London

Thursday

Cressida Connolly

How to Read a Graveyard, by Peter Stanford – review

Peter Stanford likes cemeteries. Daily walks with his dog around a London graveyard acclimatised him, while the deaths of his parents set him wondering about customs of mourning and places of burial. Over a couple of years he visited a number of sites, including the war graves of northern France, the catacombs of Rome and a contemporary woodland burial park in Buckinghamshire. He makes no claim to a comprehensive survey, but it seems perverse not to visit Highgate cemetery, yet succumb to the tourist trap of the Père-Lachaise in Paris. To extrapolate about graveyards from a visit to Père-Lachaise would be like going to Harrods in order to find out

Thursday

Barry Humphries

Diary – 11 April 2013

Whenever feminists have complained in my presence about neglect of female high-achievers, other than rock singers and courtesans, I always like to mention brilliant Margaret Thatcher. It always makes them furious. They can’t bear to think of her as one of the most successful women of the 20th century. I had afternoon tea with her and Denis once in their chintzy flat at No. 10, where she expressed a great interest in Rupert Murdoch, whom she rather admired. My father-in-law, Stephen Spender, was also a Maggie fan and once, after he had delivered a speech about Henry Moore at Westminster Abbey, she repeated the whole speech back to him at

Martin Vander Weyer

Thatcher changed the City for the better – but human nature led it astray

‘Margaret had no love for the banks,’ Nigel Lawson wrote in The View from No. 11. The idea that the amoral greed of the City and the banking crisis it fuelled should be blamed on Margaret Thatcher has been much bandied about this week. Let me try to put it in -perspective. In her early years in power, Thatcher thought of the City as another enclave of the ‘wet’ public-school types who so annoyed her in the Conservative party. The high-street banks were, in her view, a complacent cartel that reported over-large profits during the 1981 recession (hence the windfall tax), refused to contribute to Tory coffers, and did nothing

Thursday

Harry Cole

Is Andrew Mitchell the right man for Britain in Europe?

It now looks almost certain that Andrew Mitchell will be our next EU Commissioner in 2014. The job was not advertised and the backroom selection process remains a mystery. In the wake of the Plebgate row, though, we can make an educated guess as to why, according to the FT, Downing Street has asked Mitchell ‘to consider’ the offer. This would be no ordinary consolation prize for Mitchell. Downing Street has big hopes for Mitchell in the role. Senior Whitehall sources indicate that Britain will be pushing hard for a big economic portfolio when the new commission is appointed next year. The aim is to make the case for financial

Tuesday

David Blackburn

The life and opinions of Boris Johnson

It was inevitable, after the Mair interview and the Cockerell profile, that Boris would dominate the news this morning. Steve Richards and Hugo Rifkind (£) have written about him in their columns, and there are numerous reviews of Cockerell’s programme to read – Paul Goodman at ConHome will make for a thoughtful and entertaining lunchtime break. I don’t think that Cockerell’s programme told eagle-eyed political observers anything new; but that was not its intention, at least from Boris’ perspective. Eddie Mair wondered if Boris is nasty piece of work; most viewers of Cockerell’s programme would have emerged with the view that Boris is at worst a naughty piece of work.

Thursday

Julie Bindel

From Cockney to Jafaican

My mother always had a keen ear for slang and lazy pronunciation when I was growing up. Because my siblings and I were working class and attended an absolutely dreadful school in the North-east in the 1960s and 1970s, my parents made sure we were as educated as we possibly could be in manners. My father, a proud northerner, has always taken umbrage at what he calls ‘Cockney’ (in reality just phrases popular among Londoners such as ‘at the end of the day’, ‘basically’ and ‘strike a light’.) Over the past decade, however, the Cockney of my generation has been replaced with the street slang known as ‘Jafaican’, a form

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Tanya Gold reviews Balthazar

Balthazar is a golden cave in Covent Garden, in the old Theatre (Luvvie) Museum, home to dead pantomime horses and Christopher Biggins’s regrets. It is a copy of a New York restaurant, which was itself a copy of a Parisian brasserie, and it is the first big London opening of the year. This means diary stories and reviews and profiles of the co-owner (with Richard Caring), Keith McNally, the most ludicrous of which was in the FT, and was an interview with his house, which is in Notting Hill. It wasn’t quite as ridiculous as: F.T. What are you proudest of, Keith McNally’s House? Keith McNally’s house Guttering. But it

Jonathan Jones

Five things you need to know about the EU’s bonus cap

1. The plan: To limit the bonuses that can be paid to bankers to the level of their salary. Any higher bonus would need the approval of shareholders (65 per cent of votes cast if a quorum of 50% of shareholders is reached; 75 per cent of votes cast otherwise) and a quarter of it would have to be deferred for five years — and even then the bonus could not exceed double the salary. 2. Where does the proposal come from? The European Parliament. MEPs insisted on the cap to be included in a package of banking reforms. Initially, they wanted simply wanted to cap bonuses at the level of

Emily Rhodes

The birth of the Walking Book Club

In they stride, in muddy trainers or wellies, swirls of cold air caught on their clothes, children in off-road buggies, dogs bedraggledly in tow. I’ve always been thrilled that so many of our customers at Daunt Books in Belsize Park and Hampstead come in fresh from Hampstead Heath. Growing up in north London, I’ve spent many an hour walking on this scrubby land, as wild as London will get. Every November I march a group of friends across the Heath for an ‘annual birthday stomp’; in the summer I swim in the icy ponds and laze in the hot grass afterwards. Many of my friends think I’m quite dotty for

Martin Vander Weyer

Europe’s cap on bankers’ pay is merely a harbinger of the Great Persecution to come

‘Possibly the most deluded measure to come from Europe since Diocletian tried to fix the price of groceries across the Roman Empire,’ was Boris Johnson’s assessment of the proposal to cap bankers’ bonuses at 100 per cent of base salary, or 200 per cent with shareholders’ approval. This blunt exercise in market interference was tabled by a committee of MEPs led by a British Lib Dem, Sharon Bowles (perhaps in revenge for the fact that she didn’t win the Bank of England governorship, for which she applied) as a condition of agreeing a new set of bank capital reforms. With the support of all member states other than the one

Alex Brummer

Investment special: Gaining from a housing recovery

The long period of dormancy for Britain’s housing market looks as if it is coming to an end — though there are huge regional differences. Central London remains exceptional, with the influx of overseas buyers into Kensington, Chelsea and adjoining neighbourhoods creating a microclimate of surging prices that has little to do with economic fundamentals — and has the political left salivating at the thought of a ‘mansion tax’ on properties worth £2 million-plus, even if that means turfing elderly widows out of family homes. Some five years on from the financial crisis that brought many lenders and house-builders to their knees, there are signs of a broadly based recovery.

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

PMQs sketch: Miliband packs a punch, and Cameron punches back

Whooo that was nasty. Today’s was the most vicious PMQs of the last twelve months. Easily. Ed Miliband started by quoting the case of a Londoner called ‘John’ who was concerned about living standards. ‘John’, however, wasn’t a disabled pensioner but a City fat cat concerned that next year’s bonus might be capped at two million pounds. ‘What’s the prime minister going to do to help him?’ Nifty tactics from Miliband’s team. Cameron might have floundered here but his reply matched the full force of Miliband’s attack. His government, he declared, had cut bonuses to a quarter of what they’d been under Labour. ‘And we aren’t going to listen to

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

How much will Britain change in the next 10 years?

In the latest issue of Standpoint magazine I have a longish piece on the census for England and Wales. The story made the news for a couple of days at the end of last year, but I thought the census results deserved to be dwelt upon a little longer. I hope readers find it interesting: ‘Imagine yourself back in 2002. The census for England and Wales, compiled the previous year, has just come out, showing the extent to which the country has changed. You decide to extrapolate from the findings and speculate about what the next decade might bring. “The Muslim population of Britain will double in the next ten

Thursday

Stephen Bayley

The new Design Museum: Prince Charles will prefer it. But should we?

Twenty-five years ago I went to St James’s Palace to ask the Prince of Wales if he would open the new Design Museum. Before us was the model of the building, an elegant, austere, uncompromised white box that was very much along Bauhaus lines. We knew that ‘modern’ no longer meant ‘of-the-moment’ but had become a period style label. Even at the time we acknowledged the layers of irony in this historicist gesture. The Prince, sounding pained, I recall, asked, ‘Mr Bayley, why has it got a flat roof?’ And that was the end of that. Next time it will be different. The Design Museum is moving from a creatively

Rory Sutherland

Hailo matters more than HS2 – but we just can’t see it

One of Britain’s exam boards was attacked last year for a question in a GCSE religious studies examination: ‘Explain briefly why some people are prejudiced against Jews.’ Is this really a theological question? Or does it belong in biology? Or psychology? Or economics? The Canadian evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate devotes a few pages to the issue of prejudice, including not only anti-Semitism but also hostility towards trading groups and intermediaries everywhere: from Chinese shopkeepers in Malaysia to Armenians, the Gujaratis and Chettiars in India and Korean store-owners in the United States. Pinker partly attributes this to what economists call ‘the physical fallacy’. We have evolved an

Monday

Matthew Sinclair

Why no conservative should support a mansion tax

The Government is expected to raise around £550 billion in tax revenue this financial year. The Centre for Policy Studies estimates that a mansion tax (of £20,000 on properties of £2 million), would raise at most £1 billion, less than 0.2 per cent of revenue. The tax is, however, likely to weaken the market and reduce prices – reducing receipts from other taxes; so even the CPS’s static analysis is probably optimistic. This proposed tax would be a huge burden on those forced to pay. The rate is not 1 per cent of the property’s value. The standard lifetime of a lease on a new build is 125 years, over

Wednesday

Steerpike

Rooms with a view

I do like a Shard story. My recent revelations about the prevalence of hanky panky at the top of the tower graced every national paper. Now I hear that the tower has become a giant pawn in a bitter property battle. The word is that one of the many members of the Qatari royal family, who are currently buying up most of London, is locked in a bidding war with the Duke of Westminster for one of the tower’s larger apartments. The Shard is the perfect vantage point from which to survey one’s vast estates in central London. I understand that the duke is not enjoying the new competition.

Tuesday

Steerpike

Shard toilets: trouble on high

Terrible news reaches me from the top of the Shard. The viewing platforms at the top of the 1,016ft glass wonder, which is the tallest building in western Europe, are set to open to the public in the coming weeks; but preview guests and party goers have reported a rather shaming interior design flaw. My mole says that complaints have been submitted about the reflective glass in the loos, which is causing havoc, discomfort and embarassment to users. It seems that the trendy designers did not appreciate that the reflections bounce off the ceiling and walls, and into and out of the cubicles. How very, very modern. The Shard team has, as of yet,

Monday

Peter Robins

Historical directories: Street View for time-travellers – Spectator Blogs

Fancy a walk into London’s past? How about a stroll down Fleet Street in 1895? Or Oxford Street in 1899? It can be done. I can’t promise pictures, but I can offer more detail on the residents of each building than Google would risk publishing today. The secret: from the mid-1830s, a man named Frederic Kelly employed agents to call at every address in London and to record the people or businesses within. Kelly was a postal official, and his agents, at least to begin with, were postmen. There was some scandal about that. Because this wasn’t an official census, conducted every ten years and then locked away for a

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Banking Commission to force Chancellor’s hand on reform

As is becoming increasingly clear to David Cameron, the problem with answering calls for an inquiry into a scandal in one industry or another is that at some point that Inquiry will report back with a bunch of recommendations which may or may not be politically expedient to implement. The Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards came up with proposals last week for an electrified ring fence, which the Treasury politely said it would look at, and Vince Cable rather more bluntly said the government should ignore, preferring instead that ministers get a move on with implementing the Vickers proposals, rather than opening up the whole debate again. But the really