Spin city
‘That terrible place known as Westminster’: many readers might well agree with this, the first mention of our political capital in a charter dated 735 AD. However, as Robert Shepherd, journalist and political biographer, explains in his new book, all is not what it seems. The charter is a fake, cooked up by a 12th-century abbot of Westminster to get one over on those pesky monks at rival St Albans. Westminster, Shepherd asserts, was from the first a city of spin and has remained so ever since (and ‘terrible’ meant awe-inspiringly sacred, not awful, by the way). The boundaries of Shepherd’s ‘historic’ Westminster are tightly drawn.
