Starmer, the local Labour MP, opened proceedings by explaining his desire to win in 2020 and party unity were his reasons for backing Burnham.

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Jamie in chains

From our UK edition

Jamie’s Italian is squeezed into the Devonshire Arms on Denman Street, Soho, borne on the duplicitous winds of TV shows and book deals. It’s an odd fit, like a Flump meeting Dante. The Devonshire was a pub at the end of the world, a Victorian dystopia made of violence and despair. Now Jamie Oliver — an aghast teenager running to fat even as he declares war on the Turkey Twizzler and the civilisation that wrought it — has sucked it into his empire of Jamie’s Italians (there are 41, from Aberdeen to Gatwick), installed a roof terrace and written ‘Established 2014’ over the door. At first glance, Jamie has done nothing to the Devonshire Arms. It is still a grim London pub, now struck down with a late-term identity crisis.

Thursday

A.N. Wilson

Diary – 13 August 2015

From our UK edition

Should we have celebrated VJ Day? Hearing the hieratic tones of the Emperor Hirohito on Radio 4 the other day, announcing the unthinkable — the surrender of the great imperial power to the secular, gas-guzzling, unheeding West — seemed like a profanity. So much came to an end with that surrender that it is not possible to celebrate it, particularly since the method chosen to defeat Japan was nuclear-fuelled genocide, not once — which would have been unforgiveable enough — but twice.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 13 August 2015

From our UK edition

Home The Metropolitan Police encouraged people to celebrate VJ Day despite reports in the Mail on Sunday (picked up from an investigation by Sky News) of plans by Islamic State commanders to blow up the Queen. The RMT union announced two more strikes on the London Underground for the last week in August. Network Rail was fined £2 million by the rail regulator for delays in 2014-15, many of them at London Bridge. A tanker carrying propane gas caught fire on the M56 motorway near Chester. England won the Ashes series after beating Australia by an innings and 78 runs at Trent Bridge; Australia had been bowled out for 60 before lunch on the first day. Unemployment rose by 25,000 in the second quarter to 1.85 million.

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Something fishy

From our UK edition

Selfridges is skilled at making things that are not hideous (women) look hideous (women dressed as Bungle from Rainbow or a tree, after shopping at Selfridges). So I was not surprised to discover that it has summoned a ‘pop-up’ restaurant to its roof. It is called Vintage Salt and it is based on a Cornish fishing village. Not a real one, such as Newlyn, but a fake one, such as Padstow, which is based on Selfridges anyway. Selfridges shoppers do not want reality but a half-remembered contortion of something they read in Vogue while having their hair dyed banana yellow in St John’s Wood High Street in the company of a chihuahua smarter than they are. The portal is an express lift in Fragrance.

Alex Clark

Man of many worlds

From our UK edition

By the kind of uncanny coincidence that would tickle his psychogeographically minded friends Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd, Michael Moorcock’s publishers have recently moved offices to the same corner of London occupied by his latest novel, The Whispering Swarm; and just as their rather swanky embankment premises are called Carmelite House, so does the religious order provide Moorcock with one of his key characters. It is a Carmelite monk who leads the book’s teenage protagonist, one ‘Michael Moorcock’, from an ABC teashop to a mysterious enclave just off post-Blitz Fleet Street.

John Sutherland

The cavalier Michael

From our UK edition

Michael Moorcock has put his name to more books, pamphlets and fanzines than, probably, even Michael Moorcock can count, but nothing ‘major’ over the past ten years. He’s now 75. But not, as this eruption witnesses, extinct. A cult has formed around him — Moorcockians who can discourse knowledgeably on the second aether and the ‘weirdness’ of Elric of Melniboné. Inexhaustibly inventive, Moorcock proudly calls himself a ‘bad writer with big ideas’. He is interested in ‘New Worlds’ (the name of the science fiction journal he edited which injected 1960s postmodernism into the genre, banishing little green men and spaceships); ‘Other Worlds’ (e.g.

Wednesday

Geoffrey Alderman

Trade unions should foot the bill for any economic damage they cause

From our UK edition

As of 6.30pm this evening, Londoners will (once again) suffer miserably at the hands of the transport unions, which have called another 24-hour strike on the Underground system in support of a demand for higher payments for operating a night-time service on parts of the network. Many commuters – forced onto overcrowded buses - will arrive late for work, while many more will be unable to work at all. Shops and restaurants will lose custom. When the last such strike took place, on 15-16 July, the Federation of Small Businesses estimated the cost at around £300 million. With more tourists in the capital, the cost of this next strike is likely to be even higher. But the unions will bear none of these financial consequences.

Thursday

Jessie Burton

Diary – 30 July 2015

From our UK edition

The week starts well. My debut novel, The Miniaturist, is a year old. On the anniversary of its publication, my friend Patrick the bookie sends me a message to say a horse called Miniaturist is running at Sandown. I’m not normally a betting woman, but I decide to have a punt. An hour later, Miniaturist has won and I’ve collected 125 quid. Ain’t it a glorious feeling when your horse comes in? Things decline a little after that. After nine years not driving, I’m back behind the wheel and taking refresher lessons from Silvano, a Venetian south-east Londoner with a bullish prognosis for getting me up to speed. We pootle around in the small Japanese teapot he teaches in, and witness a motorcyclist spitting through an open car window.

Alex Clark

Is no one having fun?

From our UK edition

Who’d be young? Not 25-year-old Tamsin, if her behaviour is anything to go by. A classical pianist who’s never quite going to hit the heights, she devotes herself to playing for the residents of an old people’s home. She’s also acquired a boyfriend, Callum, a teacher several years her senior, for whom, when Christmas comes round, she buys an electric vegetable slicer that he’s had his eye on. The couple holiday in a run-down B&B in Ilfracombe. They are not exactly living la vida loca. But Tamsin is also suffering from a kind of arrested development — still occupying her childhood bedroom in Holland Park, where she keeps a watchful eye over her mother, Roz, since Tamsin’s father, a celebrated conductor, quit the family home for another woman.

Thursday

Maisie Rowe

Wild things

From our UK edition

Mud, timber, junk, fires, splinters, rust, daubed paint… Suddenly people are talking about adventure playgrounds again. With the Turner Prize-nominated collective Assemble constructing a new adventure playground in Glasgow, and their exhibition The Brutalist Playground at Riba, we’re being asked to think again about these ugly but lovable spaces. It was the landscape architect Lady Allen of Hurtwood who saw that in these gloriously chaotic environments — with their dens, walkways, animals, zip wires and cargo nets — children could find a freedom, self-expression and self-determination that is denied to them elsewhere. In 1946, on the way to Norway for a lecture tour, Lady Allen’s plane stopped to refuel in Copenhagen.

Martin Vander Weyer

Farewell to the City’s stroppy regulator: a modest sop for the new bank tax

From our UK edition

A City insider at last month’s Mansion House dinner told me the Financial Conduct Authority had become ‘a bit of an embarrassment’ — or rather, that was my bowdlerisation of what he actually whispered. So it comes as no surprise that FCA chief executive Martin Wheatley has resigned, having been told by the Chancellor that his contract would not be renewed. A former London Stock Exchange director and Hong Kong securities regulator, Wheatley has a knack of making enemies: Hong Kong investors, unhappy with his handling of alleged misselling of Lehman Brothers ‘minibonds’, once burned a funeral effigy of him outside his office.

Thursday

Philip Clark

The London ear

From our UK edition

The opening bars of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s A London Symphony (1914) are scooped out from the gloopy bedrock of the city. Vaughan Williams was dredging through the same mud, silt, slime and ooze as those scene-setting paragraphs of Our Mutual Friend (1865), where Charles Dickens shows that the real glue binding his book together will be the River Thames. Dickens’s famed ‘boat of dirty and disreputable appearance’ berths Our Mutual Friend in the earth and experience of London. Similarly, Vaughan Williams’s cellos and double basses, which launch his symphony, plod out from the sludge of the river. But, by the time his bucolic Scherzo waddles into view, you could be forgiven for assuming that RVW has taken a genteel amble around the countryside.

Mark Mason

National Busking Day is an insult to real buskers

From our UK edition

This Saturday is National Busking Day, a series of events across the country proving that Britain’s arts establishment just don’t get it. The whole point of busking is that it’s free-spirited, independent, individualistic – exactly the sort of enterprise that doesn’t need or want a national day. ‘Let’s take something that lots of people do spontaneously, without any wish to be organised,’ goes the thinking, ‘and then organise it.’ First prize for Not Getting It goes to Gareth Powell of London Underground. ‘Busking on the Underground network,’ he says, ‘has been a rite of passage for London musicians for generations.’ Yes, Gareth – one that they pursued in spite of the Tube trying to stop them.

Friday

Ed West

We need a Campaign to Protect Urban England

From our UK edition

If a political subject is inconvenient to both Left and Right then the chances are that it won’t get addressed, however serious the problem. And so it has been with house-building; we have a desperate need for more homes in this country, but the Tories don’t want to discuss it because the obvious solution is to build more homes in Tory areas where the locals oppose it; Labour don’t like to because the subject of immigration upsets them. More generally both globalist Left and Right, represented by a spectrum encompassing the Economist, Financial Times, City AM, the Times and Guardian, like the idea of an economic model which depends on continual population growth through immigration. Where this ends I don’t know.