Tanya Gold is The Spectator's motoring critic
24 min listen
It's the 10,000th edition. This week's episode features historian Tom Holland on the Spectator's winning recipe; Douglas Murray on why he loves journalists; Mary Wakefield on coronavirus uncertainty; and Tanya Gold on what it's like to be the magazine's restaurant critic.
A fictional Spectator restaurant critic called Forbes McAllister appeared on Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge. He was played by Patrick Marber and was obviously based on Keith Waterhouse — bow tie, mad eyes — even if Waterhouse was never the restaurant critic at this magazine. McAllister was on TV to show off Lord Byron’s duelling pistols ‘and a lock of his stupid hair’. He bought them to annoy Michael Winner, then restaurant critic at the Sunday Times. ‘Are you entirely motivated by hatred?’ Partridge asked McAllister. It was his best ever question. ‘Yes, I think I am,’ said McAllister. ‘Rather perceptive of you. I hate you.’ Partridge then shot McAllister with a duelling pistol, and he died.
Stop the clocks: Fortnum & Mason is still delivering hampers. I am not surprised, because this shop — or rather this myth disguised as a shop — sold condiments to the Empire, and it wouldn’t let a global pandemic thwart the consumption of those condiments. It was among the earliest fans of globalisation, which is now something I have to explain to my son. He doesn’t understand globalisation, although he knows some dogs come from abroad. He does understand a Fortnum & Mason hamper though; he knows it is a consolation, although he wouldn’t call it that. As soon as the lockdown began, I ordered an Easter basket and an Easter egg.
Lamorna Ash came to the fishing port of Newlyn in south-west Cornwall to write a memoir. This is not unusual. There is a tendency, as old industries die, to watch them covetously and with awe; to paint them a paradigm of all that is lost. In the 19th century, fishwives posed for the artists of the Newlyn School on the quayside. Today, journalists are found at the Star Inn, which featured in Gavin Knight’s The Swordfish and the Star, buying pints for Ben Gunn, a ‘celebrity’ fisherman, for a tale. Ash is a woman who can lose herself ‘along the simplest of paths’. She immerses herself in the real Newlyn, which is doughty, and the Newlyn of her imagination, which is mournful and filled with legends.
17 min listen
The Spectator is meant for sharing. But in the age of coronavirus, that might not be possible. This new podcast will feature a few of our columnists reading out their articles from the issue each week, so that you don't miss out. It's a new format, so tell us what you think at podcast@spectator.co.uk.Douglas Murray asks, where do we find purpose? Tanya Gold writes on the Cornish revolt against second-home owners, and Mark Mason's gives tips from history on working from home.
I love eating while watching bad films like Battleship, so I love takeaway food from local restaurants. I am not rich enough to like the idea of takeaway from Simpson’s in the Strand and a plastic lid does not have the drama of a silver-plated dome. But eating takeaway food while watching Battleship is not my job, or at least it wasn’t until now, in the era of pandemic. The fine restaurants shuttered swiftly but the local restaurants offered takeaway, and I supported them. It is not indolence to order takeaway in the time of pandemic and, if you don’t, when this is over there will only be either Simpson’s in the Strand or KFC and Domino’s Pizza, and that is not a world anyone would wish to live in.
It was sunny on Monday so I took the children swimming in Mousehole harbour. It was almost empty but a woman sanding a boat on the quayside scowled at me. She couldn’t hear the children’s Cornish accents, which might tell her that I live here. There have been tensions for years between native Cornish and the incomers who buy houses and drape them with nautical-themed junk. With pandemic, they have developed into hostility. A sign appeared on the bus stop in Mousehole: ‘If you have travelled from a hotspot area outside Cornwall (like London) you are putting vulnerable people in this village at risk of death. Please come back when the virus peak has passed, until then travel is selfish and unkind.’ But it was grey and windy that day, and the sign blew away.
‘Miss World 1970’ is the rather glorious title that Jennifer Hosten won. That was the year that the contest, then the greatest show on earth, was disrupted by feminist activists, who threw flour bombs at the host, Bob Hope. It is retrospectively called the foundation of the woman’s movement.The immediate trigger was Hope’s gag that he was happy to be in a ‘cattle market’, after which he mooed. The contest, and the protest, now dramatised in the film Misbehaviour, stars Keira Knightley — a world-class beauty — as Sally Alexander, the feminist leading the attack on the objectification of women that Miss World embodies.
The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom, and it sits like a red-brick crab on the Euston Road, on the site of an old goods yard between St Pancras and Euston. The older British Museum Library, whose collection was founded on the books of George III, Sir Hans Soane, Robert Harley and Sir Robert Cotton, was in the British Museum, but that gorgeous reading room is now a glass atrium with overpriced cafés and shops selling historical tat for children: cultural vandalism, then, and incitement to migraine. Instead we have the red-brick crab. It was opened by the Queen in 1998 and it is Grade I-listed, so, unless there is a war, we are stuck with it. Perhaps architects don’t read books. When I look at this library, I wonder if they have eyes.
I meet Miriam Margolyes in her large Victorian house in Clapham. She is very small and round, with a shock of grey hair, and the clear and open gaze of a curious child. There is an innocence to her, like someone who has not quite grown up. She has a wonderful voice, which bought this house. When it rests it is low and serious; but when she is telling a good story it takes flight. She is best known, now, for Harry Potter films and Blackadder; and for The Graham Norton Show which she dominates by speaking filth while looking delighted. This is deceptive though. When she wants, she can be very serious, although she struggles to be serious for long, which is why, I think, she does not have Janet Suzman’s career. When I say I find her serious she is delighted.
Ugly Butterfly is a zero-waste restaurant and champagne bar on the King’s Road, Chelsea. The ‘champagne bar’ addition is so awful as to be pantomime villainous — I think of zero-waste diamonds and zero-waste wars — but perhaps they need this kind of duplicity to seduce the punters, who move so slowly towards wisdom? ‘Zero-waste’ isn’t an advertising catchphrase designed for Chelsea and its constituent tractors and immaculate blondes, unless they are very drunk. It is from Adam Handling, who has six venues, including the Frog in Hoxton and the sustainable deli Bean & Wheat in Old Street. Ugly Butterfly is pretty, because anything ugly in Chelsea would shrivel through lack of identification.
The Yard is a defiantly themed restaurant in Hyatt’s new Great Scotland Yard Hotel, an Edwardian red-brick block which once housed the Central Detective Unit of the Metropolitan Police and its constituent darkness. You have to work hard to dispel that kind of horror, and Hyatt tries: the hotel is extraordinarily lush and over-styled, even for these mad days. The lobby, for instance, features a chair that is half rhinoceros but, in dreaming up the rhinoceros chair, Hyatt has invented a piece of furniture only a rhinoceros could appreciate or reach. The sofa opposite has three sequential cushions, which when placed together create a picture of a dachshund, and I can’t imagine anything more pointless.
Wild Honey is a ludicrous name for this restaurant: there is nothing wild about it, and I do not think that is even its intention. Rather, it is a cloistered, almost sombre restaurant in the grandest part of the West End, almost opposite the Athenaeum Club, whose goddess, I fancy, is weeping metal tears. I depend on old maps of London. They offer perspective and consolation, and I know this part was once marshland from the River Tyburn on its way from Hampstead to Westminster. Now it is Pall Mall and Wild Honey lives in one of its palest, grandest buildings: it glows like a slightly restrained Versailles, signifying power and brickwork. It was once home to the royal printers, a bank, and what became, in its pomp, Aviva insurance.
The Michelin Red Guide is a marketing device to sell tyres by selling pastries. The guide was invented in 1900 by Michelin, the French tyre company, which is now the second-largest tyre company in the world. The guide initially covered restaurants in France, then spread to Belgium, the Alps, Germany, north Africa, Britain and, eventually, the USA and Japan. It began to award stars – the golden number is three – for restaurants in 1926, copying Baedeker’s and Murray’s guides and it insinuated the idea that French food is the best in the world. The Guardian quoted someone calling the Red Guide, 'a tool of Gallic cultural imperialism'. One Michelin inspector – the Frenchman Pascal Remy - wrote about a book about it.
Julie’s is a 50-year-old restaurant in Holland Park, London, newly emerged from three years of closure as plushly renovated as its customers. The website calls it ‘a Holland Park favourite, neighbourhood classic and hangout for the Hollywood set, high society and rock stars since 1969’. Whenever I hear the words ‘high society’ I reach for my water pistol, as Hermann Goring didn’t say, but I do remember a birthday party at Julie’s 20 years ago when it seemed pleasingly decadent. It was designed by the owner, Julie Hodgess, the designer of the Biba boutique. I remember a series of deeply coloured rooms and dusty curtains and a faint and thrilling sense of mystery.
Simpson’s in the Strand stopped serving breakfast in 2017, after it had been renovated to stop it smelling of cabbage. Fat men wept, but worse things have happened here. Simpson’s is built on the site of John of Gaunt’s Savoy Palace, in which Geoffrey Chaucer, Gaunt’s brother-in-law, wrote part of The Canterbury Tales. The palace was destroyed during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381; it is all detailed in Anya Seton’s romance novel Katherine. Of the palace’s successor, Henry VII’s Savoy Hospital, only a small chapel remains. It looks deeply oppressed. Instead we have the Savoy hotel, created by Richard D’Oyly Carte.
Locket’s is a new café from the owners of Wiltons in Jermyn Street. Wiltons is the restaurant that dukes visit when they have fallen out with White’s. It has a sign featuring a lobster that looks like Benjamin Disraeli wearing a top hat. When a bomb fell nearby in 1942, its anxious owner immediately sold it to the banker Olaf Hambro, who was sitting at the bar, by adding the price of the restaurant to his bill. It appeared, thinly disguised, in Jeffrey Archer’s First Among Equals as Walton’s, in which a fictional Tory minister plots the seduction of a woman called Amanda. I like Wiltons, even if the female staff are dressed as Edwardian housemaids, which is the second worst uniform in existence after hessian smocks.
The theme music to Legoland in Berkshire is the theme music to The Exorcist. It appears from speakers hidden in the grass. I hear it as I wander out of some un-enchanted wood filled with Lego: we have lost our ancient woods and need new ones. These ones smell slightly of drains. The Exorcist music is a joke for parents; or perhaps an acknowledgment that there is something demonic at Legoland. You can, from the fake hills — everything is fake here, and that is both bewitching and awful — see Windsor Castle, which probably means that from Windsor Castle you can see Legoland. I wonder if Legoland will outlive the monarchy; if Legoland and the monarchy have a lot in common.
The Roth Bar & Grill exists on an art-farm called Durslade in Bruton, Somerset, which is also the country outpost of the Hauser & Wirth gallery, which is the silliest art gallery in Britain. It specialises in decapitated gnomes. It is only 13 miles from Babington House, Soho House’s monstrous country house with its playrooms for adults and giant fish-finger sandwiches. This is a world of electric Agas, black Range Rovers and pink wellington boots; and it is, almost by itself, the reason why country dwellers despise town dwellers. If people live in homage to what they read in Sunday newspaper supplements, they deserve to be despised. When I visited it three years ago, it was both abuzz and the silliest restaurant I had ever seen.
We Jews have evolved to be neurotic; so neurotic that, in certain circumstances, the Syrian border feels slightly safer than Muswell Hill. I’ll take Muswell Hill. Polls say that only 7 per cent of British Jews will consider voting for Labour on 12 December, while 47 per cent of British Jews will consider leaving the country if Labour win. I’d rather fight Dave (generic name) from the Labour Representation Committee than Dave from Hezbollah (likewise generic). But I shouldn’t joke; and nothing feels funny any more. Things are always OK until they aren’t. Jews have fled Labour since Ed Miliband’s time. In 2010 we were split quite evenly between Labour and the Tories: but Gordon Brown is a serious man.
