David Oldroyd-Bolt

Tuesday

David Oldroyd-Bolt

London By Night: an amusing homage to Victorian melodrama

Spending an evening watching an homage to Victorian melodrama in the drawing room of a gentlemen’s club sounds like the conceit of a Wodehouse story. That being nothing unusual in my faintly ridiculous existence, I trotted to the Savile Club last Friday to watch London By Night, a collaboration between John Waters and Felix Rigg, a concert pianist-turned-property auctioneer. Spectator columnist Martin Vander Weyer took the villainous lead in this story of mystery and intrigue. Though he is renowned in Yorkshire’s thespian circles, news of his ability to combine George Sanders and Rex Harrison in a most convincing fashion had not filtered down to London until now.

Thursday

David Oldroyd-Bolt

The many, many millions of Mogg

I speak to Jacob Rees-Mogg down a crackling phone line. Despite the poor-quality of the sound, his voice is unmistakeable: those rounded Edwardian vowels; the careful, deliberate delivery of phrases which fall slightly at the end, like a gramophone needing an extra turn of the crank. It is as though some enterprising audio-logist had devised the perfectly reassuring voice and presented it, with great doses of warmth and humour, in this double-breasted package. A figure of intrigue (and not a little amusement) in the political world since first standing for Parliament in the safe Labour seat of Central Fife in 1997, there is a side to Rees-Mogg which few in the Westminster bubble see: that of the successful financier.